Beside her, Alex lay sleeping peacefully, his flesh gently glowing in the moonlight, a line of spit running down his fleshy cheek. Like a child. Like nothing had happened. Susan stared at the cracks in the ceiling. She resisted the urge to shake him awake, scream in his face, go for another round. His easy slumber was just one more attack on her, one more way of making her feel bad.
Christ.
Every night, it seemed like there were more cracks in the goddamn ceiling.
The dream came again.
It began, this time, at the shrine on Livingston Street. She was sorting through the wilting pink roses and dirty teddy bears, trying to find a good one to take home for Emma. These bears had been out on this grimy street for so long, surely the fleas and maggots had had their way with them? But oh, Emma wanted one so, so Susan lifted the dilapidated toys one by one, looking into their dead black plastic eyes, running her hands through their matted fur. Until a throaty voice called watch out, and she looked up, up along the dizzying height of the building, and saw the massive double stroller tumbling down, faster and faster, spinning in the air, the twin girls screaming and screaming in their seats. The stroller slammed against the pole of the awning and hurled outward in a long final arc, sailing over Susan’s head and bursting on the sidewalk beside her. Blood gushed out in all directions, great horrid fonts of blood, pouring down over her, running into her eyes and filling her mouth as she screamed and screamed—
—and woke, panting, with Alex shaking her. “Honey? Honey,” he said, “It’s all right.” His eyes glowed with love and tenderness, and she collapsed into his bare chest, ran her hands desperately through his hair. He shushed her, cooed into her cheeks. “Your pillow is soaked,” he said, and went to the linen closet to fetch a fresh pillowcase.
“No,” she whispered, tried to whisper, but found the word lodged in her throat like a marble, round and hard. NO. He unfolded the pillowcase and flapped it once, neatly, and bugs went flying, like sand shakes out of a beach towel, thousands and thousands of bugs, their antennae twitching in the darkness, bugs coating the sheets and the floor. She could feel them, rushing in every direction, disappearing into every crack and corner of the room.
We’ll never get them out—never get them out now.…
Her eyes shot open and she was awake this time, really awake. Quiet darkness. The ceiling. The cracks. It was 3:32 a.m.
The pillowcase, Susan thought. The pillowcase!
She slipped out of bed, her heart thudding wham wham wham in her chest, stepped out onto the landing, and opened the linen closet. The pillowcase, her pillowcase from last weekend, was still where Alex had tossed it indifferently atop the otherwise neat pile. She lifted the thin folded fabric under her arm and took it to the bathroom, where she shook it out and held it up to the vanity lights above the mirror. They had convinced themselves it wasn’t blood, but it was. It was a small ragged circle of deep, rich red against the lemon yellow of the pillowcase.
It was blood.
Susan, in a sort of daze, carefully folded the pillowcase back up and laid it atop the pile. Then she stumbled back into the bedroom, collapsed into bed, and fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.
14.
The next morning Susan woke with three small bites on her arm.
She stared at them, unsurprised. Three bites.
Susan flicked on the bedside light. Her bites were arranged in a neat row, just above the wrist. Each bite was raised and hard, the circumference of a dime, dotted with a white pinprick at dead center. For thirty long seconds, Susan looked at her bites.
Just like Jessica’s, she thought, and then told herself to be quiet.
It was 6:42 a.m. on Monday, September 27. Susan and her family had been living in Brooklyn for fifteen days.
Emma was still sleeping, and she heard the water of Alex’s shower through the wall. Susan flipped her pillow and ran her fingers over the case, holding the fabric closely to her eyes, but found no spots. Then she got out of bed, pulled down the comforter, examined the top sheet; she stripped it off and ran her hands along the length of the fitted sheet, from the top of the bed to the foot. Susan had a sense that this was what she had been waiting for; the floating unease she’d had in her gut for days now had been realized somehow, like a prophecy fulfilled.
The bites didn’t hurt. She pushed at them with her fingertip, scratched gently at them, traced their outlines with one ragged fingernail. The water lurched off, and there was a pause, and then another stream, quieter; Alex was filling the sink to shave. Susan felt traces of anxiety and anger in her bloodstream, chemical traces of their horrid fight and her subsequent dream running in her blood like a hangover.
She walked to the door and flicked on the overhead, flooding the room with light, and carefully repeated her search. She ran her open palms first over her side of the bed, then his side. She remembered a desperate morning from a million years ago, her sophomore year of college, when she had woken beside a stranger, whom she had fucked—for some idiotic, unknowable, drunken reason—in her roommate’s bed. After shooing the guy out, she had performed this same diligent, shame-tinged exercise, dreading the discovery, the flash of crimson, the incriminating stain.
The top sheet and comforter were piled in a heap on the floor, and Susan was on her hands and knees at the center of the bed, squinting at the fitted sheet like a bloodhound, when the bedroom door creaked open and Alex entered, wrapped in a towel.
“Susan?” he began. He was speaking softly, eyes on the floor, ready to do a postmortem on their fight. “So, look.”
Susan shrieked. Above the thick nest of Alex’s black chest hair was a trail of blood, bright red and dripping from his neck.
“Shaving,” he said, raising his hand to the wound. “Must be worse than I thought.”
Emma started to fuss over the monitor. “Mama?” she called out, half whispering, half singing. “Maaama?”
“Susan?” Alex crossed the room to stand beside the bed. “What …?”
She shifted to a seated position and held her hands up to him, wrists extended, as if submitting to handcuffs. Alex saw the bites and let out a long, low whistle.
“Whoa. Looks like we need to call an exterminator.”
You’re in luck,” said Dana Kaufmann, exterminator to the stars. “Ten o’clock today is available. Can you do ten o’clock today?”
Susan agreed readily, and Kaufmann arrived right on time, a butch, unsmiling woman in gray denim coveralls and baseball cap that read: GREATER BROOKLYN PEST CONTROL. She wore sturdy brown boots and carried a black duffel bag and a heavy flashlight, holstered in a loop of her coveralls. Susan felt better the moment that Kaufmann stepped into the apartment.
“Hi, good morning. Thank you so much for coming.” Susan motioned to the kitchen. “Can I get you a glass of water or something?”
“No, thank you.”
As they stepped into the sunlight of the kitchen, Kaufmann produced a thin spiral notebook from a pocket of her coveralls, cleared her throat, and clicked open a pen.
“Tell me about your bedbugs. What physical evidence have you had?”
“Just, uh … here.” She pushed up her sleeve and showed Kaufmann the row of bites, feeling a quick tingle of embarrassment, like she was at the doctor, wriggling out of her underpants.
Kaufmann narrowed her eyes and muttered, “All right,” as she appraised the marks. “And what about bugs? Have you observed any active bedbugs?”
“You mean—”
“By ‘active,’ I mean alive.”
“No.”
Kaufmann scrawled in her pad. “Inactive?”
Susan shivered. “No.”
“Have you found any cast skins?”
“What would those look like?”
Kaufmann spoke rapidly, reciting a familiar passage. “Bedbugs molt five times between birth and maturity. Each time they shed their exoskeletons. Cast skins look like bugs, but empty and still and slightly transparent, measuring between a twelfth and
a sixth of an inch.”
“Oh.”
Kaufmann paused for a moment, and then said: “So? Have you seen any?”
“Uh, no. Sorry. I haven’t.”
“Have you observed any bedbug larvae?
“What would—”
“Like little maggots. Or clear jelly beans.”
Susan felt a wave of nausea, and she shook her head rapidly. “No, no. Nothing like that.”
Kaufmann frowned and flipped to a fresh page in her notebook. “So what would you characterize as your main reason for requesting the services of a pest-management professional today?”
“Um …” Well, you see, I’m having these nightmares, and there’s this creepy painting, you see, Ms. Kaufmann, and …
“It’s the bites. Just the bites.”
Dana Kaufmann began her search in the bedroom. She strode across Alex and Susan’s ovular, modernist throw rug in her heavy boots and stripped the comforter and sheets from the bed in a quick, rough motion; Susan felt silly for having taken the time to make the bed after her feverish bug hunt that morning. Then, with a soft grunt, Kaufmann lifted the mattress and lay it at a steep angle against the wall. Like a security guard frisking a suspected terrorist, she ran her hands all around and across the mattress with deft efficiency, pushing in the surface with her palms, curling her fingers to run them along the edges. She produced a kind of long flat stick, like a nail file with pointed ends, and used it to probe the seams. Then, with another grunt, Kaufmann flipped up the box spring against another wall to perform the same thorough search, dancing her fingertips along the wood frame and gauzy stretched fabric.
Susan stood in the doorway, mesmerized.
At last Kaufmann cracked her knuckles, produced a small electric drill from an inner pocket of her coveralls, and inclined her head toward the black oaken headboard.
“You mind?”
“Um …”
“Don’t worry, ma’am. I’ll put it back.”
The drill emitted a steady high-pitched whine as Kaufmann disassembled the headboard, slats, and legs of the bed, until Susan’s precious low-slung Design Within Reach beauty was a neat stack of dark wood piled in the corner of the room. Kaufmann crouched by the pile and lifted up the various sections of the bed one at a time, turning each handsome piece of wood over in her hands. When she had satisfied herself with each constituent element she set it down on her other side. Susan wondered idly what kind of bed Maggie Gyllenhaal and Pete Sarsgaard had.
“You keep a lot of stuff under your bed,” said Kaufmann, without turning her head.
“What? Oh, yeah. I guess.” Susan looked at what had been revealed when Kaufmann took apart the bed: the neat line of shoeboxes and crates from Bed Bath & Beyond, shopping bags full of other bags, a couple rolls of wrapping paper, the case containing Alex’s long-unplayed mandolin. “Is that a lot?”
“Bedbugs live in hidden spaces. They feed for ten or fifteen minutes and then, when they’re sated from their blood meal, return to a dark safe space, close to the bed.” Kaufmann jerked her thumb over her shoulder. “Shoeboxes? Clutter? Right under the bed? This is perfect, if you’re a bedbug.”
Susan nodded rapidly. “Right.” She picked up a shoebox and took it toward the closet.
“Tell you the truth,” said Kaufmann, still not looking up. “The closet’s worse.”
Dana Kaufmann put Susan’s bed back together as promised, aligning the slats and drilling them back into the legs, reattaching the headboard with practiced ease. She slumped the box spring and mattress back in place but didn’t go so far as to remake the bed. Kaufmann then slid the flashlight free of the loop where it rested and worked her way through the spacious bedroom closet, sweeping the powerful beam across in methodical rows, training it on the top and bottom corners one by one. To Susan’s mind, the closet was neat and uncluttered; they had moved in only two weeks ago, so even Alex’s deep-seated natural disorder had yet to take root. But Kaufmann exhaled disapprovingly over and over at each potential bedbug hideout she uncovered with the flashlight’s beam: Alex’s tangled forest of dress shirts; Susan’s small fabric crate overspilling with tights and pantyhose; the high shelves above the clothes, stacked with sweaters in uneven piles.
Susan stood behind Kaufmann, arms folded across her chest, anxious sweat beading on her forehead. She kept waiting for the exterminator to beckon her over, to focus the beam beneath a sweater or inside a shoebox, to say, “There? See? There are your bugs.”
But the minutes ticked by in silence, until Kaufmann at last turned off the light, gave her knuckles another crack, and said, “Let’s move on.”
Across the landing in Emma’s room, Kaufmann disassembled and examined Emma’s bed as swiftly and thoroughly as she had Susan and Alex’s and then put it back together just as conscientiously. Kaufmann pawed through Emma’s trunks and bags of playthings with her large hands, entirely uncharmed by the girl’s helter-skelter universe of pink puppies and cockeyed dollies. She chased her fingers through the short fur of the stuffed animals like a monkey picking for nits; she opened the pages of picture books and shined her flashlight through the thin cotton of Emma’s pajamas.
Kaufmann was down on her haunches in the kitchen, searching the cupboard beneath the sink, when a light rap sounded at the door.
“Suze?”
“Oh, hey, Andrea. Good morning.”
“Oh, Susan, I am so sorry to bother you, but I was having this very odd problem with my computer, something about the, the network connection? I think? And I always see you going about with that laptop case, I wonder if … oh, dear—what’s … what’s this?”
Andrea’s voice got high and flutey with anxiety. In her green house shoes and flowing silk pajamas that seemed from another century, she leaned through the front door, peering at Kaufmann. “Do we have some sort of infestation? Please say no.”
“I’m not sure. We’re looking. She’s looking. We’ll see.”
“Well, I wish you had told me. I would’ve arranged for someone to come.”
As Susan led Andrea into the kitchen, Kaufmann looked up and gave her a quick clinical glance, as if making sure she wasn’t an enormous talking bug. “Of course, you’ll take the cost of the exterminator off your rent. You haven’t paid the rent yet, have you? No, I don’t think you have.”
“Thanks, Andrea.”
Susan didn’t offer coffee, but Andrea hung around anyway, hovering at Susan’s arm in the kitchen doorway, watching as Kaufmann closed the cupboard and turned to the pantry.
“My sister, Nan, who lives in Portland—Portland, Oregon, not Portland, Maine—anyway, Nan once told me a foolproof system,” Andrea said. “You’re meant to sprinkle drops of liquor all over the house. I can’t remember now what kind, of course. But I could call her. Shall I call her? According to Nan, sprinkling this, whatever it was, kills the bugs straightaway.”
“Oh,” said Susan. “Huh.”
Kaufmann straightened up, clicked off her flashlight, and addressed Susan.
“If an apartment is infested with bedbugs, we employ a three-pronged solution. First a contact-kill solution; second, a liquid residual such as Permacide Concentrate; and third, a growth regulator such as Gentrol. If those solutions prove ineffective, there are various means of escalation available.”
“Rum!” said Andrea, snapping her fingers. “If you sprinkle drops of rum in all the corners—”
“No.” Kaufmann interrupted, scowling. “Do not do that.”
Andrea left shortly thereafter, and Kaufmann requested a glass of water, which she drank in a single, long draft. “OK,” she said when she was done. “Are there any areas of the apartment I haven’t seen yet?”
As soon as they stepped into the bonus room, Kaufmann stopped.
The portrait of Jessica Spender was now covered in hundreds of bites; they lined the cheeks and chin and covered the forehead like stucco. Worse, Jessica’s eyes had lost the teasing, insouciant expression they bore in the photo, and that Susan knew
she had given them in her portrait: the eyes of the girl in the painting looked terrified, helpless, and pleading. A light gouache of tears had been laid over the pale blue of her irises.
Susan clapped a hand over her mouth and fought the urge be sick.
“That’s really something,” said Kaufmann, and turned to Susan with wondering eyes, a flicker of childlike awe peeking from behind her rock wall of professionalism.
“Yeah. I’m a—I’m a painter,” Susan said inanely. She felt clammy; a row of sweat broke out across her brow; the room was spinning before her. Kaufmann continued staring at the painting, and Susan stared at it, too, against her will—she wanted to run desperately from that room, from the house, to take off down the street, find Emma, gather her up, and go go go.
“Well,” said Kaufmann finally, and cleared her throat. “Not a lot of clutter in here. I’ll be quick.” She dropped to her hands and knees and began to crawl around the perimeter of the room, running her fingers along the baseboards. Susan stepped toward the painting, intending to take it down, roll it up, maybe even run it down the hallway and toss it into the kitchen garbage or, better yet, the stove.
Why did I do that to her? Susan demanded of herself. Her feet stayed frozen to the floorboards, her hands stuck at her sides. Why?
“Excuse me? Ma’am?” Kaufmann was talking. “Ms. Wendt?”
“Yes. I’m sorry. Yes?”
“What was in here?”
Susan pushed away a stray curl that had drifted in front of her eyes. “What?”
Kaufmann had paused in her perimeter crawl around the room, between the door and the left-hand wall. “These scratches just above the baseboards. Here. They’re painted over, but you can feel ’em. Have you felt these scratches?”
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