Bedbugs

by Ben H. Winters

  It’s nothing. Just—it’s nothing.

  Susan let her head drop back to the pillow and closed her eyes to the dot. She willed herself back to sleep, knowing it was futile. At last, at 7:12, Emma began to fuss over the monitor, and Susan smiled, as always, at the sound of her daughter’s sweet morning noises. The rustle of the sheets, the give of the springs as Emma shifted her weight on her thin IKEA mattress, the first purring, hushed, “Mama?”

  Susan opened her eyes, thinking maybe the tiny spot would be gone, faded like a fragment of a dream. But it was still there.

  Five minutes later, Susan was crouched beside the toilet while Emma peed. She heard Alex roll out of bed, followed by a series of rustling noises and whomps as he made the bed and tossed the throw pillows in place. Then the noises stopped.

  “Hey, Sue?” he called. “Did you see this?”

  Crap. If Alex had noticed the spot, even in the morning-dark of the room, even while making the bed in his inimitably hurried, that’ll-do-just-fine style, then it must be larger and more distinct—more real—than she had hoped.

  “Go ahead and flush, and wash your hands, Em.”

  In the bedroom, Alex had flicked on Susan’s bedside reading light and angled its gooseneck over the pillow, haloing the lamp’s sixty watts around the crescent-shaped stain.

  “Is it paint?”

  “Maybe. I have no idea.”

  Susan, for some reason, didn’t let on that she had seen it before, that she had already eliminated the possibility of dried paint. Alex made a little “hmmm” and pushed his curly hair out of his eyes. “What about blood? I think it’s blood.”

  Susan winced. All right folks, she thought. Let’s not get carried away.

  “Did something bite you?”

  “No.” Susan raised a hand to her neck, ran her palm searchingly along her cheek. “I don’t think so.”

  “But it is blood? I’m right, right?”

  “No. I mean, I don’t know.”

  “What could have bitten you?”

  “I seriously have no idea.”

  But the answer skittered across in the back of her throat, nasty and furtive: Bedbugs, bedbugs, bedbugs. She thought of the article about the co-op board. The news, in fact, had been overrun by bedbugs lately, stories of renters suing their landlords, shops emptied of customers, hotels shut down on busy weekends so teams of exterminators could flush out the infestations.

  “I’m sure it’s nothing,” Susan said. “Maybe it is paint. It probably is, actually.”

  Alex crossed his arms and sighed. Emma had come in and was sitting at the foot of their bed, cross-legged in her nightgown with the owls and stars, tossing Mr. Boodle gently up and letting him fall into her lap like a parachutist.

  “Is it even red?” Susan asked, squinting at the spot. “Look.”

  Alex squinted at it, too, then looked at her questioningly. “I mean, yeah. It is.”

  “You don’t think it’s more of a brown, kind of?”

  “Well …”

  They stood side by side, bent at the waist and peering at the pillow, like two doctors examining a patient’s cracked-open ribcage.

  “Yeah,” said Alex finally. “Actually, you’re right. I think it’s just dirt.”

  “I’m not sure,” Susan said. “Maybe it is blood.”

  “No way.” Alex straightened up, certain. “It’s dirt. Watch.”

  He chipped at the spot, held his thumbnail to the light, and seemed satisfied. But Susan couldn’t see that anything had come off the pillowcase, nor that there was anything under his nail.

  “Dirt,” he pronounced with cheerful finality and clicked off the bedside light. “Phew. Now I can go to the bathroom.” He stretched and patted Emma on the way to the door. “I mean, that’s just what we need, right? Bedbugs.”

  “Seriously,” Susan said lightly, but her eyes were still trained on the pillowcase; the stain was still there, maybe slightly fainter than it had been, but still defiantly there.

  Bedbugs. She had the sudden and absurd idea that by saying the word aloud, that small skittering word Susan had been trying so hard not to say, nor even to think, Alex had invited them in. He’d given the dark spot permission to turn out to be blood, after all.

  Susan scratched her neck. Did she feel a small itch?

  “Mama? What’s bedbugs?”

  Emma had padded over and now stood on tiptoe at Susan’s side, trying to see over the lip of the bed.

  “Oh, honey. They’re nothing.”

  “They’re these itty-bitty buggies, Em,” called Alex from the bathroom above the steady tinkle of his urine stream. “They’re super small, and they live in beds and bite people. And drink their blood.”

  Emma looked up at her mother with alarm, and Susan scooped her up.

  “But guess what?” she said. “We don’t have them.”

  The day bloomed glorious, with sunlight pouring through the windows, a perfect late-September Saturday. Susan put on coffee and oatmeal, played They Might Be Giants on iTunes, and led Emma through their exuberantly silly “morning exercises” while Alex showered. Then, while the girls ate breakfast, Alex did his elaborate routine where he kept appearing in different states of undress: First in just shirt and underwear; then just pants and a baseball cap; then shirt, shorts, and swim fins; each time asking earnestly “Now am I ready to go out?” and sending Emma into fresh hysterics. Susan felt flooded with pleasure and gratitude: Here they were in their big apartment with two floors, with the wide, tree-lined street outside, just a happy family clowning around on a Saturday morning in Brooklyn Heights.

  We did it, she thought, plopping Emma down on the hardwood of the living room and wriggling her tiny feet into their puppy slippers. We’re here.

  “Now,” Alex said, spooning brown sugar into his oatmeal. “I was thinking. Why don’t I take the ragamuffin to ballet, and then to the playground or whatever. You relax for the morning and meet us for lunch.”

  “Really? Are you sure?”

  “Totally.”

  “Dada’s going to take me?” Emma sang, pirouetting unevenly on the hardwood. “Dada’s going to take me!”

  “You’ve been working like a madwoman to get this place put together and then had to be on duty all day yesterday. Take a break.”

  “OK. I mean, I still need a couple things at the drugstore. And if the bank’s open—”

  “No. Sue. Chillax. I implore you.”

  As she showered, Susan laughed at herself for freaking out about the teensy smudge on her pillowcase. She located her overreaction in a lifelong pattern of jumping to the worst possible conclusions. In college, for example, she had been certain on two separate occasions that she’d contracted Lyme disease, based on the scantest possible symptomatology. In her twelfth week of carrying Emma, after binging on alarmist websites, she’d frantically announced to Alex that hers was an ectopic pregnancy—a fear that proved mercifully fantastical.

  Susan smiled a goony smile at herself in the mirror as she combed her hair, darkened and wet from the shower. The house is great, she told herself. The neighborhood is great. And I even did some painting last night.

  She dressed quickly, not bothering to glance again at the spot on her pillow.

  Susan trotted down the interior steps and out the door of 56 Cranberry Street an hour and a half later in black flats and a simple blue cotton jersey dress—a perfect ensemble for meeting one’s charming husband and daughter for lunch on Montague Street. Andrea Scharfstein was at the bottom of the front stoop, looking up at the big red front door, almost as if waiting for Susan to emerge. Her hands were planted on her hips, and she wore a wide-brimmed gardening hat, a flowing green housedress, and those crazy old-lady sunglasses Susan so admired.

  “Good morning,” called Susan, waving brightly as she came down the stairs.

  “Hello, hello.” Andrea squinted over the tops of the glasses. “Where’s the family? Did they leave you and find some other mother?”

  “No.
They’re out and about,” said Susan, thinking, strange joke. “I’m on the way to meet them for lunch.” She stopped at the bottom of the steps and turned to stand next to Andrea. “Whatcha looking at?”

  “Oh, nothing. Nothing, really.”

  Andrea slipped one old, sticklike arm through the crook of Susan’s arm and leaned her head against her shoulder, like they were best friends, or mother and daughter. The gesture, so intimate and unexpected, flustered Susan, but she recovered and brought her other hand across her midsection to pat Andrea on the forearm. Susan’s mother had been struck and killed by a drunk driver, two years after Susan’s college graduation. She had been on a hostel-hopping painting tour of Europe, having the time of her life, when she got the telephone call. She had cried for seven hours on a plane from Paris and signed up to take the LSAT three days after the funeral.

  “I hope the apartment is OK,” said Andrea throatily, then coughed twice and turned her face toward Susan’s. “Is the apartment OK?”

  There was a deep-set, unsettled melancholy under the growl in Andrea’s voice, and a sort of confusion. For the first time Susan wondered if Andrea, for all her seeming vigor and spiritedness, wasn’t beginning to slip into senility. The arm still linked in Susan’s was old but it was sturdy, yellow and clustered with age spots. Halfway up the forearm was a small open sore, red and bright and glistening in the sun.

  “The apartment is just fine, Andrea. Thank you. We love it.”

  “There’s nothing I can do to make it better for you?” Andrea lifted her sunglasses and searched Susan’s face. “I want so much for you and your family to be happy here.”

  It occurred to Susan that Andrea wanted her to throw out a couple of problems that she could solve, that her elderly landlady somehow craved the reassurance of being responsible for someone else’s welfare. “She seems … oh, just sad, I guess,” Louis had said. “The house has a whole lot of sadness in it.”

  “Well, OK,” said Susan. “Actually, there are a couple of, you know, just a couple of little things.” Quickly she ran down the short list of minor problems they’d discovered since moving in last week: the broken floorboard on the upstairs landing; the cracking paint in the downstairs bathroom; the loose outlet cover in the kitchen.

  “Those aren’t little things, Suze,” said Andrea. “Not at all.”

  Suze? The nickname made Susan’s skin crawl, but she said nothing. Andrea at last pulled her arm free from Susan’s, the wrinkles around her eyes and on her forehead multiplying as she furrowed her brow. “It’s an old house, as I told you. As I warned you, really. But of course, of course, I will get Louis to take a look at everything, just as soon as he can.”

  “Thanks.” Susan paused, bit her lip. “I feel like there was one more thing.”

  “Yes?”

  The word scurried across her throat again, nearly slipped out onto her tongue: bedbugs. Bedbugs. Tell her about the—

  But of course she had decided there were no bedbugs—hadn’t she?—and she could hardly complain to the landlady about a spot of dirt on her pillowcase. “Oh, right, I know. There’s been this kind of noise. Like a …” She gestured vaguely with her hands. “Like a ping, kind of.”

  “A ping?” Andrea narrowed her eyes. She was now standing with one foot on the bottom step, and Susan noticed that she had come outside wearing a pair of thin-soled lime green slippers. “Where is it coming from?”

  “Well, that’s what’s weird,” Susan said, a little embarrassed even to have brought it up. “I’m not exactly sure. We’ve just sort of heard it, generally. Mostly in the living room area, I guess. It’s extremely faint, and it never lasts for very long. Not a big deal, really.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Andrea. “I’ll take care of it myself.”

  Somewhere out over the East River the sun drifted behind a bank of gray clouds, and 56 Cranberry Street was momentarily cast in shadow, silhouetted like a black crepe cutout hung on the backdrop of sky. It was almost noon, time for Susan to be at Theresa’s with her man and child, eating a tuna sandwich and hearing funny stories about ballet class. As if sensing her impatience, Andrea abruptly began to hike up the stoop.

  “Anyway, Suze,” she said. “We’ll speak another time.” As Susan watched, Andrea pulled the big red door closed behind her.

  The rest of the weekend unspooled in a series of happy, easy hours. After lunch on Montague Street, Susan, Alex, and Emma strolled the tree-lined streets, exploring their new neighborhood as a family. They stopped at the drugstore, at the bank, and at Area Toys to buy Emma a jigsaw puzzle. At the farmer’s market on Cadman Plaza they bought a bag of ripe Honeycrisp apples, a thing of frozen sausage, and three bundles of asparagus. After nap, Susan and Emma did the jigsaw puzzle, Susan marveling as her precocious genius-child patiently sorted through the twenty-four oversized pieces to assemble the barnyard scene.

  “I take it all back,” Alex said that night as he fried the asparagus with olive oil and salt. “This kitchen is actually terrific.” He winked at Susan and she winked back. When Emma was asleep they polished off a bottle of Prosecco and made love on the living room floor—their first time since moving to Brooklyn.

  Sunday morning Susan walked over to the Laundromat with a load of whites, leafed through the Times magazine until the buzzer buzzed, and then switched the stuff over to the dryer. When she caught up with Alex and Emma at the playground, she smiled to see that they’d met up once again with Shawn, and that Shawn had a seven-year-old sister named Tarika, with a pair of braided pigtails and a gap-toothed smile. The two families ended up having lunch at the Park Diner, and by dessert Emma was head over heels for Tarika, trailing the girl faithfully to the cookie case and hanging on her every word like revelation.

  “Oh, shoot,” Susan said suddenly, hours later, as Alex and Susan lay in bed reading.

  “Shoot what, gorgeous?”

  “I gotta go back to the Laundromat. Our stuff is still sitting in the dryer.”

  “No way, dude.” Alex tossed his New Yorker on the ground. “I’ll grab it.”

  “You sure?”

  “Am I sure?” He grinned and hopped out of bed. Susan smiled, feeling safe and sleepy. “What are husbands for?”

  Alex tugged on his blue track pants, planted a loud kiss on her forehead, and was gone. For once, Susan drifted off easily and was still sleeping soundly twenty minutes later, when Alex came home, folded the laundry, and put it all away—including the pillowcase that had borne the small and curious stain.

  10.

  On Monday morning at 9:13, Susan stepped into the bonus room, cried out, and dropped her coffee cup. The ceramic mug smashed to pieces on the hardwood, splashing Susan’s legs with scalding liquid where they peeked out from her pajama bottoms. She screamed again, in pain and surprise, stumbled backward and clutched the doorframe, but her eyes remained locked on the portrait. Though still half complete, it was nevertheless an excellent rendering, a vivid and precise re-creation of the girl in the photograph that she’d stuck on the lower-right-hand corner of the easel. Sweet, funny Jessica Spender with her slash of scarlet bangs, her wicked and amused expression, her high cheekbones and red lipstick.

  Except there, along the left cheekbone, Susan had given the girl a row of nasty welts, three of them in a line, running at a slight angle from the far corner of the left eye down to the nostril. Three marks, three round, raised, red circles, each with a pinprick of white at its dead center. The marks were carefully executed, and Susan did not remember painting them at all.

  Marks?

  No. Bites.

  She had given Jessica Spender a row of bites.

  Bedbug bites, her mind hissed. They’re bedbug bites, they’re totally—

  Susan slammed the door and retreated into the living room, her hand pressed to her chest. She bit her lip and pressed the heel of her palm into her eyes, trying to summon memories of Friday night, her intense hours of painting, her … binge? Trance? Whatever state of hyperfocused semiconsciousness she
had entered into. The rest of the painting was carefully realistic, taken directly from the photograph. Except she had decided, some part of her had decided, to add the marks. The bites.

  Could she have done that kind of work, that kind of careful work, without remembering it? And why would she?

  Susan thought of the blood on her pillow—paint, paint, I thought we decided it was paint? Or dirt, a smudge of dirt? What did we say?—and a wrenching shudder traveled down her spine.

  “Hey, Sue?”

  Marni was hollering from the kitchen, where she’d been busily gathering snacks and plastic utensils, getting Emma ready for departure. “We’re taking off, if that’s OK?” The nanny was being extra solicitous, trying to make up for her supposed illness on Friday, which had miraculously resolved itself in time for a concert Saturday night at Hammerstein Ballroom.

  “Wait,” said Susan, and hurried down the hall. “One second.”

  “Hi, Mama.” Emma was ready to go: she had on her shoes, her little jean jacket, her oversized Dora the Explorer backpack. Marni stood with the diaper bag slung over one shoulder, the strap running snugly between her breasts.

  “Emma, honey,” Susan said, “Mommy needs to ask you something.”

  In the bonus room she guided Emma carefully around the broken shards of the coffee cup and stood her before the easel. Susan gave her daughter’s hand a reassuring squeeze; at nearly four years old, she could sense when her mother was upset about something, and to worry that she was the source.

  “Emma, do you see these little dots on the woman’s face?” she asked gently. Emma raised herself up on her tiptoes and nodded gravely. “Honey, did you make those dots?”

  Emma shook her head vigorously, her bangs flopping on her forehead.

  “Are you sure? Maybe on Saturday, before dinner? When Mama and Dada were in the kitchen? You were playing by yourself in the living room, did you maybe …?”

  But Emma kept shaking her head, her tiny brow creased with adamance. “No, Mama. I didn’t.”

  Susan felt a presence and glanced up. Marni was hovering in the doorway, head tilted to one side, scrutinizing the portrait of Jessica Spender. Susan cast her an irritated look, and she backed away.