Bright Dark Madonna. Elizabeth Cunningham

rains, Peter’s face when he finally gets a joke. That’s why you were so angry with me, isn’t it? I forgot the Kingdom of Heaven. I betrayed it. How could I be calling people to the feast when I was blasting fig trees? It’s crazy. I’ve been crazy. Will you forgive me?”

      “You are heirs through the prophets,” Peter was shouting now, waving his hands, “the heirs of the covenant God made with your ancestors when he told Abraham, ‘All the Nations of the earth will be blessed in your descendants.’ It was for you in the first place that God raised up his servant and sent him to bless you as every one of you turns from his wicked ways.”

      All at once, in one of those moments of what seems like great clarity at the time and total insanity in retrospect, I decided that Mary was right. I needed to speak. I wanted to tell people about the Jesus who had wept in my arms that night, the Jesus who had the grace to doubt himself, who got angry with people and got over it, the one who fed people and touched people. The one who had wanted to go on living.

      “I don’t want to die. Not without loving it all more. Maeve, what have I done? Was I made for this death or did I make it for myself? I don’t know. I don’t know.”

      “What are you doing, Mary?” Mary B hissed as I began to move toward Peter.

      “My duty,” I answered.

      “Not here. Not now. You’ll only make trouble.”

      “Peter,” I greeted him, remembering all the things I loved about this big, passionate man, how he had gotten drunk the night we fed that huge crowd and jumped out of the boat to prove his faith by walking on water. He’d jumped out of the boat again, stark naked, when Jesus appeared in Galilee. “Peter, I just wanted to—”

      He turned red, flustered, lost his place and, worse, lost his face before the crowd.

      “Who is that woman!” someone shouted.

      “She’s a gentile. What’s she doing here?”

      “She’s the fisherman’s doxy, I’ll lay odds on it. All that preaching about sin and look what the cat drug in.”

      I had my put foot in it. I had to do something, and of course, I did exactly the wrong thing.

      “No, I’m not,” I turned to the crowd. “I’m Jesus of Nazareth’s wi—”

      “Whore!” the crowd roared as I hesitated between the words wife and widow.

      “I recognize her,” someone shouted. “She was charged with adultery.”

      Just then a flock of doves wheeled over my head, and I felt even dizzier as different moments of my life converged. I was seeing from a dove’s eye view, flying to light on my beloved’s head in the dream I’d had long ago on Tir na mBan. I was also standing and staring at my beloved’s beautiful feet as the crowd waited for him to pass judgment on me. And I was here now, a pregnant widow, tired, sun-dazed, and hungry.

      “My little dove.” I heard the voice of Anna the Prophetess inside my head, and the Temple doves, who had always surrounded her, came to perch on me. “Always so impulsive. Well, since you’re here, little one, prophesy. You might not get another chance.”

      “The Kingdom of Heaven,” I began, “is at hand.” And I stretched out my hands. “My hands, your hands, our hands. The Kingdom of Heaven is small, small enough to hold in your hand, small as a mustard seed whose blooms spread over the hills making a home for the birds, small as a hazelnut with all the wisdom of the world held within, and it is also huge as the sea that flowed from my beloved’s side. If you want to see the Kingdom of Heaven, just turn, turn and look. That’s what repent means, turn, like a flock of birds on the air, like the tides….”

      “The woman is raving!” someone shouted.

      The crowd, agape at first at the sheer spectacle of a gentile woman daring to preach, exploded all at once. John and Andrew rushed to Peter’s side, shouting.

      “Stand back, make way. The woman is demon-possessed. Don’t worry. We have the authority to exorcise her.”

      Peter caught on then and advanced on me:

      “In the name of Jesus Christ, I command you to come out of her!”

      The crowd was completely out of control by now, first a cripple rising up to walk and now an exorcism. But the excitement wasn’t over yet.

      “You will disperse at once!” A loud voice barked a command. “Or be arrested!”

      The Temple guard had arrived. At that point I did the only sensible thing a woman in my delicate condition (not to mention my dicey circumstances) could do:

      I fainted dead away.

      When I came to myself again, I was lying on a pallet in the upper room. Or so I assumed; the shutters were closed, and it was dark. The air should have been stuffy, but a breeze stirred now and then, scented with roses and garlic, and now and then a whiff of water and fish. There was a drone in the air that made me think of bees. For a moment, I didn’t remember how I had come to be lying there, and then it all came back. I had caused a near riot in the Temple, and Peter had tried to exorcise me.

      In the Name of Jesus Christ, I command you to come out of her.

      In the protective gesture of pregnant women everywhere, I put my hands over my belly. I felt no cramping, but just to be sure, I reached between my legs to check for bleeding.

      “Mary of Magdala.” The breeze lifted and the scent of roses grew stronger. “Your baby is unharmed.”

      Miriam of Nazareth, mother of Jesus, was sitting with me in the dark room.

      “And your secret is safe,” she added. “For now.”

      CHAPTER TWO

      MY THREE FATES

      “FOR NOW” WERE THE operative words. People say there is no such thing as being “a little bit pregnant,” but I say you are a “little bit pregnant” when the changes in your body don’t yet show, at least not to the casual eye, which my mother-in-law’s wasn’t. “For now” everyone concluded I had come unhinged by recent events (that was the charitable alternative theory to demonic possession) and they all agreed I needed a rest, which is another way of saying I was put under house arrest.

      “For now” I didn’t much mind when the disciples packed me off to Bethany and put me in Martha and Lazarus’s custody; I had always liked their house and land, how ample and well-tended everything was without being luxurious or ostentatious.

      You never hear much about Lazarus after he came forth so dramatically from the tomb. I can tell you he did not at all enjoy the notoriety that attends being brought back from the dead. Here is another unknown part of that story: I was the one who waited with Lazarus all those days in the place between life and death, a pebbled shoal in the great river, and I can tell you he would just as soon have crossed the river to join his ancestors, but he could not refuse his friend Jesus. It is my belief that Lazarus is the original for all the merciful fathers and vineyard owners in my beloved’s parables. And being called forth from the grave was just one more thing Lazarus had to forgive Jesus.

      At least Lazarus’s life was sweetened now by Susanna, the Samaritan woman of the many “husbands” who quite frankly stalked Jesus after their encounter at the well. I tried to unload her at Temple Magdalen (where her talents could have been put to use) when she flummoxed me by announcing that she had decided to become my follower instead of his. Having or being a follower is not something I’ve ever cared for. So I was pleased that Susanna had left me, so to speak, for Lazarus. He married her quietly, in the wake all of the recent drama, so quietly most of the disciples politely pretended not to notice. (I have never fully understood the hatred between Jews and Samaritans; they worship the same bloody awful One God, but I gather that’s the problem. A case of collective sibling rivalry.)

      Jesus loved Lazarus, not because he was a disciple or, as some people speculate, an initiate