“There was a cat. It, uh, it died in here. Really sad.”
“A cat, huh?”
“Yes.” Susan felt the painting watching her, felt Jessica Spender’s pleading, pitiful eyes. “Why?”
“Nothing. Forget it,” said Kaufmann, straightening up. “Not my specialty. Anyway, I’m done. Let’s talk in the kitchen.”
As it turned out, there were no bedbugs in Susan and Alex’s apartment.
Kaufmann had performed an exhaustive search, “from bow to stern,” as she put it, and turned up no evidence of Cimex lectularius, or Leptocimex boueti, which — according to Kaufmann — would be even worse.
“Fortunately,” she concluded, flipping closed her notebook. “You have neither.”
“But …” Susan gestured vaguely to the notebook. “What about all those things you were saying. Contract kill, and, and residual—”
“Contact kill, ma’am.”
“Please stop calling me ma’am. OK?” Susan was flustered. How could there be no bedbugs? It made no sense. “Call me Susan.”
“That’s fine, Susan. But listen, this is good news. Contact killers, residuals, control agents. These things are poisons, and you do not want your home treated with poison unless such a treatment is called for.”
“But …”
“I found zero bugs, living or dead. I found no cast skins, no fecal matter, no larvae. I wouldn’t say it’s impossible that you have bedbugs, ma’am …” A smile flickered across Kaufmann’s face. “Susan. But it’s impossible that you have bedbugs.”
“Wow.” Susan forced herself to smile while her stomach twisted itself into greasy knots. “Well, I mean, that’s great.”
“Yes. It is.”
“Wait, wait. What about my wrist?” She raised her hand, turned it wrist up, resisting the urge to hold it under Kaufmann’s nose. “What about the bites?”
As she said it, the bites began to itch, as if she had reminded them of a neglected duty. She lowered her arm and tried to scratch nonchalantly while Kaufmann answered.
“Could be a lot of things. Scabies. Mosquitoes. Could be fleas, though I don’t see any evidence of fleas. Do a Google search on spider beetles. Half the time, when someone’s got bedbug bites but no bedbugs, what they’ve really got is spider beetles. I’m not a doctor, but I think you put some hydrocortisone cream on there, give it a week, and you’ll be fine.”
“OK. Thanks. Thanks so much.”
“You’re welcome.” Kaufmann tucked her notebook back into her coveralls while Susan opened the door.
“It’s two hundred for the visit. Tax free, if you’ve got cash.”
“Oh, fantastic!” Alex enthused. “That’s the best news I’ve heard all week.”
“Yeah. I know.”
Susan shifted the phone, jammed it under her chin, freeing her right hand to keep scratching at the welts on her wrist. The bites had continued to itch, and the scratching was barely helping.
“Listen, baby doll,” Alex said. “I’m sorry I was such a jackass last night. Let’s start over, OK? Remember that thing you read that time? How moving is, like, the most stressful thing that couples go through?”
“Right.”
“Well, so, we moved. We’re done. We’ve got a great new apartment, and there ain’t no bugs in it. OK?”
“Yeah. Of course. Bye, babe.”
“I love you, Susan.”
She hung up and looked at her wrist. With all her scratching, the bites had opened into bleeding sores.
15
Alex transferred money out of their “rainy-day” savings account to cover the rent. On Thursday night, September 30, he trotted downstairs, rapped on Andrea’s door, and handed over the check. Susan stood on their landing, listening to the two of them chat.
“I stopped by the other morning,” Andrea was saying in her gravelly undertone. “When the exterminator was here. Or does one say exterminatrix?”
Alex’s big fake laugh bounced up the stairwell; Susan’s husband was always a good one for laughing at other people’s stupid jokes.
“Susan seemed quite upset, but I gather there’s no infestation after all. That must be a relief to her.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Alex. “For me, too.”
“Well, that makes three of us!”
Alex’s laughter mingled with Andrea’s throaty bray. Susan stood, listening, scratching at her bites. She had waited for them to fade, but they’d only gotten worse: the more she scratched, the more they bled and itched, and the more she scratched. She had taken to wearing thick bracelets every day, but when she was alone she slipped off the bracelets and attacked her wounds, moaning with relief. When she wasn’t scratching she bit at her fingernails, digging her teeth into the flesh at the base of each nail. She had gotten used to the miniature teardrops of blood that would well up at the corners, and the tender swelling and mild pain that came after.
She had Googled spider beetles, per Dana Kaufmann’s suggestion, and discovered in the all-knowing Wikipedia that they were beetles of the family Anobiidae, with “round bodies and long, slender legs.” But the pictures of spider-beetle bites she found came in clusters of a dozen or more, not neat lines of three, and they were larger and redder than her bites had been. That’s what Susan remembered, anyway; at this point, she had been scratching her wrist so relentlessly that the original bites were barely visible amid the subsequent self-inflicted damage. Meanwhile, Kaufmann’s prediction was borne out: no new bites appeared, no new spots of blood appeared on the pillowcases, or anywhere else.
Alex’s work, meanwhile, was turning around. Early October brought a raft of new clients for GemFlex, all of them small, but together enough to blunt the disappointment of having the potential rep slip through their fingers — what Alex now cheerfully called “The Hastie Incident.”
Each morning, Susan carried her sketchbook to somewhere in Brooklyn. She went to the clock tower, she went to the Carousel in Prospect Park, she went to Fort Greene and sat in the shadow of the Martyrs’ Monument. She did not return to the bonus room, explaining to Alex that she was finding oil painting unsatisfying and for now was experimenting with line drawing instead. He readily accepted this bland explanation, so Susan never had to reveal how terrified she was to go back into the little studio, to see in what state she would find her aborted portrait of Jessica Spender.
“Mama?” said Emma one afternoon, after waking up from nap. “I miss Shawn.”
It took Susan a moment to remember who she was talking about. “Oh, sure, baby. Should I call Shawn’s mama for a play date?”
Emma popped out of bed, grinning. “Yay,” she said. “Shawn’s coming over! Maybe Tarika will come, too! Do you think Tarika will come, too?” Susan laughed and squeezed Emma’s leg—sweet girl. “I don’t know. Let me call them first, hon.”
She found Vanessa’s number in her phone and then listened with a sinking heart while the other woman spoke in a cool, even tone. “Susan, this is really awkward, but are you guys having an insect problem?”
“What?”
“Shawn’s coming over!” Emma was crowing, spinning in giddy circles around her room. “Tarika’s coming over!”
“Emma, please,” said Susan. “Sorry, Vanessa, what were you … ”
“I’m really sorry. The kids and I were walking past your house the other day. We saw the exterminator coming down your stoop.”
“Oh, God, Vanessa. No, no. We don’t have bedbugs.”
There was a pause. “Bedbugs?”
“We don’t have anything.”
Susan rubbed her forehead with her palm. She felt like she was going to cry.