“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.
“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.