1. She doesn't pay attention to the talk.
It was simply the end of something, and there was a crowd when he left because that day others were leaving too, and I came home almost smiling at the thought that I was lucky that he was well enough to go and smiling too at the idea that we had been careful in the months – maybe in the whole year – before he left, not to talk too much or grow too close because we both knew that he would go.
But I should have paid more attention to that time before he left, to who came to the house, to what was discussed at my table. It was not shyness or reticence that made me spend my time in the kitchen when those I did not know came, it was boredom.
2. She goes to the wedding to convince him to stop, but gives up before she even speaks.
I went to Cana not to celebrate the joining together with much clamour of two people, one of whom I barely knew and the other not at all, but to see if I could get my son home. For days before, I summoned what strength I had in my eyes and Ipractised with my voice, worked out ways of keeping it low and insistent. I prepared warnings and threats if promises would not do. There must be, I thought, one thing I could say that might matter. One sentence. One promise. One threat. One warning. And I was sure as I sat there that I had it; I had fooled myself that he would come back with me, that he had had enough of wandering and that he was broken now, or that I could break him with some words.
When I arrived in Cana some days before the wedding I knew, or I almost knew, that I had come in vain. The only talk was the talk of him, and the fact that I was his mother meant that I was noticed and approached.
3. She abandons her son on the cross.
It is only now that I can admit this, only now that I can allow myself to say it. For years I have comforted myself with the thought of how long I remained there, how much I suffered then. But I must say it once, I must let the words out, that despite the panic, despite the desperation, the shrieking, despite the fact that his heart and his flesh had come from my heart and my flesh, despite the pain I felt, a pain that has never lifted, and will go with me into the grave, despite all of this, the pain was his and not mine. And when the possibility of being dragged away and choked arose, my first instinct was to flee and it was also my last instinct. In those hours I was powerless, but, nonetheless, as I went from grief to further grief, wringing my hands, holding the others, watching with horror, I knew what I would do. As our guardian said, I would leave others to wash his body and hold him and bury him when his death came. I would leave him to die alone if I had to. And that is what I did. Once I signalled my agreement, Mary slipped away first and we watched her go out of the sides of our eyes. I did not look at the figure on the cross again. Perhaps I had looked enough. Perhaps I was right to save myself when I could. Butit does not feel like that now and it never has. But I will say it now because it has to be said by someone once: I did it to save myself. I did it for no other reason. I watched our guardian slip away and I pretended not to notice. I moved towards the cross as if I were going to sit at the foot of it and wring my hands as I waited for his final moments. And then I slipped around the back. I pretended I was searching for something or someone, or a place to relieve myself where I could not be easily seen. And then I followed our guardian and Mary down the hill on the other side, walking slowly, walking slowly away.
4. At then end all she wants is for it all not to have happened and part of the burden is that she realises she could have stopped it.
In the meantime, when I wake in the night, I want more. I want what happened not to have happened, to have taken another course. How easily it might not have happened! How easily we could have been spared! It would not have taken much. Even the thought of its possibility comes into my body now like a new freedom. It lifts the darkness and pushes away the grief. It is as if a traveller, weary after days of walking in a dry desert, a place void of shade, were to come to a hilltop and see below a city, an opal set in emerald, filled with plenty, a city filledwith wells and trees, with a marketplace laden with fish and fowl and the fruits of the earth, a place redolent with the smell of cooking and spices.
(Since it is fiction we are looking at.)