I listened as hard as I could.

"Oh. Dave," I heard her say. "something terrible has happened. I won't be able to see you tomorrow. I have to go to Pennsylvania. A young cousin of mine and her husband were killed in a terrible car accident.

They were hit head-on by one of those dreadful tractor-trailer trucks. They're both dead, but miraculously, their child escaped serious injury....

Yes... No. I'm not going just for the funeral. I'm going to bring their baby back here. A little girl barely three years old. There's no one else.... Yes, yes, it's a horrible affair. I know you understand. I appreciate that.... No, be fine. Thanks for offering. I'll call you as soon as I return.... Thank you, I'll be fine, Dave. Please.... Yes. I know, but what does family mean if I can't do this?... Me. too. I'll call you as soon as I can."

I heard her hang up.

When she returned to the dining room. both Baby Celeste and I looked up at her.

She smiled at us. "Don't look so worried, children. Everything is going just the way I was told it would."

Baby Celeste clapped her hands as if she understood every word. My eyes met Mama's and held. For the first time ever, it was she who shifted away first. She busied herself with clearing the table.

"Take the baby into the living room," she ordered. "I'll be there soon. I want to practice 'La Vie en Rose,'" she added, threw a smile my way, and went into the kitchen.

I lifted Baby Celeste out of her chair and took her into the living room. I felt so weak and frightened inside. I thought I might drop her. so I put her down quickly. Tonight she wanted to look at pictures in albums. A collection of them was on a shelf of a side table. Some of the pictures were so old they were faded nearly to the point where nothing could be clearly seen. Baby Celeste would sit with an album opened on her lap and look at the photos for hours if we let her. How she could be so interested in people she had never met or seen intrigued me. She loved to point out babies and children.

There were some photographs of Noble and me, and when she looked at them, she invariably pointed to Noble and said. "Noble.- I could never tell if she saw him or saw me in the pictures, but she did stare with greater interest at my picture.

"The first Celeste," I would whisper to her. She wouldn't speak. She would look at me and then back at the picture.

What went on in that little head of hers? I wondered. What did she think when she heard the name and looked at me? What was she really capable of knowing?

When Mama came in, she went right to the piano and began to practice the song. After a while, she began to sing it, too, sins it in French. She had a beautiful voice. Why wouldn't Mr. Fletcher fall head over heels in love with her? Why wouldn't anyone?

Before she was finished, she looked to one of the front windows and then back at me. expectantly.

"I knew the song would bring him. Noble." she said.

I stared at the window.

Bring him? Bring whom? Daddy? Her smile told me that was whom she saw.

But there was just darkness there for me. I waited anxiously for his smiling face, but the face I saw when I finally saw one take shape was not Daddy's. It was Elliot's. I turned sharply to see if Mama saw him, too, but she was singing again and quite lost in her own thoughts.

Tell her. I thought, tell her before it's too late. If she looks up quickly enough, she will see, too, and she will believe you.

I didn't cry out. I just didn't have the courage, and moments later there was only darkness in the window. When I finally went up to bed. I couldn't stop the trembling. I had a terrible case of the chills and thought I might be coming down with something, but eventually I fell asleep, and when I woke. I was fine.

The following day Mama remained secluded.

She didn't set foot out of the house. After all, she was supposed to have gone to Pennsylvania to get Baby Celeste and bring her home to us. At dinnertime she received a phone call from Mrs. Zalkin, who was bringing a friend the next day to purchase some herbal skin creams Mama had created, "This is perfect," she told me after she hung up.

"It's all going so perfectly."

I had no idea why until I realized Mama did not ask me to take Baby Celeste up to the turret room when they arrived. The moment they set their surprised eyes on her. Mama looked at me and winked. She began her story and they listened with faces fall of sympathy and understanding, but also with some underlying skepticism, which to my surprise didn't bother Mama at all. They left praising her for her wonderful act of charity, but they looked at each other and practically winked.

With Baby Celeste in her arms. Mama stood on the porch and watched them drive off. Then she smiled and turned to me.

"It"s only a matter of days now before the whole community knows," she said. "It wasn't just a coincidence that one of the busiest busybodies came to see us today, you know. Oh, how the rumors will fly. It will be like an attack of locusts." She laughed strangely.

My heart should have been singing with joy.

Baby Celeste was freed, released from the prison of nonexistence. She could burst onto the world, play in sunlight, go on trips with us, come alive.

But my second self was full of warnings. It was truly like waiting for the second shoe to fall, and fall it would. That night Mama called Dave Fletcher and invited him to her special dinner as she had planned.

From what she had told me, I knew that people in the community were already buzzing about her romance with Mr. Fletcher. Slowly she had filled the trough of gossip, implying to her nosy clients that this affair had emerged from secrecy, that it had been going on for some time. Some people even claimed to have known, which amused Mama even more.

"They wondered how I could be so disinterested in men, and they wondered why Mr.

Fletcher never had any romantic interest with all the available widows and divorcees floating about the community. Now, they all think they have the answer.

Are you beginning to understand. Noble?" she asked.

Of course. I did. All of it had been running like an underground stream below my conscious thoughts.

Mama believed our spiritual family had planned and arranged it, and they were still actively at work on everything to follow. Anyone who looked at Mama.

Mr. Fletcher. and Baby Celeste together now would come to the conclusions Mama wanted. She didn't have to worry about anyone discovering that her story about cousins in a tragic accident was fictitious. Not only would she never have to face the truth, no one would ever know the truth. No one would ever know who I really was. In another way, an effective and admittedly clever way, she had buried me even deeper.

So my joy for Baby Celeste was tempered and short-lived. Her coming out was my eternal burial. I tried to be happier, be the way Mama wanted, especially in front of others, but it was like being draped in a dark cloud and looking at the world through eyes veiled in gauze.

All that following week. Mama had both Baby Celeste and me accompany her on every shopping trip. Once she had kept Baby Celeste hidden from the very sun, and now she wanted as many eyes to see her as possible. She deliberately attracted the attention of the women she knew were gossip mongers, whether we were in one of the mails, department stores, or on the streets of the nearby village.

She had a wonderful spiel and rattled it off with great dramatics.

"When my cousin had her child," she told the mayor's wife. "she called me immediately to ask if I minded her naming the baby after my poor lost Celeste. Of course. I thought it was a wonderful gesture and told her to please go right ahead. So here she is," she said. bouncing Baby Celeste in her arms.

"my Celeste. It"s all a tragedy, but look at the beautiful, blessed child that has been born of it."

She nearly brought them all to tears.

Afterward, she smiled and told me. "No matter what they think about Dave Fletcher and me, they'll keep it locked up like some very deep secret. They love my story too much. They're so full of confusions that they'll never spread bad gossip about Baby Celeste, She won't have to hide her head when she is older. If anything, she will be on the receiving end of their pity."

When I looked at the faces of these people. I saw Mama was right. How well she knew them. How could I ever question anything she did or thought?

"And the baby has taken so to Noble," she told them. "If s as if she has been with him since the day she was born. He's very good with her, too," she added, looking proudly at me. "It's been just as lonely for him as it has been for me, but you have your Celeste again, don't you, my son?" she would ask me in front of them.

"Yes," I would say.

You see, I was already a part of it all, already in the web she had woven with her spirits.

But no moment was more terrifying for me than the night Mr. Fletcher came to our house for the dinner party, the night he would set eyes on his own granddaughter and not know it, and the night he would set eves on me again.

Mama was more nervous than I had ever seen her about her cooking, about the table, and about our home and how it looked. I wasn't sure which of us was more anxious about Mr. Fletcher's impending arrival. Only Baby Celeste seemed unchanged. Even the days full of travel and shopping, being outside and meeting other people for the first time in her life, didn't seem to have had as dramatic an impact on her as I had anticipated it might. It was truly as though she had expected it would all happen just this way. No one could tell she had been sequestered all her life.

Mama had decided to roast a turkey. It was like a Thanksgiving dinner, and not by accident either.

"Dave didn't have a Thanksgiving last year,"

she told me. "His daughter wasn't home and he didn't feel like traveling to New York to visit with his relatives. He's not that close to his family anyway, which is what I expected. It all works so well for us, you see. It's truly our Thanksgiving, Noble."

She prepared all the fixings as well. She stuffed the turkey, made creamed onions and sweet potato pudding. She had cranberry sauce and homemade bread. For dessert she made another rhubarb pie, but this time she would have vanilla ice cream for it. The house was filled with wonderful aromas and my stomach churned in anticipation, almost driving out the butterflies.

The table had been set since mid-afternoon.

Every once in a while, Mama would step into the dining room and change something, replace a glass, move a plate, fix the flowers, and inspect the silverware. She was undecided as to whether I should sit across from Mr. Fletcher or beside him, and she changed the seating arrangements twice before concluding I should sit beside him.

"I don't want you staring at him and making him feel self-conscious," she said. "I know you, Noble. You can do that without even realizing what you're doing,"

Maybe she was right. The only time I could recall being as nervous in front of strangers was when I had had to go to the school to take the high school equivalency test. I was putting Noble Atwell down as my name. The teacher who monitored the exam seemed to stare at me with intense scrutiny from time to time I did my best to ignore him, but sometimes my hand shook as I wrote.

The hour before Mr. Fletcher was to arrive. I sat in the living room and kept Baby Celeste occupied. Mama relented on her usual television restrictions, too, and permitted us to watch some children's shows.

"My cousins would certainly have let her watch television endlessly." she remarked from the doorway as we watched. "I know how young parents are today.

They use the idiot box as a babysitter. They don't want to spend all that much time teaching and instructing their children. They're too selfish."

She spoke about the fictitious cousins as if she really believed they had existed. It made me feel as if I were an actor in a play, especially when she wanted me to reinforce everything she said. After all, it was still a drama we had to perform for Mr. Fletcher, "You remember how they were when they visited us a year ago, Noble? Remember?" She waited for my reply.

I nodded. "Yes. Mama."

"Right," she said. pleased. And then. before Mr.

Fletcher's car pulled up in front of our house, she declared. "He's here. Just be yourself and don't make him feel a bit uncomfortable."

Don't make him feel uncomfortable? Was she blind? Couldn't she see how I was shaking inside, or did she simply want to ignore it?

I heard the car door shut. Baby Celeste looked up and away from the television set. "Shut off the television and get her up to go into the dining room,"

Mama instructed. She went to the door before Mr.

Fletcher had time to use the knocker, "Welcome," I heard her cry.

I lifted Baby Celeste into my arms, took a deep breath, and walked into the hallway just as they finished embracing. She turned to us.

"You remember my son. Noble." she said.

"Yes, of course. Hi. Noble," Mr. Fletcher said.

If any painful memories were clouding his brain, he kept them well hidden. He smiled warmly at me. It had been nearly three years now since I had really looked at him. His reddish-brown hair had some gray streaks. I didn't recall that. but I did recall how similar his build was to Elliot's. He looked a few inches more than six feet, slimmer perhaps. I couldn't forget those turquoise eyes. eyes Elliot had inherited, Baby Celeste's were more a cerulean with tiny green specs. Like Elliot, Mr. Fletcher had a slight cleft and even some fine freckles about the bridge of his nose and across the crests of his cheeks.

"Hi," I said.

"Hi," Baby Celeste said without any coaxing.

She had a wide, happy smile. too.

Mr. Fletcher laughed. "What a delightful child.

I guess she feels at home here already."

Mama nodded. "She makes it easy for us.

You'll be amazed at how sweet and loving a personality she has. Come in, come in."

She closed the door and I stepped back. He smiled at me again.

"Let me show you some of the house. I've been doing some redecorating." Mama told him. "Noble, would you get the baby situated in the dining room.

Well be right there."

"Yes. Mama."

"Yes, this is nice." Mr. Fletcher declared as soon as he looked into the living room. "The piano looks like a real antique."

"It is, but I keep it tuned. I'll play something for you later,- I heard her promise him.

I brought Baby Celeste into the dining room and set her in her booster chair. I could hear them talking as they walked through the downstairs.

Occasionally. Mama's laughter floated back.

"I thought I had an interesting old house, but this place is fascinating," he told her in the hallway.

We think so. We always did," she told him.

"Well" Mr. Fletcher said, stepping into the dining room with her. "this is absolutely beautiful.

What a nice table. I'm overwhelmed. Sarah."

"It's nothing." Then, indicating the chair beside me, she said, "Here is where you should sit."

He nodded. "Is there anything I can do to help?"

"Yes,' she said. "Enjoy the meal."

He laughed. "I don't expect that to be very difficult," he said, and turned to me. I couldn't help cringing inside but his face was full of warmth and friendliness.

"You've gotten pretty tall, Noble. Your mother is very proud of the work you do around here. too.

Your ears probably were itching all the time she's been with me."

Mama smiled, "Dave's grandmother, it seems, was full of superstitions and old ideas."

"Whose wasn't?" he said. If your ears itch, someone's talking about you If your palms itch, you'll be getting money."