When the emergency meeting convened that evening, the group looked like five cats scooped out of the river and wrung out. But there were no visible signs of derangement. Meg took a careful look around.
“Everyone is all right?”
“We’re safely back in our cages,” Lilith said drily. “I’m using a metaphor.”
“Maybe,” Frank grunted. He was still badly shaken, and he suspected the others were too. But no one wanted to exchange notes, not until things settled down.
Meg picked up Lilith’s drift. “It’s not a physical cage you’re trapped in. The bars are mental. They block out the light. Deep down that’s how you want it to be, because living normally means everything if you plan to survive. The disciple has shown you a way out, an escape route.”
“So we can enjoy living abnormal lives?” Frank asked. He pulled his plastic sunglasses out. “Help like this I don’t need, thank you very much.”
Despite his protest, Meg sensed that none of them regretted a moment of their time outside the cage.
She said, “I had a great teacher, and one day he gave me a piece of advice. ‘Don’t judge anyone for who they appear to be. Get a sense of their soul. One kind of soul is masked from view, and it gives off no light. Another kind of soul sometimes peeks out from behind the mask, giving off a flickering light. The rarest kind of soul hides from nothing; it’s out in full view. That’s you.’”
“Beautiful,” Mare murmured.
“You think so? I didn’t. I felt exposed and guilty,” Meg said.
“Guilty for what?”
“For being a fraud. If you don’t have a clue who you really are, your whole life’s a fraud, isn’t it?” She gave each person around the table an astute glance. “Now you don’t have an excuse anymore.”
They grew quiet, and then Lilith stood up. “I want to apologize. I’ve been seeing the rest of you as ordinary people. The sight was extremely disappointing, let me assure you.”
“Thank you, Missus God,” Galen muttered under his breath.
“I’m not deaf,” said Lilith. “You’ve all done such a good job hiding your light that you fooled me. No longer, and so I apologize.”
She said none of this with a smile. If anything she looked angry as she sat back down. All those wasted years, the voice in her head began to say, but she turned her attention away, refusing to listen.
Jimmy held up his sunglasses. “These things freaked me out. I’m with Frank. Just take them back.”
“No need,” said Meg. “They were just an invitation. God’s not going to push himself on you.”
“Is it really so bad being a fraud?” asked Jimmy, which got a nervous laugh. “Seriously, I don’t know how to change.”
“I’d be worried if you didn’t want to keep fooling people,” Meg replied. “It’s taken years to get your act down pat. But the disciple thinks you’re ready, all of you.”
“I’ll bite,” Galen said. He hadn’t tossed in a complaint, because he didn’t really have one. The light had treated him more carefully than the rest.
Meg felt a silent agreement all around. If they had hesitated, she was prepared to make the same promise Father Aloysius once made to her: “One taste of the light isn’t the same as living there. When you live there, you won’t need hope or faith. You’ll know everything.”
Back then, her anxiety wasn’t assuaged. “I don’t want to know everything.”
“Yes, you do. You just don’t realize it yet,” he told her.
The golden shrine was sitting in its customary place in the center of the table. Meg placed her hands on it. The others followed her lead without being told. The room began to fade away. The shift into another reality happened smoothly this time, although they had no idea what would greet them on the other side.
This is what they saw. The thirteenth disciple was traveling on a road in the desert, empty in both directions. An old servant was leading the sleepy donkey she rode on, its clip-clop sending up puffs of dust. Spring had come into full bloom around Jerusalem. For a magical three weeks, splashes of yellow and purple brought joy to the landscape. But here the only vegetation was drab, low scrub.
“The place must be near,” she said anxiously.
The servant shrugged his shoulders. “Who can say?”
This stretch of the road to Tyre was usually filled with traders and their caravans. Trade attracted bandits. But there were no hills or cliff faces for them to hide in for the next few miles, and Jerusalem could still be seen in the distance, a hazy blue mirage.
The servant eyed the sun’s position in the sky. “If we don’t see a house soon, we’ll have to turn back.” He didn’t want to suffer the consequences if his mistress got waylaid.
Where could a house hide in such flat, unsheltered land? The answer came around the next bend—a deep ravine intersected the road like a slash in the skin.
“There,” she said, pointing to a trail that led into the ravine.
The servant looked perplexed. “There’s nothing down there but snakes and devils.”
“In a few minutes there will be snakes, devils, and us.”
Grunting, the servant goaded the donkey with a switch. The trail wound its way around rocky outcroppings. Once they reached the dry floor of the ravine, which had been cut by centuries of flash floods, the bed veered away from the road.
Ten minutes later they came upon their first human being, a man sitting on a sandstone boulder whittling on a stick. The servant wondered if the point of this activity was to show that the man had a knife.
When they were in close range, the man spoke cryptically. “I had a feeling.”
The thirteenth disciple didn’t hesitate. “Me too.”
The man got to his feet, revealing how tall he was. His robe, tied with a sash at the waist, was good-quality hemp, but not the fine-spun linen the girl wore. He had a neatly trimmed beard and eyes that studied her with sharp clarity.
“Do we need to speak alone?” he asked, eyeing the servant, who didn’t exactly seem pleased with their encounter.
“I’m staying,” the servant insisted.
“It’s all right,” she said. The girl knew that age had made him somewhat deaf. Her father’s granaries and fields were too busy at planting time to spare any of the young men. He wouldn’t have sent anyone if he’d known she was going to hunt for one of Jesus’s disciples. The miracle rabbi had caused trouble among the Jews, which tightened the Roman grip. Killing him only made the occupiers search harder for more of his kind.
She dismounted and approached the man. “What shall I call you?”
“Simeon. Or if you are more Roman than Jew, Simeonus.”
“Simeon, then. Do you have a hiding place nearby?”
“Yes. Bandits dug out some caves. With everything stirred up, rebels use them now. You’re safer here.” Simeon gestured toward the boulder he’d been sitting on, the only thing that could pass for a seat. The girl perched herself on it while he sat cross-legged in the dust.
“I’ve seen everything,” she began. “Just as I saw how to find you today.”
She was sparing his feelings. In a vision she had seen Simeon run away when the Roman soldiers seized Jesus. He hid in a hole in the poorest slums of the city, weeping uncontrollably. But that’s what attracted the girl to him. She had wept uncontrollably too.
“What do you want from me?” he asked.
“I wish I didn’t want anything. My family should be offering you a hiding place, someone as holy as you.”
He shook his head. “You think I’m holy? I betrayed the one I promised never to betray. Now I have no way to go in the world. I used to fish in Galilee, but that’s too far behind me.”
“So you live as God pleases,” she said.
Simeon sat back. “I live as my master taught, because I know he forgives me.”
He spoke with total sincerity, and this encouraged the thirteenth disciple. The donkey wandered toward a tuft of grass lodged in a crevice, and the old servant sat in the shade with his straw hat pulled down over his eyes.
“I spoke with Jesus,” the thirteenth disciple said. She took a deep breath. “He was on the cross when he came to me.”
She expected Simeon to jump to his feet, in either anger or amazement. But he remained calm. “What did he tell you?”
“He told me he was the light of the world. Do you know what he meant?”
“He meant what he said.”
Simeon spread his arms out. “All this, and everything we can see, is light. When the spirit completely fills us, we are the light. Jesus taught this.”
“So you could become the same as God?”
He was alarmed. “Those words are blasphemous.”
“Your whole life is blasphemous. I don’t care. Let me follow you.”
Simeon shook his head. “Someday I’ll return to Jerusalem, God willing. I don’t want your father stoning me for ruining his daughter.”
“How can you ruin me?” She asked the question without flinching, staring directly into his eyes.
“By taking away your faith. With faith, you can still be a Jew.”
“No, I’m like you. Neither of us can go back to how we were.”
Simeon frowned. He’d never heard a woman speak like this. She could have explained to him about listening behind a curtain while the rabbis taught her brothers. She could have pointed to her heart, which many days was like a burning ball of fire. But there was no time.
He said, “It’s rare to see a woman on the cross, but not impossible. You must go. I have nothing more to tell you.”
The sun had already sunk below the lip of the ravine. She stood up, brushing the pale desert dust from her shift and sandals. “I know what I’ve seen. Whether I’m cursed or blessed, I’m one of you.”
“Then I pity you.” Simeon’s eyes grew moist. “Jesus may never return to us. Don’t put yourself in danger. Just go.”
He saw how crestfallen she looked, and his voice softened. “If you’re one of us, the Lord will guide you. Even in the shadow of the death.”
She paused. “I know why you’re sick at heart. It’s not because you betrayed your master. It’s because he left you behind. You blame him. You think it’s unfair.”
How did you know? he thought. To be so blessed when the master was alive and then abandoned like a stray spark blown from a bonfire into the night. How could she know?
When he didn’t reply, her tone turned grim. “As long as you wallow in grief, you have no master, and no hope.”
Her words would come back to haunt him in all the tomorrows leading to his death. Simeon waited while she woke up her drowsy old servant. He accompanied them to the trailhead and watched the donkey climb to the road. The little party had to make it back to Jerusalem before the night and its lurking dangers swallowed them up.
With one impulse, they all took their hands off the golden shrine. As often as the disciple had taken them back in time, it was still hard to believe. Lilith looked at the others. Did they realize that the hunted fugitive in the ravine was Simon Peter? Or that he would only meet his master by being crucified in Rome? All the disciples died violent deaths. If the girl shared their life, she must have shared their doom. Lilith decided not to mention any of this. She steered the group in a different direction.
“You said that going back there would help us make a choice,” she reminded Meg. “What is it?”
“Living as God pleases,” Meg replied, quoting the disciple. “Without doubt or fear.”
Her words were meant to inspire them, but that wasn’t the outcome. Jimmy looked anxious. “It sounds too hard,” he said. “Look at them squatting in a ditch. They were miserable.”
“And hunted down,” Galen added. There was a general murmur of agreement. “The disciples were promised heaven, and then overnight they’re criminals on the run.”
Lilith was irritated. “For pity’s sake, why can’t you see past that?”
“Maybe I do,” Galen shot back. “I’m sorry horrible things happened. But history is a nightmare we spend our whole lives trying to forget.”
This was perhaps the deepest thought any of them had expressed, certainly the gloomiest. Jimmy felt sorry for Galen. But his gloominess wasn’t the only way.
“If everything’s so horrible, maybe it doesn’t have to be,” Jimmy said. “I’m an optimist.”
“For how long? Eternal optimism is insanity if nothing ever changes,” Galen declared.
When Jimmy didn’t respond, Meg said, “You’re looking at the world from darkness. But the light never abandoned us—we abandoned it. Is that what you want?”
She wasn’t throwing a challenge in their faces, but one was implied.
Frank put into words what they were all thinking. “Okay, so I look into the light and say, ‘Come and get me.’ Is it going to make me crazy again?”
“I’m not a fortune-teller,” Meg replied. “In this new life, every day is an unknown. The alternative is totally predictable. You stay behind bars.”
They could tell she meant business, but they couldn’t see where she was taking them. Meg didn’t know either. Ever since Father Aloysius died, she had abided alone in a deserted kingdom. She was the queen of her own solitude. Now the kingdom was beginning to be populated. Five shipwrecked travelers had washed ashore by the light of the moon. They had no idea if they belonged in this strange land. It was time they found out.
Meg looked around the table, sizing up each castaway. “When you see me, do you see somebody who’s like you?” She didn’t wait for a reply. “I’m no different from you, I promise. Except in one thing. When the disciple says, ‘Live as God pleases,’ I get it.”
She reached into her handbag and took out a small change purse. “Enough talk. There are five pennies inside this purse, one for each of you.” She spilled the coins out; they clinked as they landed on the table. “Take one, and regard it as precious. If you lose it, that means you want to go back to your old life.”
In silence the pennies were passed around. Galen eyed his, then he flipped it in the air. “Heads. Now what?”
“It’s not a game,” Meg warned. “The disciple gave plastic sunglasses a secret power. She’s done the same here.”
Frank shook his head. “This whole thing about walking away. It sounds like a threat.”
“It’s not,” Meg insisted. “The instructions are simple. Carry your penny around for a week, and when you return, you’ll be changed.”
Galen was annoyed. “Every time you explain things, nothing gets explained.”
If he expected more clues, Meg didn’t offer any. “You’re on your own,” she said. “Just don’t lose your penny, no matter what. If you do, don’t bother to come back.”
The group dispersed, going their separate ways in the fading twilight, more bewildered and fretful than ever.