Before There Were Angels Read Free Page B

now they were mine - not entirely mine as we were renting not buying it - but mine utendi , if not fruendi or abutendi . Sorry, slipped into Roman land law there for a second.
    Suddenly, the steps came into detail as if under a microscope, and all that blue and golden detailing towered over me to the point of making me dizzy. And those front windows, beyond which there were rooms for living and eating, and cooking and storing things and, the next level of reflective windows offering bedrooms and a bathroom.
    No faces showed in the leaden-shadowed windows.
    There is so much you cannot see from outside a house and so much you hope for, the rooms filled with light and laughter, the bedrooms filled with sleep and lust, the bathroom scented with almond and lave nder. Well, maybe not lavender - a bit maiden aunt. Macadamia, coconut, mango. Aloe vera.
    If I was having a moment of deep thought , of course the twins weren’t. Closely followed by George the dog, Zack went straight up to the front door and bashed it with a hammer. Why did he have a hammer on our first trip to this place?
    “Zack, don’t smash the place up! We’re here. We have the keys. You are making holes in the door.”
    He turned and laughed. “Come on, then. Open up.”
    I shrugged at Belle , who laughed back. Stephen laughed too. Next time he would play the hammer joke. Next time it wouldn’t be funny, but Stevie would insist it should be. It would be his turn. The second twin always copies the first, even if he is the second twin by only a few minutes.
    Zack smashed the front door again with the hammer. “Come on. Come on,” he challenged us.
    “Zack! That hammer is for your brains, not for the door,” I explained.
    Zack turned the ha mmer on himself and smacked himself in the forehead much harder than I would ever have considered.
    “It doesn’t hurt,” he declared, slightly dazed.
    Stevie laughed. He wasn’t going to copy all the antics of his brother.
    But this house was different. T his house wasn’t an empty shell of wood, sheetrock and glass. This house was alive, or at least it had the potential to be alive. It had the possibility, or probability, of four ghosts and, as I was to learn later, of one ex-dog.
    This house was already full. We were layering ourselves over the top of its pre-existence. We might not be welcome at all. That would be a matter for negotiation.
    Still, Zack had struck the first blow, and hammers must scare even ghosts with their noise.
    I jostled with the keys. Keys get all mixed up when you are in a hurry. It took me a minute to find the right key as Zack whacked the door paint one more time. In irritation, I tried to identify a mark he had made so I could point at it in parental, proprietary outrage - not being the owner, but still being responsible for all damage - but there wasn’t any. Zack knew exactly how to judge the impacts of his acts.
    The hallway yawned emptily and the twins threw themselves into its jaws, tripping over George, and we were officially living there.
    The atmosphere was exactly the same. San Francisco has a lot of sunshine , and this day and the day we viewed the house were identical weather wise. It seemed like a very happy house in every single room, the sun streaming in, the warmth off the walls, the spirit of optimism in our hearts.
    The way the boys (and George) ran around the place, you would have believed that any prior occupants would have been gathering up their luggage and heading for the refuge of the great outdoors. There was a huge amount of banging of doors and floors as the twins raced into every echoing room and committed their juvenile rites of occupancy.
    The house was our s. There were no other tenants. Nothing could withstand the aggression of the twins.
    Belle and I laughed .
    “I love our new home,” Belle said.
    “It really does feel like home, doesn’t it?” I replied.
     
    *  *  *
     
    We made a few trips and gradually filled the place up, although we had very