Bedbugs (11 page)

“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.

Susan 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 “[email protected],” 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.

Susan tapped her chin and then tried “Jessie Spender” instead. This time, the first result was a Facebook page for someone named
Jess Spender—and this lead, at last, seemed promising. It listed no age or occupation, and the profile picture wasn’t a picture of a person at all—it was an odd-angle photograph of the Williamsburg Clock Tower, with a big handlebar mustache Photoshopped over it. A very cutesie-clever, very Brooklyn kind of profile picture.

This is her
, Susan thought.

They had no Facebook friends in common, but Jess Spender’s account was set to allow incoming messages from anyone.
Even
, Susan thought with an uneasy snort of laughter,
people living in your old house, who have created a likeness of you and then covered it with some kind of biblical plague
.

She clicked the button that said “Send Jess a message” and typed quickly in all lowercase letters: “hi. if this is the jessica spender that used to live on cranberry street in brooklyn, i have a”

Susan paused, cracked her knuckles. She was going to write “a quick question for you,” but she didn’t exactly know what her question was.

What about “how’s your face?” That’s a pretty quick question, right?

Susan deleted “i have a” and instead wrote “there’s a piece of mail here for you and it looks important. landlady does not have forwarding address.” She signed with her name, her e-mail address, and then, after a brief hesitation, added her cell number as well.

“Sue, I have been the worst friend in the world! Do you want to have lunch today? Can you come to the city?”

It was Friday morning when Susan’s friend Jenna called with the last-minute invitation, and Susan accepted it eagerly. The week had passed in a blur: Each morning Alex grunted some muffled facsimile of “good morning” and left, messenger bag slung over his arm, travel mug of coffee in a one-handed death grip. Marni came and whisked Emma away, leaving Susan alone in the house, melancholy and uneasy, too freaked out by the bonus room to do any painting, or much of anything else.

“Can we go somewhere with wine?”

“You bet your sweet ass we can!”

Jenna was an actress, the rare kind who actually made a living, performing frequently Off Broadway, occasionally
on
Broadway, and the rest of the time doing TV commercials and voice-overs. She was nice to a fault, a habitual self-deprecator, constantly pooh-poohing her substantial accomplishments and professing astonishment at Susan’s life—at her
perfect
child, at her
gorgeous
husband.

Susan spent the morning in a better mood than she’d felt in days, enjoying a brisk walk to the Gristedes on Henry Street to get flowers for the kitchen table and then taking her time in her
closet, selecting the right outfit for lunch. She looked forward to hearing about Jenna’s latest adventures and to sharing with a sympathetic old friend both her excitement and her misgivings about the house on Cranberry Street. Jenna, she knew, would make her see how silly she was being, how
lucky
she was with her
amazing
family and their
incredible
new apartment.

Susan left the house at 12:30 to meet Jenna at Les Halles at 1:15. The closest A/C station, on High Street, was out of service, so she doubled back toward the stop on Jay Street. This detour took Susan down Livingston, where she walked quickly past the improvised shrine to the Phelps twins: the small forest of white and pink roses, the clutch of woeful wide-eyed teddy bears.

*

“Oh my God, how
is
everyone? How’s Emma?”

“She’s great, she’s really great. Here … ”

Susan found the latest pictures on her iPhone, and Jenna leaned across the table to clutch her arm, gasping loudly at each shot. “No! Too cute!
Too
cute! God, Sue, what an incredible creature she is! I’m serious, I am so in awe of you.”

“Of me? Come on. What about you? Fran sent me the article from
Variety
, by the way. About the Lillian Hellman festival.”

Jenna waved her hands to dismiss any talk of herself and her own accomplishments. “How’s Alex?

“Oh …” Susan exhaled, took a sip of her Merlot. “He’s fine. Busy.”

“Good, good. Busy is good, right?”

“Yeah.”

There was a long pause. Susan bit her lip, ran a hand through her hair, and looked at her friend; Jenna returned the gaze with wide, empathetic eyes. “God,” Susan said, laughing quietly. “I must look like hell.”

“You look
beautiful
, Susan.” Jenna reached across the table and took her hands. Susan and Jenna had been friends for about twelve years, since both dated a guy named William Vasouvian. They’d run into each other at DBA one night, after both were through with him, and bonded over draft beers and stories of what a moron William Vasouvian had turned out to be.

“What’s going on, Suzaroo?”

Susan opened her mouth, then shut it again, smiled, shrugged. It was all so ridiculous.
Gee willikers! I think my paintbrush is possessed, Jenna! What do I do?

“Not a big deal,” Susan said instead. “Nothing. I think we might have bedbugs.”

Jenna let go of her hands.

“You have to move.” Jenna stared at Susan with an intense, unflinching expression. “I’m serious.”

A prickly shiver ran through Susan, from the base of her neck to the small of her back; the way Jenna was reacting, it was as if she
had
said her house was haunted, or confessed that she was painting dark visions from the Other Side. She forced herself to laugh lightly and raised an arch eyebrow in reply. “Jenna, take it easy. I said we might have them. We probably don’t. Besides—”

“So why did you say that?”

“Because I … oh, I don’t know. There was this spot on my pillow, and I thought …” She had a powerful memory, of walking through the living room in the silence and darkness, of
being watched
. She almost
said it, almost said, “I felt them watching me,” but then didn’t.

“Thought what?” Jenna said. “Have you been bitten?”

“No, Jenna. No.”

But Jenna was shaking her head emphatically. “You have got to move. Get out of there. I’ll help you pack.”

“Jenna. Stop. You’re freaking me out.”

“Well, I’m sorry, but you
should
be freaked out.”

The waiter set down two green salads with grilled chicken and a basket of bread. “Enjoy, ladies.”

Jenna kept her eyes locked on Susan. “I mean, you’ve seen the news, right? These things are
everywhere
. I don’t know what it’s like in Brooklyn, but I have heard so many horror stories. People end up throwing away all their stuff, sleeping on the ground, moving a million times.”

“Jenna.”

“I knew this girl, Katie Wilkes, she was in
The Weir
with me, she was
engaged
to this guy, and then they got bedbugs, from a secondhand futon, she thinks. Anyway, it caused this huge strain between them. Whole thing fell apart.” Jenna shook her head gravely and stabbed at her salad. Her BlackBerry vibrated on the table; she glanced at it but didn’t answer. Susan wondered fleetingly who was calling Jenna and felt a stab of nostalgia for work, for assignments and deadlines and pay stubs and things to do.