Before There Were Angels

by Sarah Mathews

  “She was definitely a someone. A hottie. A serious milf.”

  “Oh nice,” said Belle rolling her eyes.

  “Oh, come on, Mom. You’re a milf yourself, at least that’s what they all say at school. I’m now living in a house with two milfs. That’ll make me sound cool.”

  “Except that there is no-one else here, unless …”

  “Unless you saw Jess DeGamo, Stevie. I’m not sure having a milf ghost is quite the same thing.”

  Stevie turned around and stared down the landing. “Are you saying she was a ghost? She looked all there to me. Is she the same one as you saw, do you think, Luke?”

  “Either that or she is an intruder.”

  “And she’s in my room?”

  “Check under the bed. That’s where I found her last time. Do you want me to do it?”

  “Please.” His face darkened. “If she is a ghost, why can’t she have been Zack. I wouldn’t be afraid of Zack.” He flung himself across the room and dived into Belle’s arms. “I miss Zack so much. Why can’t he be a ghost? We would have the best time together, scaring everyone. Zack would love it.”

  I laughed. “I wouldn’t put it past him.” My comment was met with stony silence from both Belle and Stevie. “I would love to have Zack back as a ghost too,” I added, but it wasn’t a successful recovery.

  Stevie pulled away from Belle. He had tears pouring down his cheeks. “I’m gonna sleep in the attic from now on,” he said. “That way, if Zack comes looking for me, he’ll know where to find me.”

  Chapter 17

  I couldn’t resist checking Stevie’s room, which was, of course, still full of Zack’s stuff. Stevie wanted Zack all around him even if he couldn’t be there in person. And everything they had fitted both of them, so why throw anything out, right?

  I had seen the woman with the red hair before - Jess DeGamo, I was presuming - I had even been nose-to-nose with her, so I was much less hesitant to meet her than I had been the first time.

  What I didn’t expect - who would? - was that she would come rushing at me as I approached the door to Stevie’s room. She looked terrified, reckless in her haste. Her blue eyes were wide open, her bracelets were dangling, and she had that archetypal stutter-slide to her feet that all slim women have when they are running in elevated heels.

  She didn’t seem to notice me standing there, frozen mid-stride, but I swear I smelt her perfume as she wafted past me, something chic - Prada, Gucci, Gaultier?

  She ran down the stairs to the ground floor and she was gone, eliciting a kind of startled snort from George as she crossed his path.

  I was expecting to see Martha DeGamo chasing her but Martha was not dead so far as I knew, so she would be unlikely to be a ghost. Still, perhaps scenes from the past don’t require anybody to be dead. Maybe they are ethereal images operating on the Tivo principle.

  Anyway, Martha did not appear and I was by now much more frightened of Martha than I was of Jess who seemed to be a cute, pretty, perfectly normal victim on the wrong end of a sadistic vendetta who accidentally and inadvertently intersected our lives with no harm ensuing to us.

  If I entered Stevie’s room, would I find Martha?

  That thought gave me pause. I didn’t want to meet Martha as a person, nor did I want to meet her as some kind of shade, gun in hand, eyes glaring, ready to beat down anyone in her path. However, I would at least discover whether she was the woman following Stevie to and from school.

  I eased the door open slowly, my back flat to the landing wall as if bullets were about to fly past me. There was only silence. I inched into the doorway and felt for the light switch.

  I was half-expecting a hand to grab me but, instead, I just couldn’t find the light switch. Surely it was to the left of the door?

  I caught it with the back of my hand and the light snapped on.

  The room seemed normal, much as I assumed Stevie had left it, much as any twelve year old would have left it, even a pair of twelve year olds.

  I suddenly felt a pang for Zack and a profound sense that he was gone forever. Why would a child hang himself? Who would hang a child? It still seemed impossible, and the hole of his absence felt impossibly deep and irrecoverable.

  I am not a particularly emotional man but, for a millisecond, his loss stabbed me hard.

  “Hello, Luke.”

  There she was, in her standard pose, poised like a boxer limbering out from the corner of a ring, ready to evade the first punch.

  I had never been scared of Rafaella, not physically scared of her, only cowed, ground down, exhausted and sometimes - often - desperate.

  “Hello, Rafaella.”

  She mimed a ta-dum. “Surprise!”

  “You could say that.”

  “I’ve come to get you, Luke. You don’t belong here, not with that woman. You belong with me.”

  “That was the past, Rafaella.” For some strange reason it seemed sad to say it.

  “It could be our future too, Luke,” she urged me earnestly.

  “Why would it be our future, Rafaella? We were miserable together. I am really happy here. Belle is wonderful and gentle and loving and kind and everything I could possibly want. Why would you even want us, you and me, to be together again?”

  Her eyes glowed. Usually they protruded but this time they had heat rather than ice. “We belong together, Luke. We are each other’s destiny. We are meant to spend this lifetime together, this last lifetime together. You chickened out. You are a coward, Luke. You should have stayed the course.”

  Not again. Not this stupid conversation again. Not any conversation with Rafaella again, with its inevitable eternal cyclicality.

  I knew I mustn’t engage her. I knew that she was determined to engage me, to trap me, to suck me into her world. Whenever Rafaella and I confronted each other, she would always have the upper hand, the irresistible agenda that I must bend to. I was crazy to have thought that it would ever be otherwise, that I could tower over her and bend her to my will - intimidate her.

  “What on earth are you doing in my house,” I demanded, batting back her agenda.

  She smiled sweetly, enticingly. “Not your house, Luke. Belle’s house. You are a lodger here. Once she discovers what you are really like, how hopeless you are at everything, she will chew you up and spit you out. You have to learn to be a man. When I have taught you to be a man, then perhaps you will be ready for someone like Belle. I will even make it possible for you. I will make all the arrangements. But for now, we have unfinished business, Luke. I need you to come with me, to be with me, where you are safe. It is not safe in this house. Think of what happened to Zack -“

  “How do you know what happened to Zack?”

  “How would I not know, Luke? I have been watching you. I know how unhappy you are here, what danger you are putting Stevie and Belle in. They are out of their depths. They don’t realize the forces they are dealing with. Fate overcame Zack and he was the strongest of you all. You need protection, my protection. I will look after all of you, Belle and Stevie too. You will all be safe, I promise you. But you must come back to me now. You must get on a plane and return to England, to me.”

  It would be one way of finding out where she lived.

  I squared up, trying to block the doorway so that Rafaella could not sweep past me and attack Belle.

  “Rafaella, I’m not going to do that and you know it. I’m sorry. You tried hard to make things right. I tried hard. It was just impossible. We make a terrible, terrible couple. I’m not leaving here. I’m not leaving Belle, I’m not leaving Stevie. We work as a family, you and I don’t. I wish we had but we didn’t. It makes no sense for me to come back.”

  “Please.”

  “No, Rafaella, I’m afraid not. We are over. We have done everything we could for each other. God knows, we have done everything we could to each other. I hope one day we can be friends but there is no point in our attempting another reconciliation, not for any of us.”

  Rafaella’
s eyes flashed. “We will never be friends.”

  I laughed. “No, I don’t think we ever will be.”

  “And you think you can protect Belle by blocking the doorway?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know how I can protect Belle but I will do whatever I can. Please, Rafaella, leave us alone. Go live your life. Be happy. All that matters is to be happy.”

  Rafaella drew herself up archly straight. “We are here, Luke, to learn lessons. You have not learned your lessons yet. I am here to teach you. I will teach you. And if you resist me, people can only get hurt. That man-snatcher Belle will get hurt. Stevie will get hurt. You will get hurt. I shan’t get hurt. I am only carrying out my mission. You are a fool, Luke. You think you are clever but you are not. You don’t know what you are up against. You are not up against me. I ‘m not your enemy. You are your own enemy because you are defying the cosmos. I give you one last chance - come back to England and we will work through your destiny. If you don’t do that, you are doomed. You are all doomed. You will destroy Belle and Steve as you destroyed Zack. Is that what you want?”

  “No,” I said, holding her eyes, “I want peace. We all want peace.”

  “You cannot have peace unless you earn it. I will teach you, Luke, I owe you that, but you must stop being proud, you must stop being selfish, you must learn, in all humility, what the cosmos requires of you. This is not about you. You think it is about you, but it isn’t. We all have to submit to greater wills than ours. I have been sent to save you. That is why we met in the first place - because you were lost. But you refused to listen, you refused to learn. Now you will be made to learn, either through me or via others. It is your choice. Save yourself and Belle and Stevie, or destroy all of you. You may think you are safe here, Luke, but you are not. You may think that you are hidden here, but you are not. Fate will catch up with you wherever you hide. Goodbye, Luke. And you can stop blocking the door now. I have no interest in Belle. The universe has no interest in Belle. She is just collateral damage.”

  Rafaella was gone and, as always, had insisted on having the last word.

  * * *

  And as always after being with Rafaella, I felt hopeless, hopeless as a man and hopeless of reaching any resolution. She lived in a different world from me, metaphorically and maybe literally. Her every word said, ‘I want’, but the spin was that her wants were ordained by a metaphysical force, not her wants at all but the commandments of the cosmos, of her twenty-four archangels, or Kumar, or the Wise Ones. That is one hell of a committee to fight against.

  And who was I to say she was wrong, that she was deluded, that she was insane? I could detect nothing of that other world to say whether it existed or not, so she insisted that it did and that she had a privileged access to it. She was one of the Chosen.

  Whatever there was or wasn’t, her appearance to me just now suggested that there was something, a very large something, beyond my grasp and completely outside my understanding. The person in front of me in Stevie’s room wasn’t Rafaella exactly, not in the flesh, not as a human being as I might talk to in any other context.

  I didn’t know what she was or how she had done it, but I could not deny that she had done it. She had been both there and not there, and her message might have been either genuine or self-serving.

  How would I ever know with Rafaella what was real, what was smoke and what were mirrors? How could I ever know what I was dealing with?

  Any sane person would say that she was talking crap, that she was aggrandizing herself, that she was manipulating me, but her appearing in the room as some form of projection surely lent her claims some credibility.

  Over my time married to Rafaella I had gone from despair and a compelling desire to either flee or die when she turned on me, to a quiet anger, to rebellion and eventually to disinterest. I was not listening any more to anything she was saying. I didn’t know what was true, I doubted that even she knew whether what she said was true, but there was something that she was doing that had an impact on reality, and that impact usually was more favorable to her than to me.

  And now what was I to do about it? She had discovered where we were living, she was pounding on the door making threats to kill us, she was insinuating herself into the most private rooms in our house, she was wishing to tear Belle and me apart.

  Was I going mad, was I imagining all this, or was I up against a force against which I - we - had no defenses whatsoever, a force that could violate us at any moment in whichever way it wished?

  Was there no justice in this cosmos we lived and loved in, or was I the epitome of the unjust, the foolish, the wrong-headed, the wrecker?

  Even more than the question of who or what Rafaella had been when she appeared in Stevie’s room was a more daunting question - who or what was I?

  * * *

  “What happened there?” Belle asked me. “I heard you talking to someone.”

  “I was probably just muttering.”

  “I heard you say ‘Rafaella’. I heard you talking like you were having a conversation.”

  “I must be losing it,” I said. “Too much talk of Rafaella and how she is interfering with our lives.”

  “But she is interfering with our lives, Luke. She’s seriously fucking with us and I’m positive she wants to kill us, or at least to kill me.”

  “How can she do that?”

  “I don’t know but I’m sure she wants me dead, and maybe you too.”

  “She doesn’t necessarily even know where we live.”

  “Those death threats came from her and they were put through our mail slot.”

  “They may have come from her.”

  “I know they came from her, and so do you. So what happened in Stevie’s room?”

  “I was trying to work out something.”

  “What?”

  “How I could get Rafaella off our backs.”

  “And …?”

  “And I don’t know. I really don’t know how to deal with her. I only know that we must stand firm and deal with whatever is coming our way.”

  Belle smiled resignedly. “That hasn’t worked out too well in the past, Luke.”

  “What do you think we should do?”

  “Maybe we should run away. Go where she can’t ever find us.”

  After Rafaella and my most recent meeting, that seemed unlikely. “And take Stevie out of school?”

  Belle adjusted her position in our bed. “I don’t know, Luke. I only know that I don’t ever want her to find us.”

  “I don’t know how we avoid it.”

  “I don’t either. Sometimes I think that we don’t have a chance, no matter how much we love each other or how hard we try to just live our lives. How can you beat a monster like her who never gives up and never lets go?”

  I could have added, ‘… and who has supernatural powers’.

  “I don’t know, Belle, but we will. One day she will slip up and we will have her. We have two against one, three against one. We can overpower her. If she threatens us, we can get her arrested. We would be safe if she was in prison.”

  Belle turned the light off. “We’re only safe when she can’t see us and I don’t know how to make us invisible.”

  “But together we are invincible,” I declared hollowly.

  “If only, Luke, if only we were. I would really like to believe that, but after Zack I sometimes feel like we have the whole world against us and that Rafaella may only be the tip of the iceberg. I still believe that we are meant to be together but I wonder for how long. I felt like that with Robert and I feel it even more strongly with us. We’re being hunted, and I don’t know why.”

  Chapter 18

  I managed to catch up on some work over the next few days, which was as well. While I had some excellent managers in England for my software support business, it doesn’t look good if the boss is only putting in a few hours a week while everyone else slaves away, and with $15,000 in legal fees facing us for the immigration case and the California divor
ce, we sorely needed the money.

  Belle began to help me with the business too and she really knew what she was doing, flourishing her - in business-speak - ‘interpersonal’ skills to dramatic effect. Everyone in Computers Don’t Bite Ltd was instantly charmed by her, which let me off the hook and bought me time to recover my previous earnest workaholic image. She even seemed to love doing it, making sure that everyone felt well attended to and cared for. It is a weakness I have: while I do attend to and care for people, I don’t always show it, and Belle was complementing me expertly by showing it.

  However, having ridden valiantly to our rescue, once the weekend came, she was determined to get out of the house and away from our doom-laden environment.

  “I’m taking you all on a long walk,” she said. “Stevie too.”

  “Do I have to?” Stevie challenged her immediately. After all, there is nothing a twelve year old likes to do more than publicly go for a walk with his parents.

  “Yes, Stevie, you do have to. We need to spend some time together and enjoy ourselves as a family, not just individually. Things are getting out of control here. We’re all becoming anxious and afraid. We need to stop living like this and we are going to start now by going for a long walk while I tell you about the first time I came to San Francisco, when I was sixteen and how I met your dad, and how I got pregnant with you and Zack.” She turned to me. “Do you mind, Luke?”

  “Not at all. I would like to hear about all that myself.”

  “It was a difficult time,” she said, “and a wonderful time, but I’ll tell you all about that on our walk down California Street.”

  California Street. Immediately the image came to my mind of a roller-coaster. All those streets running across the city are a bit that way but somehow California Street is the quintessential one, flowing up and down, up and down, steeply up and down across the hills. It is like a long bridge whiplashing.

  “California Street is my favorite street in the city,” Belle said. “I love Sutter Street too, though, because it is where I saw Sean Penn and Alec Baldwin.”