All things considered, the odd household got on well enough. I settled in peacefully, doing whatever small tasks Martha gave me to keep me out of the way. (My chief duty was to remove Miriam if she went into a trance, as she was apt to do, in the middle of the kitchen or anywhere Martha was trying to work.) If you’ve ever been pregnant, you may recall the dreamy inward pull of the first three months. I gave myself over to that placid bovine state, eating and sleeping, staring into space, ambling slowly if I had to go anywhere, managing not to think about much at all.
Then, abruptly, this respite came to an end. One afternoon, shooed away by Martha, Ma and I took a walk, a little farther than usual. It was hard to say who was leading whom, but eventually I saw that we were heading to the olive grove that overlooked the Kedron Valley, the place Mary B had taken me the first night we met, demanding that I prophesy as the sun rose and turned to gold the Beautiful Gates of the Temple. Below us in the valley was the fig tree he had blasted in those fierce, desperate days of preaching and prophesying, the fig tree I had restored. The spring that had sprung into being that day still welled up, dark and cool, by the tree.
It was too hot to walk down into the valley today, so Ma and I headed for the shade of an ancient olive tree, and I recognized it as the same one we’d sat under a year ago, just before my beloved’s infamous ride into Jerusalem on a donkey (in fulfillment of the scriptures, a phrase I was coming to detest). Before he upended the moneychanger’s tables and started a riot. Before the beginning of the end. That was the day I had found out that Anna the Prophetess, Miriam’s old friend and rival, was dead—though as Ma had put it, even death couldn’t shut Anna up. On that day, Ma had been the one to prophesy: “The Messiah will enter Jerusalem through the Beautiful Gates.”
As Miriam and I sat down, each of us finding a place to nestle in the lap of roots, I closed my eyes. I found I did not want to gaze across the valley toward those Beautiful (Terrible) Gates. On the day that he left us, ascended if you must, I had watched Jesus walk through them—but not into Jerusalem, though his disciples still waited for him there, going over and over the scriptures to explain his absence and predict his return.
Where had he gone?
“Look how the sky’s doors open to your beauty,” I had sung a hymn of Isis the morning he disappeared. “Look how the goddess waits to receive you. This is death. This is the life beyond life.” In that moment, singing in her voice I had known everything I needed to know. Now I knew nothing, except that he was gone. I had been left on this side of the gates, and I didn’t know why.
“The child, of course.” Miriam answered my thoughts. “What else?”
“Would you please stay out of my head?” I said as politely as I could.
“Maybe I will,” she retorted, “when you begin to use it again.”
“What should I use it for?” I asked. “Arguing with Peter and the rest? That’s what Mary wanted me to do, but look what happened when I tried to speak at the Temple.”
“From what I heard, you weren’t using your head, you were losing it.”
“Yes, well,” I more or less conceded. “But I was trying to tell people what I knew about him, what I loved about him. What I love,” I corrected myself. “Was that wrong? I’m so confused, Ma. Mary says we must carry on his work, deliver his message, save the House of Israel, meet in his name. She says I am supposed to be a leader, but I don’t know how. I just…I just miss him. Am I failing him?”
I lay down and put my head in her lap. She wasn’t my mother; in many ways, I’m sorry to tell you, she wasn’t very maternal, not in the conventional sense. But my own eight mothers were so far away. I didn’t even know if I could find their island again. It wasn’t, strictly speaking, in this world. How ironic that my beloved might have found the Shining Isles, a place he scarcely believed in, and here I was stranded just outside his Holy City.
Ma did not cradle me or reassure me or tell me what I should do, but she did begin to hum, and the sound seemed to call to the honeybees, and stir the still air. It was Anna’s voice that answered me.
“Little dove!”
And with my dream eyes I saw her, not here in the Kedron Valley but in the valley between the mountains called Bride’s breasts, on the woman-shaped isle of Tir na mBan. She sat gazing into the well of wisdom.
“Anna, Anu!” I called her the name of the Celtic goddess. Perhaps they were the same after all. “Is he there with you? Has he sailed to the Shining Isles?”
“He who?” she said dreamily, tossing crumbs to the salmon of wisdom as she had once fed the Temple doves.
“You know,” I insisted. “Him whom my soul loves. I sought him, but I could not find him, I called, but he did not answer. I charge you, daughter of Jerusalem, if you should find my love—”
“Give the Song of Songs a rest, honey.” Anna looked at me across the worlds. “You did seek him, you did find him. Remember?”
It was true. I had spent my life doing little else from the time I first glimpsed him across the worlds in that same well.
“Well, he ran out on me again. He disappeared through the Beautiful Gates.”
“Did he now?” said Anna mildly.
“His disciples think he’s coming back. To rule the world as the Messiah—after it gets destroyed or something. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, but if he’s coming back, I wish he’d hurry up.”
“Don’t hold your breath,” Anna muttered.
“What?”
“I said don’t hold your breath. That’s just between you and me. The boys are being too literal minded, as usual. Remember how hard it was for them to understand a simple parable?”
“Then he’s not coming back?” I kept to my point.
“Little dove, he never left. There’s nowhere else to go. You should know that, daughter of the Shining Isles. It’s all mirrors and veils and shapeshifting. Magic wells and ways between the worlds. Now life, now death, now you see him, now you don’t.”
“Well, right now, I don’t.”
“You have to see with new eyes, love with a new love. The questions you need to ask, you don’t even know yet. But someday people will need those questions, the way earth needs rain to plump the grain.”
“You said that before. You said that to him.”
“Long ago and not so long ago,” she said in a sing-song voice. “When he was a boy and you were a dove with no control over your bowels. None.”
In the Bride’s valley where Anna sat and crooned, the light was so thick and golden. I wanted to touch it; I wanted to taste it. I wanted to feel it settling heavy on my shoulders, a mantle of warmth. I wanted to go home.
“Not yet, little dove, not yet. Your story isn’t over. Not that anyone wants to hear your story. You have to live your story before you tell it. You have to live.”
“But my story was always about us. Him and me. Finding and losing and finding each other. Standing together under the Tree of Life. I don’t know any other stories.”
“The druids wouldn’t like to hear that, lamb chop.”
I recognized Dwynwyn’s comestible form of endearment even before she appeared beside the well wearing her blood red tunic with its girdle of skulls, white hair floating on the wind, looking just as she had on the day she helped save my beloved from