The Covert Messiah

 


EXCERPT

THE COVERT MESSIAH

COPYRIGHT ©2013 J R Lankford

All rights reserved




Chapter 1


   I didn’t expect to run into my son eight years after he died. In the brightness and the crowds I almost missed Jess. The sunrise had just turned Lake Lugano into liquid diamonds. I was at the mercato del sabato, the market in Porlezza, held every Saturday on the lakefront. By now I was used to Italy’s northern lakes—their extravagant aura, the surrounding green of Alpine hills, the markets held in shore side medieval towns, each on itsown special day.

   When he was hours old, I’d brought Jess to Lake Maggiore, the large lake to the west of Lugano. Brought isn’t exactly the right word. It was an escape. Then a year after he died at the age of ten, I took his infant brother, Peter, to live on Lake Como to the east of here. Took isn’t the right word, either. Peter and I and Adamo, the man I married, live in hiding in a village there.

   Since transportation between Lake Como and Lake Lugano is easy, I’d taken the 6:20 am ferry, caught a taxi and come to Porlezza alone, leaving Peter and Adamo to fish and myself to spend a day pretending we were a regular family.

   Today would have been Jess’s eighteenth birthday.

   He stood beneath a hanging hand-lettered sign that advertised Ricotta di Mucca, cow cheese. Did I glimpse a crescent birthmark on his chin, identical to the one on mine? Light filtering through an adjoining stall’s white curtain made details hard to see. Nearby an old man played an accordion. A woman in an apron scooped olives from a clay bowl. Naturally, my logical mind kicked in and told me that, at the age of fifty-four, my eyes had decided to lie to me.

   “Ciao, mia cara madre,” he said in a voice that belonged to no one but Jess, even eight years older.

   I must have dropped my market tote and passed out, because the next thing I knew I was on the ground, staring at people’s legs, my head resting on what smelled like squashed oranges and my precious Jess bending over me.

   A small crowd stared, mostly at Jess.

   “Mia madre è bene,” my mother is well, he said, helping me stand. This caused furtive glances between Jess’s brown sausage curls, his olive skin and me—dark sienna Maggie Duffy Morelli—African, at least via my ancestors. Someone retrieved the unsquashed former contents of my tote and handed them to Jess. A few followed as he took me to a lakeside bench, eased me down, and then sat beside me.

   Still dazed, I hadn’t spoken.

   I knew it was Jess. I knew he was here. I knew he was dead.

   “Are you real this time?” I whispered, finding my voice. Jess had appeared to me in a vivid dream after Peter’s birth seven years ago.   

   Now he put a hand on my back and replied, “I am real in the way you mean.”

   I had a thousand anxious questions—starting with how did he get here, how long would he stay?—but for a moment I just sat there, marveling that his hand was on my back.

   “Siete tutta la destra, signora?” Are you all right, ma’am, a man in a grey shirt and brown felt hat asked. All the while he stared at Jess. So did the woman in the apron from the olive stand; and a younger one in glasses and long pink dress, auburn hair gathered at the nape of her neck; also an older woman I recognized by the big red flowers on her blouse. She’d been tending the shoe stall and had left it to come here. All I could see of the cheese stand now was half of an orange wheel of Rigatello because people had stopped their shopping and crowded near.

   They all stared at Jess and now I saw why.

   Like the diamond surface of the lake, he gleamed. It was an aura I could feel, more than see, as if happiness had arrived in the Porlezza market and taken the shape of a boy. He had on tan pantsand a blue polo shirt, but it was the blue in rainbows, the tan in the sky after a storm. A closer look and his skin seemed as iridescent as my mother of pearl combs.

   “It’s really you, Jess?” I asked.

   He gazed at me, peace and power behind his eyes. I’d never been looked on with such love.

   The girl in the glasses must have felt it, too, because her eyes brimmed with tears. People murmured, breaking the silence. The man in the felt hat frowned, as if expecting an explanation.

   Jess didn’t seem to notice.

   I had to do something, so I leaned toward him. “Jess, sweetheart. People are staring—”

   “Who are you? What do you want here?” demanded the man in the felt hat.

   Jess glanced up and the girl in the glasses began to weep. So did the woman who owned the shoe stall. Their tears only upset the man.

   “I asked who you are!”

   Around us the murmuring grew louder. There was a gasp of joy.

   “Sweetheart,” I repeated.

   Jess said, “Oh!” As if he turned off a light switch, the blue in his shirt and the tan of his pants became normal colors. He stopped gleaming.    

   He was just an eighteen-year old boy.

   “Are you all right, Mother?” He brushed orange bits out of my hair.

   “Yes,” I said, though I was not.

   “Vien.” Come. He took my hand and the tote. Smiling in delight, nodding with confidence, he led me from the stunned crowds of Porlezza’s Saturday market.

   Eagerly I followed, desperate to hug him, but when we reached the street, everyone was either still looking or coming our way. I caught the eye of the woman in the flowered blouse. My expression must have pleaded because she shouted to the market crowd, “Why are you bothering a boy and his mother? They have done nothing to you!”

   Those who’d followed us paused, suddenly come to their senses. Eyes cast down in embarrassment, they returned to the market and their shopping—all but the felt hat man, who glared as Jess got us a cab.

   “Go anywhere, please,” Jess said to the driver.

   The car pulled away from the Lungolago and at last I cried out in jubilation and threw my arms around him. Jess put his head on my shoulder, as if he were still ten years old.

   The cab driver smiled. In Italy, family affection is cherished. As for me, my heart almost burst as I held my long lost son, filled my fingers with his curls, touched his arms, to prove he was a person and not a ghost.

   Tears wet my face, his face, as we hugged.

   “Jess, you’re here! Oh, sweetheart, how I’ve missed you!”

   “Dear Madre. I wasn’t gone. I was always here.”

   Wiping away his own tear at witnessing a joyful family reunion, the driver sped away from Lake Lugano as I hugged the clone of Jesus of Nazareth, who’d died and now returned.

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