"Why is that so terrible?"

She thought and rocked.

"Was the lock of hair Infant Jordan's?" I asked.

She smiled. "Yes, it was."

"Why do you blame yourself then? Why was it wrong to keep a lock of her hair? You kept ours and pasted it in the family album."

"This was different." "How?"

"Questions, questions, since when are you so full of questions? Your sister was always full of questions, but not you, not you." she added with her voice drifting.

"I just wondered how this was different."

"It was different because she was never alive,"

Mama said in a tired voice.

"Oh, I know that."

"No, you don't know. She was never alive."

I smiled at her. Now she was the one forgetting and sounding stupid. I thought. although I would never dare even suggest such a thing.

"But you told me, Mama. You told both of us.

You told us she was stillborn. Isn't that what stillborn means?"

"She was never alive. Even on the other side she was a dead thing. We live first there. I've explained it to you many times. haven't I? We are born and we die many different ways and eventually return to what we were, return to where we were created in the first place."

"I know."

"She was a dark dead thing. She was born of evil, and opening the box was like opening Pandora's box. That's why I had to do what I did tonight. The evilness was set loose in our house. It had been sleeping up there all this time, just waiting for an opportunity."

"Is that why you put out all the family pictures and lit the candles?"

"Yes. I had to bring them all here, have them all help us, and they did.

"But it"s all my fault," she added. rocking. "I shouldn't have taken a lock of her hair in the first place. I did it when no one could see. I had to have it.

I just had to have it. I should have known. You see, I wasn't as powerful as Baby Celeste is. If anything proves it, that does."

What did she say? She had to have it? That made absolutely no sense. "You did it? You took the lock of hair from her head?"

Now I was really confused. She remained silent, rocking, staring at the wall, her lips tight with rage.

"But how... you weren't even born yet. Mama."

She turned to look at me, and in her expression I could see that she had said more than she had wanted. She actually looked frightened for a moment and turned away.

"Mama?"

She shook her head. "I don't want to talk about it anymore and I don't want you to talk about it. Ever."

"But how could you be there to do it?" The question wouldn't swallow back. It was a bubble that wouldn't be denied no matter how I tried to keep it from reaching the surface. How could she be there to cut the lock of hair from a stillborn baby born to her great-grand-parents?

The answer was in the heavy silence that fell between us. It wasn't a stillborn baby born to her great-grandparents. Was it her mother's baby? Why wouldn't she ever have told us? Why would she say it was her great-grandparent's child? My heartbeat quickened and a feather made of ice brushed over the back of my neck.

"Was it your mother's baby?"

She turned back to me ever so slowly, and when she did. her eyes seemed to have sunk deeper into her skull. Her lips became tight and thin.

"No."

"No? Then I don't understand."

"She came out of me," she said in a deathly whisper. "You?"

"I wasn't much older than you are. I hid it from my mother until I could hide it no longer and she drew it out of me so it would be stillborn. It was wrinkled and ugly. Only its hair was pretty, only its hair. Its hair was like spun gold. I couldn't resist."

"Your baby? How did your mother know it was evil?"

She looked away and rocked. "Every family has a dark spirit in it, a blemish. He was my father's younger brother. He wasn't here often or long, but it was enough. I was seduced, and afterward he was punished."

"What happened to him?"

She smiled. "Yes, something happened to him.

My mother put a curse on him and he died a horrible death, his insides rotted out with cancer. But he was a handsome man, a charming man. Evil always is, you know, The devil hash a pleasing face,' she quoted.

She looked at me. "That's why it's so important to be careful, to be guarded, to be good. That's why you must listen to everything I tell you and do what I tell you. Noble."

She turned away again and rocked. "If she had lived, if she had been alive, she would have been the first Celeste. She knew that and she worked and worked at returning until she entered my Celeste, and that is why I had to bury her forever and ever. Now all the evil is underground and we're safe. We're safe,"

Mama chanted.

She had entered the first Celeste? Had Mama always thought me evil? Was that why she so readily believed Noble's death was my fault?

"We're safe," she chanted. "She's dead and gone. Buried and gone."

She looked at me again. "And she'll never be resurrected." Her words fell like small explosions on my ears and echoed.

And echoed, "Never be resurrected... never be resurrected...

never..." I turned and ran out and up the stairway.

5.

I'm Beautiful .

All my life I had grown up believing that our house was truly sacrosanct, that we really lived within a castle protected by our family's spiritual wall as Mama had described, that we were safe and that the only evil that could come into our lives had to come from without, and only if we ourselves weakened and permitted it to happen. All of our family spirits were good. They hadn't had perfect lives. Some weren't productive and had caused their own problems, but their hearts were pure. That was what had made us special, what gave us the power to cross over, to see them and hear them. We had been given the gift because we had this pureness in our blood.

It was shocking to hear otherwise, to learn that someone so close to us had been dark, depraved, and unholy and that his seed had entered our world like something infectious, a disease of evil that could contaminate us. Was Mama then right about me? Was the wickedness my grandmother aborted able to resurface within my heart, in the first Celeste"s heart?

Mama's revelations resurrected my memories of that fateful day Noble died, a day not only Mama denied. but I did. too. Despite my reluctance to remember, my attempts to dam them up and keep them away, the images came flooding back over me.

It was like someone pinning my eyelids back and forcing me to see, to look upon the ugliest and most frightening things. I wished I could shake the pictures out of my head, drink one of Mama's wondrous elixirs and forget forever, but that could not be.

Instead. I recalled Noble standing on the biz rock in the creek. I had come to get him to go home.

Mama was upset he was out there alone. He was stubborn so I grabbed his fishing pole, and then he and I had a tug-of-war with it. Once again I saw him losing his balance, only now I saw myself deliberately shoving that pole into him, driving him off the rock.

Anger and jealousy had taken control of my arms. The dark thing had truly come to life within me. He fell off and hit his head on smaller rocks. I had to admit it.

It was my fault, my fault. Mama was right to bury me and I had to stop fighting it. I vowed to put away my childhood fantasies.

I would dream no more of handsome young men, of being a beautiful young woman, and having children of my own. I had to pay for my sin and remain forever incarcerated in my brother's identity.

This was my prison. This was my fate. I would not cry and moan about it either. All that was feminine, gentle, and tender within me would be pushed aside and forgotten. I didn't deserve it. Anything that tried to revive it in me was surely evil, the evil Mama battled daily.

I pledged to myself that I would join her struggle and fight beside her. I would put away the memory of that small black wooden box. I would forget that strange night and I would think no more about the golden curls, the pink ribbon. and Mama's sobs in the cemetery that hid so many of our family secrets. All graveyards, it occurred to me, were like gardens. They contained beautiful souls, flowers of the purest spirits, but they also contained the remains of the most sinister hearts, weeds that could choke the flowers.

The effort it had taken Mama to drive the malevolent spirit from our home seemed to reinforce her determination to follow the new plan she had been given, a plan I did not yet fully understand and was now more afraid of questioning. Was she right? Did my questions rise out of a pool of inky evil still within my troubled soul?

Mama continued to go out on dates with Dave Fletcher, and each time she did, she came home late and slept late. I was still afraid of what this could lead to. but I made no comments and I put on no disapproving faces. For one thing, she did seem to be happy. She was looking younger and younger and her revival along with the way the house was being revived brought new sunshine into our lives.

It encouraged and inspired me to look past the dark and the gray. Like Mama, I wanted to put a new shine on the surface of our world. I whitewashed our fences, repainted shutters and doorjambs, cleared the weeds away from the sides of our driveway, pruned and trimmed our bushes and trees. The worn, tired, and droll look our house and property had was dramatically changed. Mama decided that even the shed had to be repainted and a new roof put on it as well. The only disadvantage to all this that she saw was that it would attract more gawking eyes. Cars passing by did slow down and some even stopped so the curious could get a longer, better look. Baby Celeste had to be kept even more secluded. Twilight was now too early for any sort of outing.

The work I did was hard, especially in the hot summer sun. but I didn't complain. My hands developed calluses on their calluses. Many nights my muscles ached and I was so exhausted, I couldn't wait to finish dinner and get to bed, sometimes as early as Baby Celeste went to bed. However, I was up early and on to my chores often before Mama was up and at her own, especially after one of her dates with Mr.

Fletcher.

And then one afternoon she told me she was going on a special date with him that very evening and she needed me to take complete charge of things for nearly twenty-four hours. I didn't understand what that meant until she added, "I won't be home tonight."

"Why not?" I asked, "Dave's taking me to a special bed-and-breakfast place eighty miles or so away from here. It's near Albany." she said, "and it wouldn't make any sense to go there to eat and enjoy the surroundings if we had to hurry back.

"You'll have to take care of Baby Celeste. Be sure she eats well and goes to sleep early. I'll call you in the morning and let you know about what time I'll return."

"But I was going to get up early to finish the shed roofing tomorrow, Mama. It's easier to work in the morning now."

"It will wait," she said firmly. Then she smiled at me. "I"m very proud of you, proud of the way you've gone about your work on the farm. Noble.

Your father would not have done much better. He's proud of you as well. Has he told you so? Have you heard his voice lately?"

I shook my head, "You will," she promised. It will all come back to you. Were in a transition period. Everything waits on everything, but we'll be fine. We'll all be fine."

Then she hugged me and held me longer than she usually did. "Everything I've been told would be will be," she whispered. "You'll set."

More than ever now. I wanted to know exactly what that meant, what she had been told would be. but I still didn't dare ask. Sometimes, it was better not to ask. I thought. Sometimes. I didn't want to hear the answers, but it was on the tip of my tongue to warn her about Elliot, to tell her what I had seen, to warn her about his anger, about the threat a vindictive spirit like that could bring to us, especially after I had seen her do what she had done with the black box.

But I couldn't bring myself to do it, for after all, it had been I who had brought Elliot into our world. I was responsible for everything that had happened as a result and that could happen in the future.

"What about Mr. Fletcher's daughter. Betsy?" I asked instead. Of course. I wondered if she knew anything about Mama and her father.

"What about her?"

"Is she still gone?"

"Yes, and it breaks poor Dave's heart to worry about her so each and every day. Ms.- grandmother used to say that sometimes children are rained down upon us as a punishment for past sins. I'm afraid its so in Dave's case. His children were never any source of pleasure and pride for him.

"Unlike mine,' she added, running her fingers through my hair. "My beautiful children."

As if she sensed she was being referred to.

Baby Celeste cried out for us. She had woken from her daily nap.

"I'll see to her and then I have to get myself ready,"

Mama said. "Go finish what you're working on today, have your and Baby Celeste's dinner prepared.

All you will have to do is warm up things. Baby Celeste will be excited about helping you without me supervising. She will have more to do, more responsibility. It will be an adventure for her, You know how excited she gets over new things."

Mr. Fletcher had yet to set eves on Baby Celeste and, like everyone else in the community, had yet to learn of her existence. When and how would Mama deal with that? I wondered.

When I returned to the house. I found Mama all dressed and ready to go. She had her hair brushed and styled beautifully. Two days earlier she had gone to a beauty salon for the first time in ten years and had it cut. When she came home that day, I almost didn't recognize her. However, it wasn't only the use of makeup now, the change in her hairstyle, and the updated wardrobe that surprised me. A new brightness was in her face, a new life in her eyes, that truly made her look younger and more vibrant. Did this come from being in love? Could she be in love?

I was actually a bit jealous. Despite all the pledges and vows I had made to myself. I couldn't help but imagine what I would look like with longer hair, with makeup on my face, and with jewelry and new dresses and shoes. This overwhelming fantasy revived feelings and emotions I had experienced years ago in the forest in my special place where I had gone to be alone, to explore my inner self and feel the freedom of being who I really was, even if only for a short while. These thoughts, my curiosity, was titillating, tantalizing, drawing me to the edge of some precipice, tempting me with simply leaping off and sailing into the wind of my driving desires.

I said nothing about it to Mama, of course. She remarked about the flushness in my face and thought it was a result of my hard work in the hot sun. She had packed a small bag and waited by the front window for signs of Dave Fletcher's approaching automobile.

When he turned down our driveway, she kissed and hugged both me and Baby Celeste and made us promise we would behave and follow all her rules, the most important one still being to keep Baby Celeste from being seen and discovered.

"I'm sorry you have to stay inside all morning tomorrow. Noble." Mama said. but I'll try to get back as early as I can. Remember to clean up after dinner"

she called back from the door, going out as soon as Dave. Fletcher drove up to the house.

I peered out through a curtain and saw him get out to take her little overnight bag and give her a kiss, this time smack on the lips and a little long, too, like a kiss in a movie full of passion and surrender, a kiss that lingered in sighs of contentment, a kiss I would never know. I heard her laughter and watched her hurry around to get into his car. He had opened the door for her, bowing like a gallant gentleman out of a romantic novel. After she got in, he came around and looked at our house. I pulled back from the window and waited until he was into his car, too. Then I watched them drive away.

Baby Celeste stood by watching me quietly. I shook my head when I turned to her.

"Mama's making a mistake." I said. "I don't understand what she is doing. How can this be good, be part of some wonderful plan for us?"