Chapter 28 | The Days Between
The day after Lavi brought the news, heavy silence settled over the house.
We did the small things that proved we were still living: I heated water; I swept dust toward the door with the willow broom; I folded the rough linen cloths that had dried hard on the line.
I kept thinking if I did the next ordinary task well enough, the world might tilt back into place and the word I had heard—crucified—would turn out to be some other word entirely.
The courtyard smelled of pressed skins and sun-warmed clay.
Weeks before, the work would have felt like prayer to me.
Now the same sweetness gnawed at my ribs.
I set my hand on the lip of the stone basin and waited for the quiet satisfaction the vineyard usually stirred in me.
There was nothing. Even my heartbeat seemed out of rhythm.
Lavi followed me like a shadow. He did not run anymore. His feet dragged in the dust, his curls unbrushed, his face older than it had any right to be.
“Does the Messiah die?” he asked, not looking at me, worrying a string that had unraveled from his sleeve. “If He is the One, can He die?”
I had no words ready, no teaching stored in the folds of my mind that I could shake out and drape over this raw thing. I wanted to say what I had said to him his whole life—God keeps what He promises. But the certainty frayed under my fingers, and I could not pretend otherwise.
“I don’t know,” I said. The confession tasted like metal.
“He is the Son of God. I believe that. And people thought He was pretending—a false prophet. So, they wanted to kill him. But why would God let His Son die? That I do not know.” I had started out answering Lavi and ended up speaking more to myself.
Still, no matter how I tried, I could not understand it.
He nodded, and that was somehow worse than if he had cried or argued. He set his palm on the smooth edge of the press beside mine and stood that way a long time, like we were holding up a wall together.
In the late light I walked the rows, because they did not wait for my sorrow.
The vines curved in their patient arches, the new shoots already reaching.
A few trellises leaned the wrong way after the last rain.
I could have called Baruch to reset them, but I took the mallet myself.
The thud of wood into earth steadied something small in me.
A sparrow startled from a cane, flitting toward the olive tree, indifferent to our grief, which somehow felt both cruel and merciful.
Lavi trailed behind, picking up bits of twine, tying loose threads, doing the work his hands could find.
By dusk Abba eased himself out to the threshold. He watched me in that way of his—half pride, half worry—then tipped his chin toward the rows. “Work steadies the soul,” he said.
“Sometimes,” I answered.
He was quiet. “And sometimes it only keeps the hands from shaking.”
“Yes,” I replied, the irony not lost on me as his hands trembled.
~
That night the Sabbath began with a sky like hammered bronze.
I lit the lamp anyway, cupping my hand against the wick until the little flame took hold.
We had bread, though I could not remember when I had kneaded it; my hands must have known what my mind forgot.
I set it on the board and placed my palms over it.
The blessing rose in me from habit first, then from a deeper place I could not name.
“Barach atah Adonai… Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the Universe…” I began, and my voice shook.
The words were a ladder I climbed because the ground was gone.
Lavi stood beside me, close enough that his shoulder pressed against my arm.
Baruch came in and stood at the edge of the room, eyes lowered.
Abba listened, sitting in his chair, looking worn.
After the bread, after the first cup, after the lamp had burned for a little while, I slipped outside again.
The night air felt cool against my cheeks.
From the far road came the clink of something metal and the murmur of voices—pilgrims still making their slow way home from the feast. I wondered what tales traveled with them, how heavy their feet felt from carrying news they had not asked to carry.
Somewhere out there, the world was no longer as it had been, and it felt like our little space had no room to hold it.
I sat with my back against the press shed wall, knees drawn up, hands empty.
I closed my eyes, and James rose in my mind.
Where was he? Was he safe?
The question came with a sharpness that surprised me. I had known worry before—worry for harvest, for coin, for Abba’s wellbeing. But this was different. This had no ledger. No remedy. No task to steady it.
I wanted—God help me—I wanted someone close.
Not to solve it or to make it smaller. Only to be there, solid and warm, while the truth wrecked me.
And my mind did what it had started doing lately, when my strength ran thin.
It went to him.
James, with his stubborn shoulders and the way he filled every space he stood in. James, who had stepped into ruin and made it feel survivable. James, who looked at me like he meant to stay.
I felt the ache of it, simple and humiliating and human.
I wanted him alive. I wanted him to come back.
I drew a breath that shook.
This is grief, I told myself. This is fear. This is the world turning cruel.
You are only frightened. You are worried for all of them. You are grieving because Jesus has been killed.
Then His face came to me—the day He had stood in our rows and looked at me as though He could see straight through bone and marrow, to the place where my truest self lived.
You are the vine. My Father is the gardener. He had said.
I had nodded as though I understood, but I hadn’t truly.
Now, with lamplight warming the doorway behind me and the dark restless at my feet, I tried to give voice to what I had kept locked in my throat.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. The words seemed to startle a moth from the lintel; it flitted toward the lamp and then away again.
“I was so certain I was right. I thought the Law could keep out every danger if I kept it. I thought righteousness was a fence, and I built it higher every year. I thought obedience would save me from myself.”
I let my head rest against the wall. “But a fence should always have a gate.”
The words made me think of Ima and I smiled.
She would have known Him immediately. I had no doubt of that.
~
On the second day, the ache set in like a guest who would not be moved.
I kept catching myself listening—for footfalls on the road, for a voice, for the scrape of a bench in the courtyard—but there was only the soft clatter of Lavi searching for something to make with his hands, and the occasional knock of Abba’s staff as he shuffled around looking for something to make himself useful.
I tried the psalms one after another, like keys against a stuck gate. Some opened something in me—not comfort, but a rawness that left me shaking.
When my tears came, they came quietly.
I rose when the shadows reached the third post because there was water to draw and a pot to set and a shirt of Lavi’s to mend. I mended it badly, I discovered later, but the work kept my hands moving.
Lavi watched me the way he watched for storms. Like he was waiting for a sign.
Once, when I stood to stir the lentils, he came behind me and leaned his forehead against my back and stood a while without words. I covered his hand at my waist with my own and left it there.
After a long silence, he said, “He told me something.”
My hand stilled against the spoon.
“Who?” I asked, though I suspected I knew.
“Jesus.”
The name moved through the room like a whisper.
We stood like that for another moment before I turned slightly so I could see his face.
“What did He tell you?”
Lavi swallowed. His eyes were not frantic now. They were remembering.
“After He healed me,” he said slowly, “we sat in the field for a while.”
I said nothing.
“I asked Him about my parents.”
The ladle slipped in my fingers and knocked the edge of the pot.
“What did you ask?” I managed.
“I asked Him why they left—if they didn’t want me.”
The words were simple, but they landed hard.
He kept going quickly, not giving me the chance to interrupt.
“I asked what I did wrong. If I wasn’t worth keeping. If God forgot me.”
The room felt smaller.
“And what did He say?” My voice barely held.
Lavi’s brow furrowed as he searched for exactness.
“He said,” Lavi whispered, “that no sparrow falls without the Father seeing it.”
I felt tears building.
“He said God counts the hairs on my head. Even the ones that won’t lie down.” Lavi gave the faintest attempt at a smile.
“And then,” he continued, steadier now, “He told me I was not forgotten. Not unwanted. Not misplaced.” Lavi’s chin lifted slightly. “He said I was seen.”
The word landed like a stone dropped into deep water. It’s all he had really ever wanted—to be seen.
“I asked Him where my parents were,” Lavi added. “And He said there are things we will understand later. But the important thing was that I was not alone.”
His eyes searched mine carefully.
“He said family is sometimes given twice.”
I sat down hard on the bench behind me.
Lavi stepped closer.
“And he said,” he said quietly, “sometimes grief feels like being torn in half, but the Father is near to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.”
I shut my eyes.
That line I had tried in the psalms.
That line that had opened something too raw to hold.
The pot boiled over, but I did not move.
After a moment, Lavi reached past me and lifted it off the flame the way he had seen me do a hundred times.
Then he turned back to me.
“And when I asked if God would ever leave me,” Lavi said, his voice thinning, “He said no.”