“I’m sorry, Susan. I just can’t risk coming over — the kids—”
“Of course.”
She hung up and stared into space, the phone dangling in her hand while Emma spun around her, clapping. “Shawn’s coming over! Shawn and Tarika are coming over!”
On Tuesday, October 17, Susan dialed the number for Greater Brooklyn Pest Management, not exactly sure what she intended to say. It’s not like they had a spare two hundred bucks lying around for Kaufmann to come take a second look, even if she’d be willing to do so. When the exterminatrix answered with a gruff “Kaufmann,” Susan panicked and hung up, like a kid making a prank call.
Instead, she called Jenna, and reached her at the Acorn, on Theatre Row, where she was in technical rehearsal for the Tom Kitt musical, which was titled Dignity and scheduled to open the following Tuesday.
“Susan, hey! I only have a second. How are you?”
“I’m fine. I’m OK. I wanted to let you know I called the exterminator you suggested. Kaufmann? The woman that your friend from Actors’ Equity—”
“Oh, my God, so you do have bedbugs! Susan!”
“No. Actually, she came out, and she said we’re clear.”
“Well, that’s good news. I’m sorry if I freaked you out.”
“Yeah. Except—”
“Hold on.” Susan could hear orchestra instruments in the background on Jenna’s end: the muted bleat of trumpets, someone sawing at a double bass. “Sorry.”
“That’s OK. How’s the show, Jenna?”
“It’s wonderful. It’s really great.”
The last week in October, the New York Times ran a three-day series on the city’s ongoing bedbug epidemic: one article on the lengths being taken by hotels to reassure worried customers; one on the devastation being wrought upon secondhand furniture and vintage clothing markets; one on the vogue for “bedbug-sniffing dogs,” which were likely a scam, preying on the paranoid and anxious. Susan tried to ignore the articles, but Alex read the headlines aloud each morning: “There but for the grace of God, huh, gorgeous?”
The last days of late summer were gone now, and Susan was glad for the arrival of long-sleeve weather, the better to hide her gouged and inflamed wrist. Each night, after Alex went to bed, she swallowed an Ambien and stood at the foot of the bed for a long time, staring at the rough triangle of exposed sheet where she had pulled down the corner of the comforter. She would listen to Alex’s soft, even breathing, then force herself to get in.
Book II
16
On Wednesday, November 3, at 3:21 a.m., Susan woke to find a bedbug latched onto her upper arm.
It was perched on the rise of her shoulder, just inches from her face, a brown-black oval, looking for all the world like an apple seed. But it was not an apple seed, or a fleck of paint, or anything else: it was a bedbug, and it was biting her, actively drinking her blood. She felt no pinch, no pain, but the bug was latched on, bent to its task: It was eating her — this thing was feasting on her flesh.
Feasting. The word caused bile to bubble up from Susan’s gut, and she tasted it at the back of her throat. A monster is feasting on my blood, she thought stupidly. A monster.
She reached up to kill the bedbug, to pluck it off and pulp it between her fingers — and then paused, letting her hand hang in the darkness.
“Alex?” she whispered.
She needed him to see, to know.
“Hey.” Louder. “Alex.”
He slept as soundly as ever. She twisted her head toward the bug, watching as it drank. She remembered baby Emma nursing, the splotchy yellow infant huffing at her breast, all desperate animal instinct, tugging at her, drawing the fluid free, fat little cheeks plumping and overflowing with milk.
Now it was feeding. The bug, this monster, was drinking of her, too.
Again Susan reached for the insect to pluck it free. She formed her fingers into pincers, advanced by millimeters in the dark. She hesitated, dreading the visceral sensation she was sure she’d experience when she grabbed it, the awful little tug and release as she pried the grasping mouth free.
“Alex. Please.”
She pushed his back and then shoved it, at last causing him to rustle, clear his throat, and roll over slowly. “Yeah?”
“It’s …” She looked at her arm. The bug was gone. Her skin was clear, clean, and pale in the darkness.
Alex rubbed his eyes and blinked. “What? Susan?”
“Nothing. Sorry, honey. It’s nothing. Go to sleep.”
Alex did so, slipping back into unconsciousness, and Susan lay on her side of the bed with her heart hammering, her body awash in adrenalin. The red lines of the bedside clock said 3:27. She went downstairs to wait for dawn.
17
Alex wasn’t convinced.
When he came downstairs in the morning, a few minutes after seven, and Susan tugged down the strap of her Old Navy camisole to show him the tiny pink blemish marring her shoulder, he cocked his head, squinted, and said, “Hmm.”
And then, after a moment, he asked if she was sure the mark hadn’t been there before.
“No, Alex. It wasn’t there before.”
“Are you sure? It’s not, like, a pimple, or … ”
“A pimple?”
“Well, whatever. I think I’ve seen it before.”
Susan looked at him. “Alex. I saw the bug. I woke up and saw it biting me. I felt it.”
He sighed, said, “Bleh,” and pulled open the fridge to rummage around for coffee beans, talking over his shoulder. “It’s just … I mean, the lady said we were clear, right? The exterminator.”
“Dana Kaufmann.”
“Right, Kaufmann. I knew a guy with the same name in my dorm, freshman year. Did I ever mention that? Dan Kaufmann. Isn’t that funny?”
“Alex?”
“Right. Well, she said we didn’t have bedbugs. She was pretty unequivocal about it, you said.”
There was no way Susan had said that. “Unequivocal” was a word from Alex’s lexicon, one of his all-business, look-how-clever-I-am vocabulary words. She rubbed her rutted, scabby wrist with the flat of her palm. “She was wrong, Alex. I’m getting bitten. I think we have to move.”
“Whoa, whoa.” He pushed shut the fridge door and turned to look at her. “Move? Slow down.”
Susan shut her eyes. She saw Jenna staring across the table at Les Halles, insistent: “I have heard so many horror stories …”
“Alex, I know this sucks.”
“No pun intended.” Susan didn’t laugh, and Alex sighed. “Couldn’t it still be something else? What was it the lady—”
“Kaufmann.” It was irritating to Susan that Alex couldn’t get the name straight. He wasn’t paying attention to the problem.
“Right, right. Didn’t she say it was spider beetles or something?”
“She said it could have been. But it’s not. It’s bedbugs.” She slapped her hand down on the table, loud, and he took a step back, startled, and ended up leaning against the sink. “Alex, I saw it.”
“I know you did, baby.” Alex raised his hands in gentle surrender. He wore baggy pajama bottoms and a ratty, ancient softball jersey. “But you don’t think it’s possible — just possible, is all I’m saying — that you imagined it? Dreamed it or something? They’ve really been on your mind lately, right?”