Chapter 28 | The Days Between #2
Lavi swallowed, eyes fixed somewhere past my shoulder, still seeing the field. “He said the Father doesn’t leave His children. Not ever. Not for storms. Not for wolves.” A small tremor ran through his mouth. “Remember that, little lion.”
I reached for him and pulled him into me, no longer fighting the tears.
~
At dusk we heard again the murmur of travelers.
Some stopped at the well by the road, voices spilling and crossing like rivulets in a flood.
I did not go out. Abba slowly ventured out and then returned with a look I could not read and said only, “Pilgrims are always heavier when they go home than when they leave.”
“What did they say?” Lavi asked.
“Everything,” he answered.
We kept the lamp burning again that night because the dark pressed harder than it had any right to.
After we ate, Baruch slipped out, and I heard the soft, steady rhythm of his mallet beyond the wall as he set one more post to rights.
The sound comforted me. There were always more.
No matter how many we straightened, another leaned, another slipped.
It was as though the storm had shifted everything, the vines and the ground beneath them—and we were trying to set it back by hand.
I sat by the doorway and watched the lamp’s flame move. Somewhere under the doorframe a little wind found its way, and the flame bowed to it and rose again.
I tried to pray with the words I had learned as a girl—the ones Uncle Eleazar had taught me.
I could not get past Hear, O Israel. It was not that I did not believe God was One.
It was that the rest caught in my throat and became a thorn I could neither spit out nor swallow.
When Lavi finally fell asleep, I tipped my head back and spoke without shape or measure.
If anyone had been listening, they might not have called it prayer. It was more like surrender.
“Find me,” I said. “If You are near to the brokenhearted… then come near to me. Father, help me understand. Please… help me understand. Or give me peace, if I cannot.”
“Keep them safe,” I whispered. “The others… all of them.”
“James.”
I slept then, deeper than the night before, and dreamed I was a child and the whole vineyard rose and fell around me like the sea. I woke just before dawn with the taste of salt on my mouth and did not know if it was from the dream or my tears.
On the third morning, the light had a different color.
Perhaps it was simply that my eyes had lost their shock and could take in the shade of the leaves again, the way they turned their pale undersides to the wind to drink it.
I went straight to the rows with a coil of twine looped over my arm.
A cane had split on one of the older vines—too much weight on a weak angle.
I knelt, slid my fingers under the torn green, and felt the pulse still running there.
The break was not clean; the strip of living wood that held the two halves looked like a thin river on a map.
If I bound it and kept the wind from worrying it, it might knit again.
We still had no word of James or the others.
No runner came up the road. No neighbor brought a whisper from the lakeshore.
So we worked, and waited, and listened for anything beyond the ordinary sounds of the vineyard—birds, wind, the creak of branches—until several more days passed and even waiting began to feel like its own kind of labor.
As I tied, I felt Lavi’s presence before I saw him. “They’re at the well,” he said, his voice hushed but urgent. “Two men and a woman. They came from Jerusalem. They were arguing, but not like angry people. Like… frightened birds.” He swallowed. “They said… the stone was moved.”
The twine paused under my fingers. I could not feel the roughness of it the way I had only a moment before; my hands had gone numb.
“Stones move,” I said, though my voice came strangely from a distance.
“Wind loosens them. Men do.” I kept my eyes on the vine because if I looked up I would reveal the tremor in me.
“They said,” he went on in a rush, “that some of the women went to the tomb before morning to bring the burial spices, and the stone was not there, and His body—” He broke off, hitting the edge of the thought. “They said the tomb was empty.”
I took in air through my nose, slowly, and the smell of cut cane and damp earth and my own skin filled me like a draught I didn’t think I could bear.
“People say many things after grief,” I told him, and hated the echo of my uncle’s caution in my mouth.
I tightened the knot, checked the angle of the cane, and laid my palm flat over the break, trying to press life back into place. It pulsed anyway, without my help.
Lavi waited for more, something that would open a door into action. When I did not offer it, he rocked back on his heels and tried again. “They said—one man said—Peter ran. Ran to see for himself. And another said a woman—Mary—”
“Mary of Magdala,” I whispered, “What did she say?”
“That she saw Him.” His eyes shone with fear at his own words. “Alive.”
“Adonai,” I whispered. I did not know what to say past that.
The wind moved along the row, leaf to leaf, with the soft sound of a garment being lifted.
After that, I tried to work.
I walked the rows again, slower, twine still looped over my arm, hands moving out of habit more than purpose.
I lifted a vine to its wire and forgot why I had lifted it.
Every sound made me turn—every footstep, every scrape of sandal on stone—waiting for someone to say my name with more news, more certainty, anything that could settle the trembling inside my ribs.
The stone was moved. The tomb empty.
The words would not leave me alone.
Was it true? What did it mean?
And where was James?
I hated that my mind reached for him first—arrogant, stubborn, loud as thunder—yet the thought of him somewhere on the road, somewhere in danger, made my hands go cold. I tightened a knot until the twine bit my fingers, and still I could not anchor myself.
At the far edge, beyond the olive, a thin green shoot had pushed itself through the black crust of earth where the run-off had dried. I crouched and brushed away a small stone that would have forced it to curl. The shoot straightened a fraction, stubborn and resolute.
For years I had told myself that newness belonged only to the right season, that it arrived when we deserved it or when we had planned well enough. I had been wrong again.
Newness had its own mind.
I rose, dust on my palms, twine dragging loose from my wrist. I looked down the rows—at the work waiting, at the vines that needed my attention—and knew I could not do it. Not like this. Not with my thoughts racing ahead to roads and rumors and stones that did not stay where they were put.
I had to know.
If word had made it all the way from Jerusalem to our well, then someone in Capernaum would know more. Mira would have heard—or Malka. And if James had returned, if any of them had returned, it would be there.
I decided I would go in the morning.
I lay down with my shawl folded beneath my cheek, already set aside for the road. I kept my hand on it, hoping the cloth could hold my resolve in place while sleep tried to loosen it. If I woke and the courage was gone, the shawl would remind me what I’d promised myself.
When I closed my eyes, I prayed it would still be true.
I prayed He was alive. I prayed for a miracle so simple it felt impossible—that I might see Him again—knowing it was truly Him.
“If there is breath in You still,” I whispered into the dark, “let me see it. Only once. And I will not turn away.”