She spun around so fast that she almost cracked the arm of the rocking chair.
"How do you know it was a lock of baby's hair? she demanded. Then she relaxed, nodded, and smiled, "He told you, didn't he? Your father whispered it into your ear. Yes, I'm sure."
She threw her head back and rocked harder.
"No, Mama."
She brought her head down again and glared at me. "If you lie to me,Ill know. I'll always know when you tell lies. Noble."
"I'm not lying, Mama. I haven't heard Daddy for quite a while now."
"Um," she murmured. She rocked and thought. Then she let out a long, deep breath. "I should have known she would find it someday. I should have known." She stopped the rocking abruptly and spun her head around at me again. "Do you see how special she is?" she asked, flashing her eyes at me. "Do you?"
"You mean Baby Celeste?"
"Of course that's who I mean. Why do you stand there and pretend to be so stupid all the time?"
"I'm not pretending to be stupid, Mama."
"No, you're really stupid, is that it? Oh, the burden, the burden," she wailed, rocking on.
"Sometimes, you have to help me understand things, Mama," I said as calmly as I could manage. "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 its 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."