arms. We hurried from the court, down the staircase, and into the street.
“Was it you who set them loose?” he asked.
“It was.”
“What possessed you?”
“You did,” I said.
xii.
The day we departed Bethany, I found Tabitha in her room strumming her lyre. Already she could make it sing. I paused unnoticed in the doorway as she sang a new song she seemed in the midst of composing. The best I could tell, it was about a lost pearl. When she looked up and saw me, her eyes were glittering.
She would remain and I would go. I hated to part, but I knew she would be better off here with Lazarus, Mary, and Martha. They’d made her into a little sister.
“She’ll be safer here, too,” Jesus had pointed out. “In Nazareth she would be too close to Japha.” I hadn’t considered this. If she came to Nazareth, her relatives would surely hear of her presence and come for her. They would send her back to the man in Jericho or sell her all over again.
“Before I go, I want to tell you something,” I said to her.
She set down the lyre.
“Years ago, after that day I came to your house, I wrote down your story on papyrus. I wrote about your ferocious spirit, how you stood in the street and cried out what happened to you and were silenced for it. I think every pain in this world wants to be witnessed, Tabitha. That’s why you shouted about your rape on the street and it’s why I wrote it down.”
She stared at me unblinking, then pulled me to her and clung there.
* * *
? ? ?
WHEN WE CAME through the compound gate in Nazareth, Yaltha, Mary, Judith, James, and Simon hurried to greet us. Even Judith kissed my cheek. Mary linked her arm through her son’s and led us to the large stone basin across the courtyard. It was the custom in our household that those who remained behind would wash the feet of those who’d made the Passover pilgrimage. Mary motioned for Judith to remove my sandals, but my sister-in-law, misunderstanding, perhaps deliberately, perhaps not, bent and untied Jesus’s sandal strap instead. Mary shrugged, then did me the honor of bathing my feet herself, water splashing cold on my toes, her thumbs circling my ankles.
“How was your time in the Temple?” James asked.
“A most remarkable thing occurred,” Jesus said. “There was a stampede of lambs in the Court of Gentiles. Somehow they escaped their pen.” He grinned at me.
“It was . . .” I searched for the right word.
“Unforgettable,” he said. Beneath the water, his foot nudged mine.
xiii.
One fall morning, I vomited my breakfast. Even after my stomach emptied, I remained bent over the waste pot retching plain air. When the heaving subsided, I washed my face, cleaned the spatter from my tunic, then went on slow, solemn feet to find my aunt. The blackseed oil had finally failed me.
Over the past few years, the compound had begun to spill over with people. Salome’s husband had died, and we’d all traveled to Besara for the funeral banquet, then brought her home, childless and bereft, her husband’s meager properties having gone to his brother. The following year, Simon’s wife, Berenice, had arrived, and then came a baby, to which Judith had responded by producing her third. Now there would be one more.
It wasn’t long past daybreak, and Jesus was off in the hills with his prayer shawl. I was glad he was absent—I didn’t want him to see my stricken face.
Yaltha was sitting on the floor of the storeroom eating chickpeas and garlic. The smell convulsed my stomach and nearly sent me back to the waste pot. After she set aside the bowl and its vile-smelling contents, I lay down beside her, resting my head in her lap. I said, “I’m with child.”
She rubbed my back and neither of us spoke for a while. Then she asked, “And you are certain?”
“My bleeding is late, but I gave it little thought—it has been late many times. It wasn’t until I retched my breakfast that I