Marni laughed and Emma waggled her head playfully, but Susan didn’t say, “Good puppy,” like she was supposed to. She nodded silently, slowly, and went back down the stairs to the kitchen.
Susan turned on her MacBook and drummed her fingers on the kitchen table until the screen lit up, telling herself all the while that she was being an idiot. Go take a shower, she told herself. Put on something pretty, get the hell outside. It was really a great area — the Promenade, the cute coffee shops on Smith Street, that row of antique-furniture stores along Atlantic Avenue. Outside the kitchen windows of 56 Cranberry Street the day had blossomed bright and blue, the kind of crystal blue you only get on crisp autumn days, when smoky clouds drift through pockets of sunlight.
Go paint something, for God’s sake. Capture the autumn light. Eat a bagel.
Instead, Susan stayed rooted to her kitchen chair, drinking coffee and surfing the Internet, her face bathed in the pale light of the screen. She Googled “bedbugs” and “bedbug infestation” and “signs of bedbug infestation,” scanned the resulting paragraphs, and jumped from link to link. She downloaded an article from the Journal of Applied Entomology, scrolled through chat-room threads, and watched YouTube clips of bedbugs swarming in laboratory jars.
“Yick,” said Susan.
When the coffeepot was empty she brewed more.
Susan learned that bedbugs can be killed by extremes of heat and cold; she learned that they hide in the hair of their victims, in discarded clothes, under beds, and in couch cushions. Back on BedbugDemolition.com, Susan discovered numerous schools of thought relating to bedbug control. Some exterminators adhered to the aggressive methods of Dana Kaufmann: contact kill, residual kill, growth control. Some advocated the exclusive use of pyrethroids; others suggested more traditional insecticides or a compound made of diatomaceous earth, which could be purchased at pet-supply stores and which, when sprinkled around the home, kills the bugs by drying out their waxy membranes.
“DDT!!!!!!” suggested one contributor, who signed himself EndsJustifyMeans. It was noted in a flurry of responses that DDT was banned in the United States in 1972, one contributor sneeringly adding, “SILENT SPRING MUCH, DUMBASS?” To which the stubborn EndsJustifyMeans simply wrote “DDT!!!!!!” again, this time all in bold and underlined.
The guy who signed himself 0-684-84328-5@gmail.com had contributed to this thread, too, writing “makesureit’sreallybedbugs.” Susan wrinkled her brow and grunted, “Huh,” when she had teased out this jammed-together phrasing. What does he mean, “make sure it’s really bedbugs”? She clicked on the signature link and dashed off a quick e-mail to 0-684-84328-5@gmail.com: “So how you do you know it’s really bedbugs?”
As she plowed through website after website, Susan occasionally scratched at her wrists and shoulder. At some point, the shoulder-bite itch intensified, and she dug a ballpoint pen out of the junk drawer and used its capped end to zero in on the itch. At 11:52, her phone rang, startling her with its crazy rattling vibration on the counter. The screen showed that it was Karen Grossbard, a college friend, who was in town for the weekend with her two kids; they had made loose plans, a couple weeks earlier, to hang out today. Susan was absorbed in a detailed explanation of the dual proboscis morphology of bedbugs and other hemipterans: one channel to suck the victim’s blood, the other to inject saliva and anticoagulant, which maximized the flow of blood while keeping the host from feeling the sting.
Keeping her eyes locked on the article, Susan fumbled for the phone and silenced the call.
Another sign of a bedbug infestation, according to a contributor to BedbugDemolition.com named MrMcEschars, was their deposited feces. “Gross but true!” MrMcEschars wrote and attached a picture of one such deposit in his bathroom: a small pile of black and brown dust. Five minutes later, Susan was yawning elaborately, stretching back in her chair and twisting her torso, when she spotted a pile of the feces on the kitchen counter, just below the broken outlet cover. She blinked, gasped, and froze, staring at it in shock.
Finally, she rose slowly, walked over to the counter, and poked gingerly at the pile with the tip of her ring finger.
Coffee grounds.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Susan said to no one. She exhaled heavily as her heart resumed beating. She was brushing the coffee grounds off the counter and into her palm when she heard keys jingling in the door, followed by Emma’s hopeful call of “Mama?”
She called, “In here, love!” as she rinsed the coffee grounds off her hand into the sink.
Her legs were wobbly beneath her, dancing with pinpricks. She had been in the kitchen, seated at her computer, since the girls left, five and a half hours earlier.
“Hey, you want to know what I read on the Internet?” Susan said.
“That the Internet is a giant waste of time?”
“Har-dee-har.”
The TV was on in the background, with Alex keeping one eye on the Top Chef season finale. When they spoke on the phone at 5:30, Alex had announced his intention to make a big chef’s salad for dinner, but Susan told him the lettuce had a lot of rotten pieces, so could he grab a pizza on his way home, instead? She was lying about the lettuce. In fact, she had seen small dark specks on the bottom of the vegetable drawer, and, even after confirming that they were apple seeds, and after rinsing the drawer thoroughly, she couldn’t shake the idea that the spots had been dead bedbugs.
“All right, sorry. What did you read on the Internet?”
“I learned that a lot of people with bedbugs think they’ve killed them — they think the infestation is over, in other words, and then the bugs come back.” Alex chewed his pizza, half listening, while Susan yawned into her fist. That afternoon she’d taken Emma to the big playground down in Dumbo and watched her make circuits from the rope ladder to the slide and back, too exhausted and preoccupied to give chase.
“They’re not like ants, where you just use Raid or whatever and they’re gone. Even in abandoned apartments, with no one to eat from, bedbugs can live for months and months. Some people say up to a year. Oh, and they can hide in your hair. Disgusting, right?”
“Yes,” said Alex, and made a face. “Actually … wait …” He put down his slice, dug his fingers into his corkscrew curls, his features convulsed with exaggerated terror. “I … I … feel them right now! Aaaaah!”
He shook his head wildly, clutching at his temples.
Susan looked at him evenly. “I need you to take this seriously, OK?”
“I am. Seriously, honey. I totally am. In fact, I called Dana Kaufmann today.”
Susan’s heart leapt in her chest. “You did?”
“I did. Could you pass me another slice of the mushroom?”
She obeyed, her hands trembling slightly. Yes! Let Kaufmann come back. This time she would see — surely, this time …
“I just figured we might as well have her come back and take another look,” Alex said. “She wasn’t too happy about it. She told me she was ‘past the point of reasonable doubt as to that particular residence.’ Quote, unquote.”
Susan smiled. It was easy to imagine the deadpan Dana Kaufmann using exactly those words, and in exactly the icy tone Alex had conjured. Alex smiled back, took a big bite of his fresh slice, and tugged a strand of cheese from the corner of his mouth. “Anyway, I talked her into it. I told her my wife is pretty sure we’ve got bedbugs now, even if we didn’t before, and my wife’s a pretty smart lady.”
“Thank you.” Susan reached over and stroked Alex’s cheek gently. “I really appreciate it.”