“But …”
“But?”
“I was standing out there. I like to keep an eye on Andrea. Just between you and me, Susan, I get a little … just a little worried about the old girl, sometimes.”
“Worried?”
Louis looked around, discomfort emanating like sweat, his big hands knotted together. “Yeah. Since Howard died, she hardly sleeps, you know, and that’s not right. She seems … oh, just sad, I guess. Tell you the truth, this house has always had an atmosphere to it. Something. Just a whole lot of sadness in the place since Howard died. So sometimes I peek in on old Andrea. Just keepin’ tabs. Figure I owe it to my friend.”
“Huh.” Susan wasn’t sure what she thought about this information. A brief, painful surge of memory coursed through her, of her mother, her mother’s death, the stupid funeral. They had tried to make her look, right in the casket, but for God’s sake …
“And, if you don’t mind my asking,” Susan said suddenly. “What was it Howard died of, exactly?”
“No, I don’t mind.” Louis heaved a big, body-shifting sigh, juggled the bucket of supplies from one hand to another. Now the room smelled thickly of cleaning fluids, of bleach and ammonia. “He was sick. Real sick. It came on sudden, because before that, I tell you straight up, this was the healthiest person you could ever meet. We played racquetball three times a week, and if I beat him once in forty years, I can’t say when it was.”
“Wow.” Susan was blatantly prying now, but she couldn’t help it. “What did he have?”
“I don’t exactly know. A disease. Something in his blood. He didn’t let it kill him, though. That was not Howard’s style.” Louis tilted his head to one side, his eyes glinting with the memory of his friend. “He shot himself, you see? Did himself in before the disease could do it first. Shot himself right in the head.”
In the front hall, Emma eyed Louis warily, but he crouched down, tugging up the cuffs of his jeans, and grinned at her. “Hey, little sister, can I tell you a secret? I got a granddaughter just your age, and you want to know her name? Her name is Amethyst.”
Emma’s eyes widened, and she nodded, as if, yes, she had known that. “And guess what?” she asked, leaning confidentially toward Louis. “That’s a kind of jewel.”
“No kidding!” He pretended astonishment, and Emma nodded rapidly, beaming. “It is! It’s a jewel. And it’s purple.”
As Louis stood up, a faint but clear ping filled the room.
“Ping!” Emma yelped merrily in reply.
“That’s—” Susan began, but Louis held up one hand, palm up, listening. “Hold on.”
It went again. Ping.
And then, a moment later, came a ghostly, deflating moan, raspy, long and low. It was an ugly, uncanny noise, all the more so for being so indistinct—barely audible, really, and originating, or so it felt, from no particular place. Louis narrowed his eyes, took a halting step in no particular direction, then stopped. Susan reached for Emma and grasped her hand. She held her breath, waiting for the noises to come again, felt her whole body grow thick with tension and unease.
A second passed, then another. Silence.
And then her iPhone rang, ripping through the silence, and Susan screamed.
8.
“Marni,” said Susan into the phone. “Crap, you scared me.”
“Why? What?”
“Mama?” said Emma. “What’s crap?”
“Nothing, love. Marni, what’s up?” Susan glanced at the clock on the cable box: 8:17. Marni was supposed to be walking through the door in thirteen minutes. Louis gave a cheerful salute and mouthed “so long.” Susan held up a finger for him to wait—the pinging noise, what about—but it was too late.
“Listen,” Marni said. “I am really sorry about this … ”
Speaking in a voice so exaggeratedly throaty and congested that Susan immediately suspected playacting, Marni explained that she’d felt ill last night, hoped it would fade by this morning, but woken just as bad. Of course she would come in anyway, knowing how much Susan had to do, but the last thing she wanted was for Emma to catch anything from her.
“Sure, sure,” said Susan, only half listening to Marni’s elaborate apologies. “All right, then. Feel better.”
She hung up, took a deep breath, and called out, “Guess what, Emma? Looks like it’s an all-day mama day!”
“Really? Yay!”
Emma bounced up the stairs to her bedroom to get dressed while Susan chastised herself for feeling irritated. After all, it’d been ages since she’d spent a whole day with her spirited, funny little daughter, just the two of them. Come on, she told herself, turning her back on her studio and heading up the stairs. We’ll have a blast.
While Emma rifled through her drawers, loudly considering different possible outfits, Susan waited on the landing between the bedrooms and examined the floorboards.
The gap, that little crack … was it widening? She hadn’t measured, of course, and it was still an infinitesimal separation, but she felt sure it was slightly bigger. The wood was groaning, separating, or whatever it was that wood did. I’ll get Louis back up here, Susan thought. Maybe he can take care of it.
According to 1010 WINS, the morning would be rain streaked but the afternoon clear, so Susan decided she and Emma would start their day at the small branch library in Cadman Plaza before lunch and then head to Pierrepont Playground after nap. On the way to the library, Susan left a message for Alex, letting him know that Marni had bailed, so if there was any way he could get home earlier than usual, she’d appreciate the relief. An hour passed, and then two, as Susan and Emma read picture books and put Dora the Explorer through her paces on the ancient desktop computer in the children’s section. Susan became more and more irritated with Alex’s failure to return her call—she knew he was busy, trying to repair the damage done by the lighting assistant and salvage the crucial Cartier shoot. But he could at least check in, to acknowledge the change in schedule. The morning slipped by, they went home for lunch, and still Alex didn’t call.
He must be really busy, Susan told herself. He must be slammed.
“Mama? You OK, Mama?”
“Yes, love. Eat your sandwich.”
While Emma napped, Susan ate her own lunch, a bagel with cream cheese from a place on Montague Street, and flipped aimlessly through the paper. There was an article in the New York section about a co-op board on the Upper West Side dealing with a bedbug infestation: a couple was protesting an edict they’d received to either undergo a costly extermination or move. Susan skimmed the article before flipping to the crossword. When she went to the junk drawer for a pen, she found the photograph of Jessie Spender and her boyfriend Jack.
Such a shame, she thought, turning the picture over in her hands in the light of the kitchen window. They look so happy.
After nap, at the playground, they ran into Shawn, the sweet-faced kid with the cornrows whom Emma had played tag with on the Promenade, the morning they first came to look at the apartment. While the children played an elaborate game of Cinderella, in which they took turns in the roles of prince, princess, fairy godmother, and coach-bearing horse, Susan chatted with the boy’s mother, Vanessa.
“Oh, hey, have you got Shawn in a preschool?”
“Three days a week. If you need any information on what’s around, just ask. I did so much research it’s ridiculous. I’m way anal about that stuff.”
Susan grinned—Vanessa sounded like a woman after her own heart. “I will totally take you up on that,” she said. The woman agreed to arrange a play-date-slash-information-session sometime soon, and they swapped numbers.
Soon after Vanessa and Shawn’s departure, Susan and Emma’s pleasant afternoon was marred by an ugly incident. A tall, coolest-dad-at-the-playground kind of character, in a tailored sport coat and black jeans, eyes locked on his BlackBerry as he pushed his daughter on the swing, gave the girl a too-hard shove and sent her flying. The kid, a frail, dark-haired girl of five or six, lan
ded headfirst on a jutting edge of rock and came up wailing, gushing blood. The mother ran over from a bench while the father furtively jammed his BlackBerry in his pocket.
“Can I get you something?” Susan called out, lifting Emma from her swing and rushing over. “Does she need a bandage? Should we call an ambulance?”
The mother didn’t respond, focused on the girl, cradling her head and daubing at the cut with a wet paper towel. Mr. BlackBerry, however, turned to Susan with open irritation. “An ambulance?” he said. “No, it’s nothing. She’ll be fine.”
It didn’t look like nothing to Susan, but it was also none of her business.
“Is she OK?” asked Emma, craning around in her stroller seat, as Susan wheeled her out the gates of the playground.
“Yes, doll,” said Susan. “Of course.”
Susan cast her own glance backward at the frightened girl, who was rising unsteadily, reddish streaks caked to her forehead. She thought of the awful dream she’d had the other night: The stroller slamming into the ground and bursting like a bomb, sending fountains of blood spraying into the sky. She thought of the rusty smudge on the back of the photograph; she thought of poor Catastrophe the cat, starving and mad in the bonus room, white spit and pink blood foaming the corners of his mouth.
“Alex? Hey.”
They had just returned home, and Susan answered her iPhone on the first ring. It was 4:45 p.m.
“Hey, babe. How are you?”
“I called this morning. Did you get my message?”
“What? Yeah. Oh—I mean, I think so. This morning?”
Alex’s voice carried an undertone, a subtle tightness, indicating to Susan that he was looking at his computer while they talked. Vic was shouting orders to someone in the background.
“You sound busy.”
“Susan, I’m sorry about this, but I can’t come home tonight.”
“Oh.” Susan felt a queer twisting in her gut. She cradled the phone under her ear while she sat Emma down to tug off her shoes.
“It’s this stupid watch. It took us all morning to find a new face and get it affixed properly. Now we still have to shoot the thing, along with the sport watch, the Rolex, the one that was actually scheduled for today. It’s gonna be hours.”
“How many hours?” Susan struggled to control her voice.
“I really have no idea, babe.”
“Oh.” Susan paused. How understanding was she supposed to be here? “So, you know, Marni didn’t come in today.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah, I told you on the message.”
“Hold on.” He yelled to someone in the room with him, probably Vic: “Two seconds, OK? One second?” Then he was on the phone again. “That sucks. I’m sorry about this. We really have to nail this gig. You know that, right?”
Exactly how bad was Alex’s business these days, Susan wondered. She felt a dark pocket of despair open in her stomach: they’d just blown all this money on the move, increased their rent … what if Alex’s business was about to crumble? Then what? You can always go back to Legal Aid, pick up law-temp work, document review … something.…
“Listen, Sue, I gotta go.”
“Sure, sure.”
She hung up, lowered the phone, and saw her daughter staring at her, her eyes quivering saucers of grief.
“Honey?”
Emma burst into tears. “I wanted to talk to daddy!”
Three and a half hours later, with Emma sleeping soundly, Susan fixed herself an easy dinner of pasta and a glass of shiraz. Then she washed the dishes, cleared the table, and dug the picture of Jessica and Jack out of the junk drawer. She walked straight into the bonus room, set up her easel, and tacked the photograph in the lower-right-hand corner of a fresh canvas. The cat-pee stink was gone, thank God, but Susan left the window open anyway, allowing the mild nighttime chill of early fall to breathe into the room. There were two electrical outlets, and in one Susan plugged the baby monitor so she could hear if Emma cried; in the other she plugged her laptop, so she could turn on iTunes and listen to Bach’s Mass in B Minor, always her favorite music to paint to.
Susan arranged her pleasingly old-fashioned wooden palette, her turpentine, her cleaning rags, her wineglass, and the bottle of Shiraz.
“All right,” Susan said to the photograph of Jessica Spender. “Shall we?”
Slowly at first, she painted. Her eyes darted back and forth between the photograph and her canvas as she scumbled in the thin oval of Jessica Spender’s face, the high angles of her cheekbones, two dark recesses for the eyes, the confident angle of the hairline. Soon Susan was working faster, shedding her initial hesitance, losing herself in the work, drawing in details with the tip of a brush. She sang along with the music, moving her brush confidently, slashing and darting, feeling a kind of vigorous animal power flowing through her as she attacked the canvas.
Occasionally, Susan danced backward to survey her work, grunted approvingly, took a gulp of her wine, and dove back in. I’m good at this, she thought, jabbing her brush at the portrait and then yelping aloud. “I’m fucking great!”
Burning hot, sweating buckets, Susan stripped down to her bra and underwear, kept painting, faster and faster, her eyes locked on Jessica’s eyes, hypnotized by the woman she was bringing to life on canvas. She disappeared into the work, edging in the dark shapes, thickening her layers, massaging the colors, feeling the power of each small act of creation. The Mass crescendoed, the Credo, and Susan moaned with exultation, lost to the world.
When she heard the knock at the door, her hands froze. She looked around wildly, heaving breath, scared and guilty like an animal caught feasting on something forbidden. Susan shut off the music, unplugged the baby monitor from the wall, and slipped out of the bonus room, carefully pulling the door shut behind her.
Alex was at the front door. “I’m so sorry. I forgot my keys,” he said, then paused. “Honey? Are you OK?”
“Why?” she asked. “What?”
“What do you mean, what? You’re naked. You’re covered in paint. That is paint, right?”
Susan looked down. She was streaked and splattered, bright jagged lines of reds and blacks crisscrossing her chest and torso.
“Also, it’s two in the morning.”
“What?”
Two? That couldn’t be right. She hadn’t been in that little room for five hours, had she? “I was just doing some painting, is all. I got really into it.” Susan’s own voice sounded distant and unnatural. She felt exhausted; her muscles ached and her head swam. “Really? It’s two o’clock in the morning?”
“Yeah. I’m really sorry I’m so late,” Alex said. “After the shoot was finally over, I ran into Anton on the way to the subway, and I bought him a beer. He and Blondie are on the outs again, apparently.”
Susan nodded, blinked. How had it gotten to be two o’clock?
She was so tired she could barely make it up the stairs. But once she had brushed her teeth and peed and collapsed into bed, Susan couldn’t sleep. Alex, of course, passed out easily and immediately, and she lay watching him for half an hour before slipping out from under the sheets. She considered taking an Ambien but decided it was too close to morning, and she was already pretty drunk on the wine. She went to the bathroom, peed again, and then washed her face and hands, watching as flecks of paint spiraled down the drain. On her way back to bed, she lifted Alex’s jeans from where he’d shed them onto the bedroom floor and was halfway to the laundry hamper when she noticed a curious square bulge in the pocket. Susan hooked two fingers into the pocket and came out with a matchbook from the Mandarin Oriental Hotel.
Two in the morning, Susan thought immediately, and looked over at him in his easy slumber. Hotel matches?
It took her about five seconds to remember that the girl they called Blondie, the on-again-off-again girlfriend of Alex’s college friend Anton, worked at the Mandarin Oriental as a concierge. She’d occasionally gotten them theater tickets, before they had Emma and co
uld still occasionally leave the house at night. A warm wash of relief flooded Susan—Alex had used Anton’s matches, and Anton had gotten them from Blondie, who worked at the Mandarin. Hotel matches, indeed. Moping around like the wife in a country-western song …
She slipped back under the covers, laughing uneasily at her own paranoia. Jesus H. Christ, she thought distantly, as sleepiness began to settle over her, what is this place doing to you?
It was very early in the morning on Saturday, September 18. Susan, Alex, and Emma Wendt had been living in Brooklyn Heights for six days.
9.
Five hours later, Susan opened her eyes and saw a single tiny spot of blood on her pillow.
Except it wasn’t blood. Except maybe it was. The room was dark, she was half asleep, and Susan couldn’t really tell. It looked like blood. She rolled over, blinked at the glowing red lines of the clock radio, and moaned softly: 6:36 a.m. A good twenty minutes before Emma’s usual wake-up time, and there was no reason for Susan to have woken.
The spot on the pillowcase was a few inches from where her face had been, just below the line of her mouth; it might even have been a puddle of drool, but it was too small and too contained. A dark crescent-shaped speck, ragged at the edges, the size and rough shape of a chewed-off fingernail. Alex slept on, snoring and open-mouthed. Susan propped herself on one elbow, listening to her breath, and peered at her pillow. Now the speck looked a deep muddy gray against the lemon yellow pillowcase; now, as dead orange glimmers of day crept under the shades, it resolved itself into a dull brownish red.
Oh, she thought. It’s paint. Duh.
Susan flicked at the speck with the nail of her pointer finger, expecting it to come right off. But the speck stayed where it was, bled into the cloth of the pillowcase. Susan pressed at it gently with the pad of a fingertip, and the firm pillow gave way slightly under the weight of her push.
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