Bedbugs

by Ben H. Winters

  “Mommy’s not mad, honey. I just need you to tell me the truth. Did you touch my painting?”

  Suddenly, urgently, Emma threw her arms around her and buried her face in Susan’s neck, breathing hotly into her throat.

  “Can we leave, Mama? I don’t like this room.”

  “Sure, Em, just—”

  “I don’t like it!”

  Susan cleaned the spilled coffee and the broken mug, gathering up the shards into a paper bag and mopping the floor on hands and knees with a wad of paper towels. Down here on her knees, she could still smell it, even under the rich bitter smell of the coffee: that abandoned cat, its dying reek of piss and rot. The painting stood on its easel above her, still and silent. The truth was, Emma couldn’t have messed with it, even if she’d gotten it in her head to do so. She would have had to drag in the stepstool, drag it back when she was finished, not to mention mix the colors and clean the brushes and.…

  I did it. I painted that picture that way, and I don’t know why.

  Susan felt a darkness welling in her veins. She rose from her cleaning crouch and stepped to the painting, ran her hands over the three dots marring Jessica Spender’s beautiful cheeks.

  I’m sorry, Jessica, she thought, as if she’d vandalized not the painting but the girl herself. I’m sorry.

  Twenty minutes later, Susan was out the door and on her way to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. She would, she had decided, sit with her sketchpad and charcoal pencils, watch the stream of joggers and the middle-aged Caribbean nannies pushing their strollers; she would set her artist’s gaze on the Manhattan horizon and sketch the magical skyline. She hustled down Cranberry Street, feeling the September sun on her cheeks. Turning right onto the Promenade, she dug her iPhone out of her coat pocket and called Alex.

  “Hey, hon,” he said tersely. “What’s up?”

  She could picture him, staring like an X-ray technician at his computer screen, running the pixelated magnifying glass over an enlarged JPEG of a diamond, searching out its flaws.

  “Nothing, just a random question for you. Did you by any chance do something to my painting?”

  “Did I what?” She heard his fingers rattling over the keys.

  “My painting, Al, the painting I’m working on in the bonus room.”

  “I’m sorry, Susan, could you hold on for just one sec?”

  “Sure.”

  She was halfway down the Promenade now, and she tossed her bag onto a bench and sat beside it, looking out at the Statue of Liberty and Governor’s Island. A few feet away, a knot of tourists was posing at the railing, framed by the view, leaning on one another and laughingly hoisting an Italian flag.

  “OK. Sorry, babe. What is it again?”

  “I—careful!” One of the tourists was bobbling a toddler up on his shoulders, and Susan had a lurching sensation of the boy tumbling over the railing, down into the rushing traffic of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway below.

  “Susan?”

  The boy was fine. His father had his legs gripped tightly, one in each hand. Susan closed her eyes and opened them again, resumed breathing.

  “When you got home on Friday night, I was working on a painting. In my … in that little room, behind the living room. Did you, by any chance, do something to it? Over the weekend?”

  “Did I do something to it? Yes, dear. I baked it in a pie.”

  “Alex.”

  “I have not stepped foot in that room since we moved to Brooklyn.” She heard rapid tapping: he was sending e-mails while they talked. “I seriously don’t even know what the room looks like.”

  “Huh. It’s the weirdest thing … ”

  “Susan? I am so busy today. Can we—”

  “Yes. Of course. Get back to work.”

  Susan held her sketchbook in her lap for half an hour, staring out across the river.

  *

  When Alex came home that night, it was as if the easygoing, eager-to-please doofus with whom she and Emma had spent their weekend had been kidnapped and replaced with his sullen, irritable twin. He barely said hi, barely acknowledged the painted pinecone Emma had spent all afternoon making for him.

  “You don’t seem up for dinner,” Susan said, trying to get a read on him. “Should I do grilled cheese?”

  “Sure. Fine.”

  While Susan dug around to find the cheese for their sandwiches, he reached over her head and helped himself to a beer.

  “Want to hear some great news? There was some old dude hanging out on our stoop just now, perched on the front step, smoking a cigar. I said, ‘Excuse me?’ as in, ‘Can I help you?’ but he didn’t say anything. He just shifted over and gave me this big, extra-polite grin. Like he was doing me some big favor, you know, letting me into my own house.”

  Alex stalked over to the front window, pulling on his beer, and glared outside.

  “If he’s still out there in ten minutes, I’m calling the cops.”

  Susan was slicing cheese on the cutting board. “That’s just Louis,” she said.

  “Louis? Who the hell is Louis?”

  Alex’s voice was too loud. Susan stopped slicing. Emma, at the kitchen table, looked up from her coloring book and back down again quickly.

  “Remember, when Andrea told us she had a guy who did stuff around the place for her, like unclog the toilets and stuff? That’s him.”

  Alex rolled his eyes, let out a derisive snort. “You have got to be fucking kidding me.” Susan gave him a look—language—but he ignored her. “What is he, a thousand years old?”

  Susan shrugged, heard herself parroting Andrea. “He doesn’t look like much, but he gets the job done. Seriously.” Alex sipped his beer and grunted. “So what’s going on? How’s work?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  But he told her anyway. From all appearances, their hard work the previous week on the Cartier shoot had been for naught. Richard Hastie, the potential rep, was using the watch-face snafu as an excuse to pass them over on the Cartier contract in favor of a large Diamond District outfit called Stone Work.

  “It’s just classic. They’ve got more experience, he says, so Cartier feels more comfortable with them, but of course we can’t get more experience without a big-time client. So we’re stuck with the penny-ante stuff, and I’m spending half my time writing invoices and payment reminders, instead of taking pictures.” He snorted. “At least when I’m taking a particularly stylish picture of a ring, I can tell myself I’m a real photographer.”

  “I’m sorry, honey.”

  Susan made the right sympathetic noises, but beneath the surface her anxiety blossomed to bright and busy life. She could hear every word that Alex was thinking but not saying: This is all your fault, Susan. All your fault. He was struggling, handcuffed to a sinking business, stripped of his artistic identity, and she got to stay home and make art?

  Or sit uselessly on the Promenade and people watch, not making art at all?

  “Come on, Susan, don’t use the santoku knife to cut tomatoes.”

  “What?”

  “We have a cheap tomato knife. Use that. I’ve told you, save the good knives for when you really need a good knife.”

  Emma went to bed early that night, and Alex and Susan watched Hell’s Kitchen in silence. If Alex remembered her odd phone call, questioning him about her painting in the bonus room, he didn’t mention it. Given his mood, Susan saw little point in reminding him.

  11.

  The next day, Susan made no effort to paint. Once Alex had left for work and Marni had arrived and taken Emma to a 9:30 story time, she walked, with her umbrella open against a damp and drizzly autumn morning, to a Court Street coffee shop called Cafe Pedlar. She ordered a cappuccino and a pretzel roll, settled at a table in a back corner, and contemplated the recent unsettling events.

  By now, she had abandoned the idea that Emma or anyone else had snuck into the bonus room and messed around with her work. She had painted the marks—bites, the bites, the bites—but could no
t for the life of her imagine why. Did this strange act of automatic painting represent the emergence of some cache of artistic energy lurking in her subconscious? Was she, in fact, an artist of exceptional brilliance, whose talent lay buried beneath calcified layers of ego and superego?

  “No,” she said aloud, and snorted derisively. “Probably not.” A bearded dude in a Bob Dylan T-shirt, sitting with an iPad at the next table, glanced up and scowled. Susan smiled apologetically.

  So, what, then? Had a ghost painted the row of red bites? A poltergeist?

  She shook her head, sipped her coffee. Susan had never had much use for the supernatural, or even the religious. At her mother’s funeral, she’d knelt by the open casket, said the required words, thinking the whole time how stupid it all was. This was not her mother laid out before her, this was a broken machine, a dead thing, ready to be lowered back into the earth from whence it came.

  Susan sighed. Probably she was just a lunatic. She remembered an article from the Times magazine section, from a few years ago, about people who do bizarre and unaccountable things in their sleep: punch their spouses, eat raw steak, urinate on the floor. She’d sleepwalked down the stairs in the middle of the night, Friday night, or maybe it was Saturday, added the dots to the painting, and slipped back into bed.

  That had to be it.

  The other thing that kept playing in her head was a vision of Louis, standing in the newly cleaned bonus room with his hands knotted together anxiously: “This house has always had sort of an atmosphere to it. Something. And well, there’s a whole lot of sadness in the place, since Howard died.”

  … a whole lot of sadness in the place …

  Oh, would you stop it, Susan told herself. The Bob Dylan guy scowled at her again. Susan smiled very politely, gave him the finger, and got up to leave.

  On the way home, Susan stopped at Dashing Diva on Smith Street for a manicure, pedicure, and waxing.

  “You bite your nails, ah?” said the manicurist, a small Korean woman named Lee with a tall pile of shellacked black hair and a frozen smile.

  “What? Oh, years ago.”

  Susan had developed the habit in the months after her mother died and cured herself only years later, with a combination of hypnosis and the gross pepper-spray-type stuff parents smear on the nails of their thumb-sucking children. But now Lee’s plastic smile flickered with confusion, and when Susan looked down she saw that her nails were raw and ragged, with red spots at the corners where she had chewed away the skin.

  That night the family ate in silence. After Emma was in bed, Alex did the dishes, complaining several times about the “bucket of crap” under the sink. Susan had dutifully been tossing vegetable matter under there, periodically running the plastic containers down to the foot of the steps for Andrea to compost. When he was done with the dishes, Alex turned on his laptop and sat on the sofa, his glasses pushed up into his hair, his palm pressed to his forehead. Susan puttered around, sending out small feelers—“Do you mind if I put on some music?” “I thought we’d try that place Jack the Horse this weekend, if we can get Marni on Saturday night”—and earning only caveman monosyllables in return. Once she glanced at the screen and was surprised to see not a photograph of a diamond or a watch, blown up to full-screen view so Alex could scour it for flaws. Instead, there was a long column of figures, which he was scrolling through, jotting notes on a yellow pad beside him and muttering.

  “Honey?” she ventured at last, knowing she was being nosy and annoying but unable to help herself. If the company was in financial trouble, if he was in financial trouble, then she was, too. “Whatcha looking at?”

  “The books,” Alex said curtly.

  “Of the company?”

  “Yes.” Alex snapped the computer shut and stared at her challengingly. “Of the company.”

  “And—”

  “Don’t really feel up to chatting about it, OK?”

  Susan tensed, flew up her hands, and retreated. This kind of outburst was so unlike Alex, and it confirmed exactly what she’d been thinking all that day: something was wrong around here, something had … had darkened somehow. It was more than just a few red dots on a painting. It was like since moving to Cranberry Street, her family couldn’t quite get their footing. Alex was tense and distracted; she was going on somnambulant painting sprees. And wasn’t even Emma quieter than usual, more distant?

  Or wasn’t it more likely that she was imagining things, casting into the anxious waters of her mind, fishing for new things to worry about? Alex was having a rough patch at work, that was all. Hadn’t this past weekend been nice? More than nice—it had been perfect.

  Things would revolve back to normal, to happy, as they always did. They had their problems—had had them in the Union Square apartment, too—but happy was the default setting.

  Susan went upstairs, brushed her teeth, took a whole Ambien, and lay in bed thinking mistake mistake mistake, I made a terrible mistake.

  The bedside clock read 1:12 a.m. when Susan gave up on sleep and went downstairs. In the kitchen she poured herself a tall glass of red wine, drank half in a long swallow, and then refilled it to the brim. Clutching the wineglass in one hand, she walked through the living room in the darkness, drawing up her bathrobe against an unsettling sensation of eyes peering at her from the corners of the room: hundreds of eyes, thousands of them, staring at her. Living things tracking her hesitant steps in the darkness.

  Slowly, with dread uncoiling itself in her stomach, Susan pulled open the door to the bonus room and then let out a low, shuddering moan. There was just enough moonlight to see the half-finished portrait of Jessica Spender, and it was covered in bites. Dozens and dozens of the nasty red spots, clustered in groups of three: three on the neck, three above and three below the eyes, two groups of three along the ridge of the nose, more circling the chin and cheeks.

  Susan barely made it to the kitchen in time to retch, emptying the contents of her stomach violently and painfully into the sink, thick wine-stained vomit choking up into her throat. She coughed and gagged, loudly, hoping to hear Alex’s groggy voice from the top of the stairs, calling down with hushed nighttime kindness, asking her if she was all right.

  But the house radiated silence. Susan drank three glasses of water in the empty kitchen and went back upstairs to try again for sleep.

  When Emma began to chirp over the monitor on Wednesday morning, Susan had slept for two hours, three at the most. She stumbled through the morning routine with a cup of strong coffee and a dazed expression. Alex declined breakfast and hurried out, unsmiling, at 7:25; an hour and a half later, Emma was gone, too, on her way down the steps with Marni, crying bitterly that she didn’t want to leave mommy, a performance she hadn’t put on in many months.

  Susan settled heavily into a kitchen chair, ran a hand through her greasy hair, and laid her palms flat on the table. “Let’s get some shit done,” she told herself. “Forget all this haunted-house BS and get some shit done.” There was a friend of hers from college, Kerry Feigue, who talked like that: brash, hyperconfident, unapologetic. Susan liked to conjure up an internal version of Kerry at times like this, when she could use a swift internal kick in the pants. She opened her MacBook at the kitchen table and let her hands hover over the keys. Alex had asked her, a few days ago, to order a new nonstick frying pan to replace one scratched in the move; she could go to Amazon.com, read customer reviews for ten minutes, and buy one. She’d also been meaning to follow up on the first couple suggestions that Vanessa, Shawn’s mom, had given her for local preschools.

  Instead, she Googled “bedbugs” and clicked on the first search result, a site called BedbugDemolition.com. The site was chaotic and unstructured, with one page titled “Sleep Tight,” one called “Ask the (Sort of) Expert,” and one just called “Pictures! Pictures! Pictures!” The webpage was amateurish in its design, studded with arbitrarily bolded paragraphs and bristling with blinking pop-up ads for exterminators and cleaning services.

  Su
san clicked, almost at random, on a link that said “Everything You’ve Always Wanted to Know about Bedbugs But Were Afraid to Ask” and quickly scanned the bulleted list, which looked like it’d been written by a hyperactive elementary school student doing a report: “Bedbugs are parasites, which means they live off the blood of a host—that’s you!” “Every bedbug begins life as a ‘stage one’ and molts its exoskeleton five times before achieving full maturity as a ‘stage five’!” “Bedbugs can live for more than a year between feedings!”

  “Great,” Susan muttered. A couple more clicks, and she was engrossed in a fierce debate, ranging over many posts, about whether bedbugs bore a detectable odor: some people were saying no; others were saying that a colony smelled faintly of lemon or lemon-scented candles. One person argued passionately that bedbugs smelled of raspberries and cilantro, a smell that “gets much stronger before/during blood meals!”

  Susan went back to the previous page, found the link that boasted “Pictures! Pictures! Pictures!” and clicked on it. She began to scroll down and immediately stopped—the first picture, posted by someone identifying themselves only as “0-684-84328-5@gmail.com,” featured a row of three bites, each one red and raised, with a white dot in the center.

  “Oh, crap,” said Susan. “Oh, crap.” She reached up and scratched idly at the top of her left cheekbone, just below her eye. Then she clicked the tab for Google on her bookmarks bar and did a search for “Jessica Spender.”

  It was, at it turned out, a fairly common name. There was a Jessica Spender in Joliet, Illinois, who owned a pastry shop, but the picture showed a heavy middle-aged lady in a ruffled apron. Another Jessica Spender was in Detroit, quoted three times in a Free Press article about the ongoing struggle to rebeautify that city’s beleaguered downtown. This Jessica Spender was twenty-seven years old, which sounded like the right age, but she was a lifelong resident of Detroit, not to mention black. There was a seventeen-year-old Jessica Spender in a high school in South Bend, a newborn Jessica Spender in a Babble article about jaundice, and on and on and on.