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.