Rebekah: Women of Genesis (15 page)

Her beloved boy. The girl she gave birth to. Rebekah had never seen her own face—therefore she was the only person in the camp who could not have known how much they looked alike. But the guard last night—he must have taken her for Akyas in the darkness. And all the servants here—how many of them had been with the household longer than Rebekah had been alive? Most of the adults, anyway. They had all known that Rebekah’s mother was not dead. That Father had sent her away, that somewhere in the world she was still alive, even if they had not known exactly where. And not one of them had told her. Not even Milchah, though now it was obvious that it was Father’s marriage to Akyas—to
Mother
—that she had been speaking about.

As soon as Laban had finished writing Ezbaal’s words, Father turned on him with barely contained fury. “You could have told me who she was when I first broached the matter.”

“You didn’t ask me who she was,” said Ezbaal. “You spoke of her as my sister, and my sister she is, as she has been for more than fourteen years. Akyas is the name
you
caused her to take.”

“‘Rejected one,’” Laban murmured as he wrote Ezbaal’s words. His stick moved so quickly now that his letters were barely legible and crossed each other haphazardly.

“I gave her no such name,” said Father, when he at last reached those words.

“No, you merely made them true,” said Ezbaal. “Well, do I take it that for the second time, you renounce your vow? For the second time, you send her away? But this time in full view of her children?”

Laban was still writing, but then began to falter, and suddenly he was sitting on the ground, bent over and weeping loudly.

Rebekah could not have named what
she
felt, but it most certainly did not lead to weeping, not like Laban was doing. She took her stick and wrote savagely in the dirt, “You lied to me.”

Her movement must have been bold enough to draw every gaze, though the only one that mattered was Father’s.

“Yes,” said Father. “I did, and commanded that all the others do it, too. They dared not disobey, even among themselves. Blame no one but me.”

Akyas’s voice came softly from behind her. “All these years I have longed for you, dreamed of you, and now I see that you have grown up better and dearer and with more courage and wisdom than even a mother’s love could imagine.”

But Rebekah was in no mood to hear such things. She whirled on Akyas and hurled words at her like stones. “A mother’s love! You lied to me too, from the moment you first entered my tent. Is that why you came? To mock me?” Rebekah turned to look at all the others from the camp. “And you!” she cried. “All of you, tut-tutting about how sorry you were my mother was
dead
and how nice it would have been if she had
lived.
All of you
liars,
and me the only one who didn’t know the truth!”

Several of the women were weeping; others stared at the ground. Only Pillel met her gaze steadily, as if defying her to tell what they
should
have done.

She knew she was being unfair. But they had all been unfair to her.

“I didn’t know,” said Laban miserably. “I was lied to as much as you.”

“What are you saying!” Father demanded. “Tell me what you’re saying!”

Rebekah deliberately drew her foot across Akyas’s vow that she had written in the dirt, and replaced it with letters boldly and angrily gouged. “Why bother to tell you, when you’ll only make up your own version and make everybody else tell it for fifteen years?”

She was still writing when he began to answer, a note of pleading in his voice. “It was a terrible thing to take your mother from you, but all I could see was that she was going to raise you to believe in Asherah, at least a little, and you can’t believe even a little in Asherah and still believe in God at all. You needed a mother, but you needed God more. Do you think I wanted to send her away? Do you think I haven’t longed for her every day for fifteen years? Every time I saw your face, I saw
her
and hated myself for sending her away, but every time I saw how you love God and serve him, I knew I had done right.”

She wrote again, but the anger was dissipating now, leaving her merely . . . tired. Dry. “That doesn’t explain why you lied. That wasn’t for God, that was so I wouldn’t blame you. It was
cowardly.
”

“I, I, I,” said Laban. “You talk as if you’re the only one they lied to, the only one who lost your mother.”

“You’re a boy,” said Rebekah impatiently. “You don’t need . . .” But the look on his face stopped her. Obviously the words she was about to say were deeply wrong. He
had
needed his mother. And as he collapsed again into weeping, she realized that judging from her fury and his sobbing, he was the one most deeply hurt by this.

And maybe he was. Because she, at least, had Deborah all her life.

At the thought of Deborah, she turned to see the dear simple soul standing there with tears streaming down her cheeks. Rebekah walked to her, put her arms around her.

“Everybody’s mad,” said Deborah, “and I don’t know why.”

“This is my mother,” said Rebekah. “She isn’t dead after all.”

“But . . . where
were
you?” Deborah asked Akyas.

Before Akyas could make any kind of answer, Rebekah turned to Father and spoke to him—as if he could hear her, and perhaps, without knowing the exact words, he could read her face. “Yes, Father. Where was she?”

Rebekah leaned her head on Deborah’s shoulder—for Deborah was still half a hand taller than Rebekah and probably always would be, judging from Akyas’s height. “But then, I
did
have a mother,” she said. “It was no fault of yours, Akyas, but
this
is the woman who fed me and washed me and dressed me and dried my tears and taught me to be kind and fair and . . .
honest.
I wondered about you, but I didn’t miss you the way Laban seems to have, because I had Deborah.”

“Pillel!” shouted Father. “Come and write down what everybody’s saying!”

“I had a mother,” said Rebekah. “But now I wonder what I’m going to do for a father. Because the old one turns out to be a liar who took my mother away from me in my infancy and never had the courage to tell me what he did!”

Though he hadn’t heard her, the anguish in Father’s face told her that he understood the kind of thing she was saying. She turned to Akyas, who looked scarcely less upset than Father. “As for you, I know you truly love me, because you went to such great lengths to make sure that I found all this out here, today, with all these people looking on. What a fine story this will make, told around every campfire between Hurria and Egypt.”

She stepped forward to meet Ezbaal’s gaze—Ezbaal, who still seemed quite pleased with himself. “As for you, I thank God I was saved from marrying the kind of man who would set up such a cruel joke as this, played on two children who never did you any harm. How proud you’ll be to tell about this jest to all your friends.”

Ezbaal’s face grew suddenly grave. “I was thinking only of reuniting your father and mother. It was not a jest. And the story will not be told to anyone, not by me or any man of mine.”

Pillel was writing for Father now. “No one will speak of this,” Father said determinedly.

“Everyone will speak of it,” said Rebekah to Ezbaal. “Neither of you has authority over the people from the villages. And even in your households, no one could resist telling. It would be cruel of you to punish them for it.” She turned to Deborah. “Come with me to our tent, will you, Deborah? I’m tired of all this company. And now that Father has a wife to govern the women of the camp, I don’t have any duties. So I’ll have plenty of time to sit in the dark and figure out just which parts of my childhood were true and which were false.”

Only Laban broke the silence that fell as Rebekah and Deborah walked away. “You big selfish baby!” he called.

She tried to ignore him. He was distraught. Emotional. Nothing he said would be true.

“They didn’t plan this to hurt
you!
They were all doing the best they could to do the right thing, only there was no right way to do it!”

She whirled to face him, and this time turned her fury on him, the one person she had spared before. “
I’m
the big selfish baby? Go dry your eyes, Laban, and tell me who the baby is.”

It was a terrible, unfair thing to say, and she hated herself for saying it as soon as the words were out of her mouth. She
was
being a big selfish baby. Laban had told her the truth—the only one in her life, it seemed, who ever had—and all she had done to him, to anyone, was to lash out and try to hurt everybody as much as possible. She was ashamed, and yet at the same time she was frustrated that she had not hurt them more. Surely there must have been something she could say that would tear their lives to pieces the way they had shattered hers. Something that could make them all feel as empty and foolish and worthless as she felt right now.

Deborah parted the tent door for her, and before Deborah could get inside herself, Rebekah had thrown herself on her sleeping rugs and burst into huge, wracking sobs. Mother, Mother, Mother, she said silently, perhaps murmuring the words sometimes, too. Mother. Mother.

After a while, Deborah came and patted her arm. “I’m not really your mother,” she said. “I wish I had been. But then they might have taken you away from me.”

Rebekah finally turned her thoughts to the sufferings of someone who was not herself. Deborah, who grieved for her lost little boy all these years, all fifteen years of Rebekah’s life. Akyas must have grieved for me the same way. And Father, did he also grieve for the wife he lost? He had said so, many times. Was that true, then? He sent her away, but loved her still, missed her, mourned for her.

Sent her away for
my
sake.

The bitterness flooded her heart again, driving out all other feelings. That was the most galling thing about it—that Father had sent Mother away . . . for
her.
That can’t be true. Father can’t have been that stupid. Did he really think she wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between the living God and gods of stone and wood? Between the God of Abraham and a silly god like Asherah?

“You’re the only one I can trust, Deborah,” Rebekah murmured.

“Everybody loves you so much,” said Deborah. “Nobody would ever hurt you.”

How odd, that this statement could be the truth, and yet somehow they had all managed to conspire together to do exactly that. To hurt her so deeply that as she lay here on her bed all she could wish for was to die, so she didn’t have to live in a world where something like this could be done to her, and there was nothing she could do about it. Fifteen years stolen from her, broken and deformed and misshapen by loss and lies. Her whole life so far. And no reason she could think of to ever leave this tent again. Whom could she look in the eye? Who could speak to her, and she would believe them?

Only God.

And now that she thought of him, she couldn’t help but ask him: How could you let such a thing as this happen? It was all done for
your
sake, wasn’t it? And you stood by and let them tell me these lies and never whispered the truth to me, not even in my dreams. You could prompt me left and right when it came to strategies that would keep me from marrying a man who might raise my children to worship false gods, but you couldn’t just once say, “By the way, Rebekah, your mother isn’t quite as dead as people have led you to believe.”

She rolled over on her back, the tears suddenly dried, her heart empty.

The words of her own bitter, hateful prayer stung her to the heart.

I turned down the noblest man among all the great houses of the desert, and all for exactly the reason Father sent Mother away. What would I have done, if Ezbaal had agreed to let me raise my children to worship God, and then I caught him teaching my sons to sacrifice to Ba’al? I couldn’t divorce him, the way a man could divorce a woman. I would have had to stay and watch and hate him for leading my sons away from the truth.

That was the choice Father faced. And there he was, and Mother, too, watching me make
exactly
the same choice Father had made. What did Mother think, when I refused to marry Ezbaal for precisely the same reason Father sent her away?

She
knew the truth. And yet she still went through with the wedding. Still wanted to have Father as her husband again. It wasn’t just so she could see her children again, either. She could have told Rebekah that first night who she really was, and Rebekah would have arranged for Laban to come also and find out the truth. In her rage at Father, Rebekah might even have crept off to go live with her in Ezbaal’s household, not as a new bride, but as a long-lost daughter. But Akyas did not handle things that way. She did nothing to undercut Father’s authority. Indeed, she went to great lengths to make sure Father was married to her before he found out who she really was.

It could only mean that she forgave Father. She had seen how firmly Rebekah was committed to serving the God of Abraham, so that Father’s victory was complete, and yet she still wanted to return to the marriage.