Bedbugs (17 page)

“Don’t be an idiot,” she muttered and forced herself to remain in the store for fifteen minutes, rifling through the racks of vintage dresses and antique costume jewelry.

Then Susan just kept walking, trudging in no particular direction, yawning, shivering, her bone-deep exhaustion making her feel like she was walking on the bottom of the ocean. Pressure throbbed behind her eyes. She weaved down Smith Street in a haze, trying to puzzle out what was happening to the house … to
her
. The dreams, the bites, the egg on her toothbrush that morning that had disappeared before she could snatch it, before Alex could see it … she felt like the bugs were teasing
her
—tormenting
her
—like they had somehow singled her out for punishment …

 … and don’t forget about Jessie—good old Jessie Spender …

“Hey! Watch it, lady!”

Susan had collided with a knot of people clustered at the corner of Schermerhorn and Court, in front of the state courthouse. They
were gawking at a woman in a bright orange jumpsuit and handcuffs, being led from a prison van into the courthouse by a trio of brutish-looking female police officers. Susan brought a trembling hand up to her chest. The prisoner was Anna Mara Phelps, who had shoved her poor babies to their death from the rooftop on Livingston Street.

At the door of the courthouse, the prisoner stopped in her shuffling progress and turned to stare back at the crowd, her eyes wide and innocent and terrified.

Susan found herself staring directly at Anna Mara. “It’s OK,” she mouthed to the terrified woman, who looked so small and fragile surrounded by the escorting officers and the restless crowd, like a trapped bird.
“It’s OK.”
Anna Mara looked back at her desperately before being led away. Susan turned and stumbled down the street.

Strange words appeared again in Susan’s head, flashed before her eyes like neon on a dark street:
not only on blood—on body and soul
.

Susan didn’t know what it was, but something very wrong was going on, and she had to act.

*

“Oh, my God, Susan! I was just
talking
about you!”

“Really?”

Susan reached the intersection of Schermerhorn and Court Street and waited at the light, running her tongue over her dry and chapped lips, while Jenna prattled in her ear. “I was just saying to Rami—do you remember Rami? He’s the choreographer on
Dignity
, and his boyfriend went to college with you, actually—anyway, I was just telling Rami all about you, and how I
seriously
owed you a call.”

“That’s sweet. How’re you doing, Jenna?” Susan cleared her throat, trying to let some light and air into her voice. “Did that show open?”

“What? Yeah. We got—there was a pretty good review in the
Times
, actually.” In the background, someone, she guessed Rami, screeched “
Pretty
good?” with exaggerated incredulity.

“Oh, I’m sorry. I totally missed it.”

“That’s OK. You’re so busy.”

“Jenna …” Susan took a deep breath and steadied herself in the doorway of the Barnes & Noble. She winced at the reflection, haunted and haggard, staring back at her from the bookstore’s glass doorway. “I need to ask you a favor.”

It was no use. She could hear and feel the tears in her voice; surely Jenna could hear them as well.

“Susan? What’s up?”

The wind had intensified along the broad stretch of Court Street. It whistled and whipped at her ears. Susan held the phone closer and drew her coat closed around her chest. “Me and Emma need a place to crash.”

She ended with a hopeful rise in her voice and waited for eager, generous Jenna to say, “Oh, of course!” Or “No problem!” Or “I’ll leave the keys with the doorman.… ”

Instead there was only silence, and the light crackle of an imperfect connection.

“Jenna?” she said at last.

“What’s going on?” Jenna’s voice on the other end dropped to a whisper. “Is it the bedbugs?”

“Oh, no, no.” Susan spoke quickly, rattling out the words, her voice rising desperately. “Actually, no, remember? Kaufmann said we don’t have them, I thought I told you, I could have sworn I told you,
and by the way thanks so much for the recommendation. She was—that was super helpful.”

Another silence. The tinny echo of the cell-phone connection. The wind whipped up into Susan’s sleeves. “No, it’s not that. It’s, um, it’s Alex. We’re having a really hard time.”

“Oh. No kidding?”

Susan bobbed her head up and down as she lied. Except, it was true, wasn’t it? They
were
having a hard time.

“Yeah, so, we’re working it out, you know, but it’s pretty bad right now. So, I mean, can I—can we—can Emma and I please come crash with you for a few days? Just till I figure out our next step.”

Finally Susan shut up, tilted her head back up to the sky, and squeezed her eyes shut.
Come on, Jenna. Come on
.

“I … oh, Sue.” The final silence was the longest. Susan felt a tear spill down her cheek, before Jenna spoke at last. “I can’t get bedbugs. I just can’t.”

Susan ended the call and shoved her phone in her pocket, cursing loudly and stomping her foot.

“Ma’am?”

At some point she had entered the Barnes & Noble and was standing at the table of new releases. A small crowd of perplexed shoppers were looking her up and down, and a rent-a-cop security guard placed a gentle but firm hand on her shoulder.

“Sorry,” Susan muttered, and pushed her way out of the store.

*

On the way home she stopped at a pet store and asked if they sold diatomaceous earth, the crumbly soil compound that was one of
several supposed bedbug killers she had read about on BedbugDemolition.com. The saleswoman, a puffy, overly made-up woman in her fifties, chuckled ruefully. “Sure, honey. You’re lucky we still have some in stock.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“You think you’re the only one with bedbugs?”

Susan felt a hot rush of shame and looked furtively around the shop. “No, I … I …” She had no idea what other uses one might have for diatomaceous earth. The pet-shop lady shook her head and grinned.

“Don’t worry, dear. Everybody’s got the darn things, or it sure seems like it.”

“Not like I do,” Susan muttered. The saleswoman cocked her head and said, “Sorry, dear?” But Susan just shook her head and forked over the $27.50 for her three-pound bag.

“Well, I wish you luck, sweetheart, I do,” said the saleswoman. After giving Susan her change, she squirted hand sanitizer into her palm from a dispenser beside the cash register. “Do you know where you got ’em?”

“No, I …” Susan trailed off, and her mouth dropped open.

“Ma’am?”

It was funny—for all her research, all her terror, it had never occurred to Susan to wonder where the bedbugs had come from. But as soon as the woman asked, Susan knew the answer. She took her bag and left the store, passing under the tinkling shop bell, clutching the heavy bag of soil to her chest. Susan marched up Court Street and turned left onto Montague toward home.

Quietly, Susan let herself into the apartment and set down her lumpy package of diatomaceous earth just inside the door. She poked her head into the kitchen, then slipped off her shoes and padded in her socks to the living room, where she found Marni dozing on the sofa, her phone dangling in one hand, breathing lightly.

“I can’t believe it,” Susan whispered to herself. “I can’t believe it took so long to figure this out.”

Marni’s chest rose and fell gently; her thick copper hair lay in a tumble across the pillow.

Every day she’s been coming here. Every day, in my home. With my daughter
.

Staring at the sleeping girl, Susan dragged the nails of her right hand along her left wrist, harder and harder, perforating the barely healed skin for the hundredth time, drawing out bright red beads of blood.

Every single day
.

“Marni,” she said sharply. “Get up.”

Susan waited a moment and then knelt at the girl’s side and shook her, roughly, by the shoulders. Marni proved to be a lighter sleeper than Alex—she jerked awake, blinked twice, smiling through her confusion. “Oh, hey, Sue. Emma’s napping.” She fumbled for the
baby monitor, which sat on the coffee table, and lifted it up reassuringly. “Poor thing was totally zonked. We went over to the carousel, and then … um, Susan?”

Susan was still crouching beside the sofa, staring at Marni, not moving. She could almost see them, the bedbugs, stage-one and stage-two nymphs most likely, invisible to the naked eye, crawling out from Marni’s shirtsleeves, up from her cleavage, marching in uneven lines. Bugs appearing from the folds and creases of the girl’s clothing, tumbling onto the sofa, disappearing into the cracks, sliding between the floorboards. It was disgusting.

“Marni, you have to leave.”

“Oh.” She hefted herself up to a sitting position. “Wait. What?”

“I’m sorry,” said Susan. “But it’s not working out.”

“What? What do you mean?”

“You’re fired. Get out. Right now.”

Marni’s eyes were wide with pretended innocence. Susan felt waves of hatred and disgust wash over her. The girl shifted on the sofa, ran a hand through her hair, and Susan saw the invisible rain of them, bedbugs floating like dandruff off her scalp. She grasped Marni by the wrists. “Get up. Please. Please, just go.”

“But why? What is this about?

Susan’s mounting distaste crested, transforming into pure hot fury. “Why?” Susan laughed once, a high thin bark. “What is this
about
?” Like she didn’t
know
! Like she didn’t go home every night and laugh at them—laugh at
her
, laugh at
Susan
, laugh at what she’d done to her. “Because you’re
dirty.
”

Marni’s back stiffened, and she stared at Susan with cold, hard eyes. “Excuse me?”

“Because you’re
disgusting
!” Susan heard the hateful words
pouring out of her mouth, a hot torrent of bitter words, but she couldn’t stop them. Didn’t want to stop. “Because you got bedbugs in some 10th Avenue motel room, or at your Friday night gang bang—”

“Oh, my God! Susan!”

“—and you brought them here. Into my house! You contaminated my home!”

Susan was shrieking now. She felt her blood pumping in her veins; her hands were clutched into fists, her ragged fingernails biting like teeth into the tender flesh of her palms. The pain felt good and powerful, clean and right. Marni was furiously collecting her things, sweeping her computer and hair-ties and a textbook into her backpack.

“This is unbelievable,” she said.
“Unbelievable.”

“Out! I want you out!” Susan chased Marni as she stomped down the hallway. “Get
out
!”

She reached past Marni, threw open the door, and it cracked against the wall of the landing.

“Fine!” shouted Marni. “Jesus! Fine!”

Susan slammed the door behind her and locked it. Through the wall she heard the muffled tromp of Marni’s footsteps as they rapidly descended the interior stairs. As Susan stood there heaving hard raspy breaths, she felt something at the back of her knees: A bite. She whirled around, slapped at her legs, trying to catch the dirty little creature in the act. Another one, this time right at the corner of her eye. She brought her hand up, pinched at where she had felt the insect, clawed at her face.

When she looked up, Emma was standing halfway down the steps, clutching Mr. Boogle, scratching her little bottom and looking
around the room.

“Mama? Did Marni go home?”

“Oh, baby.”

“Is everything OK, Mama?”

“Yes, honey. We’re fine. Everything is fine.”

She smiled at Emma, who smiled sleepily back, Mr. Boogle dangling against her pink thigh. “All right, Mama.”

“Everything is fine and dandy like sugar candy.”

*

Susan spent the next two hours spreading her diatomaceous earth around the apartment. She crawled into the closets and sprinkled loose handfuls of the stuff along the baseboards; she worked her way down the steps, layering a line of chalky soil along the joints and cracks as she went. Emma passed these hours in front of the television, enjoying the unimaginable treat of a
Sesame Street
marathon, lazing like a pasha in a nest of pillows—Susan having decided that the sofa was off-limits for the time being.

At a little past 4:30 Susan was squatting in front of the kitchen sink. The bag, now half empty, dangled from one hand while she seized handfuls of earth with the other, patting them behind and around the small bucket she’d set up for compostable material. At the sudden, heavy sound of a knock at the door, she twisted around, like a dog startled by the sudden noise, and rose unsteadily to answer it.

“Heya,” asked Louis. “Whatcha got there?” He angled his head to the bag Susan clutched to her chest.

“Nothing,” said Susan, and she took an unsteady step backward into the apartment. “What’s up?”

Susan needed to get back to her task. There were many corners of the house she had not yet reached with her bag of diatomaceous earth. She wanted it scattered everywhere the bugs could be. She wanted to decimate their population, poison their habitats, run them down.

“Well, this is going to sound …” Louis grinned shyly, like he was going to ask her to the prom. He looked down, tracing a nervous pattern on the rug of the landing with the toe of his boot. “The thing is, Susan, I’m a little worried about you.”

“Worried?”

“Well, listen, this afternoon, I was sweeping some leaves from the front stoop, and I saw that girl go sprinting out of here …”

Susan let him trail off.

“Anyway, so. I hemmed and hawed about it, but I figured I’d just come and make sure everything was copacetic in apartment number two.”

“I fired the babysitter, that’s all. Everything is fine.” Susan readjusted her fingers on the mouth of the bag, and the foil package crinkled in her grip.

“Glad to hear it,” said Louis, nodding slowly, trying to look past her, into the apartment. From the TV in the living room they could hear Elmo’s falsetto giggle. “And your little girl, she’s doing all right?”