Before There Were Angels

by Sarah Mathews

  “Do you have any evidence that she received the court summons or the final divorce declaration?”

  “I haven’t. My lawyer should know.”

  “Did your lawyer act according to the Hague Convention in serving these papers?”

  I laughed. “I somehow doubt it.”

  Carol furrowed her brow. “I somehow doubt it too. You had better contact your lawyer and find out if he has any proofs of serving. I don’t know what the INS will accept - I am not an immigration lawyer - but your immigration lawyer can perhaps help you with that. In the meantime, I suggest you find your wife, or ex-wife.”

  Unless, of course, she were to find us first.

  Chapter 16

  The next morning Belle woke up fighting.

  “I’m going to kill that bitch,” she declared.

  “Her too?”

  “That bitch tried to kill me. She tried to take you away from me. Can’t she mind her own business for once? This is my business now and she is going to wish that she had left us both alone. We are going to find her and she is never going to mess with our heads, or our lives, again.”

  I smiled. “That’s my street-fighting girl,” I said.

  “I’m a biter,” she preened, and she meant it.

  * * *

  That night Stevie announced that someone was following him to and from school, and had been doing so for three days. It was a woman he said, an older woman, older than Belle. He would stop and turn around, and there she would be. Blonde. Mournful looking.

  That was all we needed, a physical threat to Stevie, maybe the same person who had murdered Zack. A blonde woman, thirty plus - who could that be?

  Rafaella was blonde and approaching her thirties, but Stevie’s assessment of her age might be approximate. Belle was twenty-nine. How old was Martha Degamo?

  There was only one way to find out. When Stevie left the house the next morning, Belle decided to follow him a hundred yards behind, and I would follow Belle a hundred yards behind that. Belle had seen photos of Rafaella but had never seen her in person, so I was there to help identify her, if it was her, and to intervene should there be an altercation or should they be attacked. One hundred yards is a long way to make up in a crisis but if we left in a tight crocodile she would never show her face.

  Sure enough, before Belle even left the house, a blonde woman, middle-aged, appeared from somewhere down the road and began to trail Stevie. It certainly wasn’t Rafaella. Could it be Martha DeGamo?

  However sorrowful her face, and according to Belle it was indeed grim as she passed by our front door, from the back she was a solid woman with a determined step. She made no attempt at subterfuge and didn’t try to dodge as Stevie shot a glance back at her. Nor did she seem to care that we were following her. She noticed Belle almost immediately. Whether she saw me behind Belle I cannot say.

  When Stevie reached the school, he looked around one more time and entered the building. The blonde woman carried on walking and a second later seemed to disappear. Belle was fifty yards behind her but admitted being distracted watching Stevie safely inside, so she failed to notice what happened to the woman until her eyes left Stevie’s retreating form and she couldn’t see her anymore.

  I had more distance on the situation but I too was paying more attention to Stevie than to the woman.

  “What happened to her?” Belle asked me.

  “I haven’t got a clue. She just vanished into thin air.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “That’s weird. Will anything ever be normal again do you think?”

  “It makes you wonder.”

  “I think she saw me following her.”

  “I’m sure she did.”

  “Did she see you?”

  “I don’t know. I doubt it.”

  “Will you pick up Stevie this afternoon?”

  “Of course I will.”

  “Who the hell was she?”

  * * *

  When we got home, there was an e-mail waiting for me from Thip Ark, our immigration lawyer. “I’ve just realized,” she said, “that the INS broke the rules by not giving you the right to answer to your ex-wife’s allegations. That was a breach of procedure, so that is an extra point for the appeal.”

  I don’t know what it was about this statement that suddenly made me furious, not against Thip for sure as she was being appropriately diligent, nor against the INS, the uncaring scions of bureaucracy, but finally against Rafaella.

  Why hadn’t that woman been Rafaella today? I could have grabbed her and accosted her in public. I could have assaulted her the way she had already falsely suggested I had done. I could have finally behaved the way she had long depicted me as behaving. I could have been out of control, and isn’t that what she would have deserved, to have finally drawn down from me what she had assiduously forged?

  During our five years of marriage I freely admit that I had never known her at all. I had taken all her shit, the storms that she had conjured up from nowhere that had nothing to do with me except that they were always blamed on me. I had been me, harmless, innocent in its truest sense (not wishing to cause anyone any harm), and she had hurled a torrent of pitiless bile at me. But for what? For the fact that I was standing there? For having loved her and for having wanted the best for her? What had I ever done to her?

  Now, more importantly, what had Belle ever done to her, or Zack or Stevie? Weren’t we merely trying to build a happy life together, a life that she apparently envied, but by what right did she envy our happiness, by what right did she demand to play any part in our lives at all? Isn’t it only monsters who continue to chase hapless prey because they have attracted their attention and they can be preyed upon?

  Rafaella was preying upon us, stupidly, viciously, cunningly, without any sense of morality or justice, solely for the pleasure and tittilation of the chase. Wasn’t it time we all turned on her and frightened the bejesus out of her so that she would never dare to mess with our lives again? Wasn’t it time, as Belle had put it, that we threatened to kill the bitch?

  But killing isn’t what good people do, what those who want to live fulfilled lives for those and others do. Yet Belle probably really was prepared to kill her. It wasn’t just a figure of speech. So why not I? Why was I leaving all the outraged sense of needing to protect our family to Belle?

  Here we were, having lost Zack a few weeks earlier, deep in mourning and loss, and here was Rafaella, the self-declared spiritualist, trying to rip apart all that remained to us, all that we were struggling to salvage.

  I wished that the woman in the street had been Rafaella, I wished that I could for once have cornered her and screamed my anguish and contempt at her for the way she habitually and remorselessly behaved towards us, towards me. She wouldn’t have cared, she was swimming in the honey of her own infallibility, her and her pandering archangels. She would be without apology for anything she had ever done, she always was, but I would have liked to have seen a prolonged moment of shock in her face, of discomfort in being trapped by me, of fear as to whether I was finally capable of being the person she had always made me out to be.

  ‘Look, you petty, crazy, delusional, specious parasite, I am now the bastard you have always wanted me to be. Now what should I do to you? Should I rip you limb from limb as you have tried to rip my family limb from limb? Should I grab you and throw you in front of a street car? Should I repay you for everything you have put us all through? Should I chase you down the road and lay into you when I catch you until you beg me to leave you alone?

  ‘But you wouldn’t beg me to do anything, would you? You wouldn’t do anything that human. There is nothing human inside you. You are an empty vessel of acid that needs to be securely disposed of so that it can poison no more lives.

  ‘Now I hate you. Now I want you here. And you probably are here somewhere, plotting your revenge for slights and hurts that exist only in your mind, that are mere figments, illusions, insanity. You want to toy with us and to
destroy us, and there is very little a law-abiding person can do about that. The police will not listen. The courts will not listen. Passersby will be embarrassed, and possibly outraged, to bear witness to any scene between us. They will probably take your side because you will play the mistreated victim and people always believe that a woman is a victim of a man, however ludicrous it might be that you are a victim of anyone in reality.

  ‘Rafaella, I want you here. I want to know if it was you who murdered Zack. I want to know what possible place you think you have a right to play in our lives. I want you crushed. I want you buried. I want you dead because that is the only safe place you can be, encased in lead-lined concrete and lowered to the bottom of the ocean like radioactive waste.

  ‘How dare you do this to us, and what would it take to stop you daring, to stop you fucking with us?’

  But I was still being robbed of that moment. Instead I was left wondering who this unrecognized woman was who was following Stevie every day to school and back again. What harm did she intend to do to him, and why?

  Why, why any of it? Why? And why were we all left, those of us who were left after Zack’s death, tilting at miasmas, at ghosts, at those who could brutalize us without ever showing themselves and almost certainly without any motive.

  ‘Senseless cruelty, that is you, Rafaella, someone who should by the rights of any rational society be abolished, be tamed, or at least be forced to restrain yourself and build your own fruitful life far away from us and from others you will always wish to harm.

  ‘I don’t hate you, Rafaella - you have had the monopoly on that emotion in my life - but I too am willing to kill you to make this home a safe home.

  ‘I can’t leave this task to Belle. I have to man-up and do what is necessary all by myself, jackets off in the playground, and if it appears unfair for a man to beat a woman to pulp, then you know you started it, even if nobody else believes that, and that will have to be enough for me, to know that I have done the right thing, the only thing that can set things right.

  ‘The trouble with evil is that it comes in a heavy disguise, but you haven’t worn that disguise in front of me. You haven’t seen the need to. Well, we will see, Rafaella, we will see, and one day everyone will see.’

  OK, so you think I have gone off the deep end too, hating an ex-wife ‘just because’, but you too will see, or maybe not. Rafaella always did get away with everything.

  * * *

  I was roaring by this point. Everything about Rafaella and my marriage was coming back to me, memories I had suppressed since meeting Belle because why rehearse the bad times when you are living the good ones?

  We weren’t living the good ones anymore because of Zack’s death and everything Rafaella was doing to mess with us - the death threats, the computer hacking, the viruses, the INS intervention, the bad mouthing to my clients (she had got hold of a list and written to every single one of my clients telling them what a cheating sonofabitch I was and how I was stealing money from a company she owned fifty per cent of, and driving it into bankruptcy, so watch out!) - and maybe all of that was down to Rafaella. Something told me that Rafaella had played a part in Zack’s murder; I didn’t know how, I even less knew why Rafaella would go to the extreme of torturing and killing a twelve year old boy, but I knew in my bones that she was capable of it, that she was capable of almost anything to get her own way, to have the last, the definitive, word.

  So I remembered …

  There was the time she hurled my cell phone out of the window because I was talking to a friend, Mike, for twenty minutes and therefore not available to help her move a chest of drawers she had decided on the instant should be the other side of our bedroom. I hardly ever spoke to my friends while I lived with Rafaella because she resented, sometimes violently, any relationship I conducted with anyone other than her.

  Then there was the time she so infuriated me with her criticisms that I got out of the car forty miles from home and had to hitchhike back in the pouring rain because there was no public transport, only to be met by ‘stupid moron’ triumphalism on my return and another shit storm.

  Once she threw an Oil of Olay bottle at me in the bath, which smashed, dropping glass all around me in the water. That was because she thought I was having an affair with a client who was actually a lesbian and about three hundred pounds.

  Rafaella continually went on about my time management skills, or lack of them, saying that she could do everything I did in terms of work in about a quarter of the time I took. How she could have known that when she had never once helped me in my work, nor even had a job while we were together, was beside the point. She had surmised I was wasting lots of time talking to people - which I think is called ‘management’ - and that I was only doing it to avoid spending time with her.

  And the endless arguments over everything, between us and with virtually everybody else we met. We all misunderstood her, we were all being mean to her, we were all denying her truth, enough to justify her scorched earth outbursts and to drive a less sane person to schizophrenia, a destination I became increasingly convinced that she had already reached.

  Oh, and all the feigned illnesses: liver cancer, pancreatic cancer, lung cancer, Hodgkin’s, MS, Parkinson’s. Over a five year period they all came, they lingered and, miraculously, they went away again …

  * * *

  Now was a good time to get into action to find Rafaella. I was ready for her. She usually took the initiative, turning everything over to her agenda, but not this time. This time I was all too ready to plunge into her.

  Except … wouldn’t it be more discrete to use my own call center? I had a software support business and therefore a large call center? They could find her and I wouldn’t have to deal with her at all.

  Call me a coward, if you will, but when you are dealing with Rafaella, cowardice is a synonym for self-protection.

  * * *

  Belle and I spent the day speculating as to the identity of this newcomer in our lives - Stevie’s tail. Was she Martha DeGamo, was she a plain clothes detective, was she someone who had lost a son of her own and adopted him as a substitute? All our speculations were as far-fetched, except maybe the detective, as they were futile. We simply had no idea of who she was, and we had no way of knowing. What we did know was that Stevie might be at risk, and that really scared both of us.

  And there were still those annual accounts for me to do.

  * * *

  I went back to the school to escort Stevie home, albeit from a distance. At schools out, Stevie came down the steps and beckoned me over.

  “Luke, Rich asked me to come over to his house. Is that OK?”

  “How are you going to get home?”

  “The same as always, on the bus.”

  I pondered the idea. It wasn’t really my decision to make. I wasn’t his father. “I’ll give your mom a call and check, okay?”

  “OK.”

  Belle didn’t answer her cell phone after three attempts. This was going to have to be my call.

  “OK, Stevie, you go to Rich’s and have a good time. Call us if you want us to come and get you.”

  “I’ll be fine. Don’t worry about me. Hey, did you see that woman today?”

  “Yes, we did. We both did.”

  “And …?”

  “We don’t know. She disappeared. We have spent the day trying to work out who she is.”

  “Stop her and talk to her.”

  “We might have done but, as I say, she disappeared after you went into the school.”

  Stevie smiled. “Maybe she’s my guardian angel. That would be kind of cool.”

  “She’s a little bit short on wings.”

  “Maybe they don’t have wings anymore. They could have evolved like Great Whites did.”

  “I think we’ll check her out all the same. The odds on her being a guardian angel seem a bit long to rely on.”

  “OK, Luke. See you later.”

  * * *

  When I got bac
k home, Belle was in the kitchen preparing food. “Where’s Stevie?” she asked anxiously.

  “He’s gone off with his friend - Rich.”

  “Rich who?”

  “I didn’t ask. Sorry. I tried to call you but you didn’t answer.”

  “I was probably in the bathtub.”

  “Sorry, I made a snap decision which should have been yours, but Stevie seemed all excited about going back with Rich and he has his cell phone. I know we are very frightened for him right now but we won’t be doing him any favors treating him like he is in the witness protection program.”

  Belle came over to me, hugged and kissed me. “You made the right decision, Luke. You always make the right decisions. I know Stevie isn’t yours but you have to treat him as if he is. I’ll always back you on any decision you make. I’ll know you made the right one.”

  She didn’t say that it was the decision she would have made, though.

  By midnight, we had gone to bed and I was kicking myself, and expecting Belle to kick me. Stevie still wasn’t home, he hadn’t called and he wasn’t answering his cell phone.

  “I wish we had this Rich’s home number,” Belle said.

  “I’m sorry. I should have thought of that.”

  Belle stroked my hair. “It’s not a problem. He’ll be home soon or he’ll call.”

  Sure enough five minutes later the front door rattled and Stevie came racing up the stairs.

  “Whoa,” he called from outside our bedroom door. “Who is she?”

  “Who is who?” we called back.

  “The lady with the red hair.”

  “What lady with red hair?” I asked.

  “The one who has just disappeared into my room.” Stevie entered our room. “Is she a friend of yours?”

  “We don’t know who you mean,” Belle replied indulgently. “There is no-one else in the house, sweetie.”