“Everything is fine and dandy like sugar candy.”
Susan spent the next two hours spreading her diatomaceous earth around the apartment. She crawled into the closets and sprinkled loose handfuls of the stuff along the baseboards; she worked her way down the steps, layering a line of chalky soil along the joints and cracks as she went. Emma passed these hours in front of the television, enjoying the unimaginable treat of a Sesame Street marathon, lazing like a pasha in a nest of pillows — Susan having decided that the sofa was off-limits for the time being.
At a little past 4:30 Susan was squatting in front of the kitchen sink. The bag, now half empty, dangled from one hand while she seized handfuls of earth with the other, patting them behind and around the small bucket she’d set up for compostable material. At the sudden, heavy sound of a knock at the door, she twisted around, like a dog startled by the sudden noise, and rose unsteadily to answer it.
“Heya,” asked Louis. “Whatcha got there?” He angled his head to the bag Susan clutched to her chest.
“Nothing,” said Susan, and she took an unsteady step backward into the apartment. “What’s up?”
Susan needed to get back to her task. There were many corners of the house she had not yet reached with her bag of diatomaceous earth. She wanted it scattered everywhere the bugs could be. She wanted to decimate their population, poison their habitats, run them down.
“Well, this is going to sound …” Louis grinned shyly, like he was going to ask her to the prom. He looked down, tracing a nervous pattern on the rug of the landing with the toe of his boot. “The thing is, Susan, I’m a little worried about you.”
“Worried?”
“Well, listen, this afternoon, I was sweeping some leaves from the front stoop, and I saw that girl go sprinting out of here …”
Susan let him trail off.
“Anyway, so. I hemmed and hawed about it, but I figured I’d just come and make sure everything was copacetic in apartment number two.”
“I fired the babysitter, that’s all. Everything is fine.” Susan readjusted her fingers on the mouth of the bag, and the foil package crinkled in her grip.
“Glad to hear it,” said Louis, nodding slowly, trying to look past her, into the apartment. From the TV in the living room they could hear Elmo’s falsetto giggle. “And your little girl, she’s doing all right?”
“Yes, Louis.” Susan felt like her whole body was vibrating, could feel the bag of loose soil trembling in her hand. What the hell did he want?
“Listen.” Louis said suddenly, quietly, leaning forward toward her. “Is it bedbugs?”
“Bedbugs?” Susan dropped the bag, and her eyes shot open. “Why would you say that?”
“Whoa, whoa.” Louis reached forward to pat her reassuringly, and she flinched backward from the touch. “No reason, really. It’s just that you asked me about them. You were awfully worried, seems like. And I just know, bedbugs, boy … that’s the sort of thing people get themselves all worked up over. All twisted up in knots. Hate to see that happen to you.”
He was just being nosy. He didn’t know anything. Couldn’t help her.
Nobody could help her.
“Really,” said Susan, beginning to inch the door shut. “I’m fine.”
Susan glanced in to check on Emma — rapt, thumb-in-mouth, Mr. Boogle tucked under one arm — and returned to the kitchen. Louis’s and Andrea’s voices echoed from the front stoop, a low murmur of old-person argument drifting up through the slightly cracked kitchen window.
“… it’s a free country,” Louis was saying, “and if there’s something I can do … a person having trouble or … ”
Susan watched through the window. Andrea was shaking her head, waving a nagging finger up at Louis, who had six inches on her. The wind carried away her words, and Susan just caught scraps, drifting up through the window: “… your own beeswax … bothering me is one thing … nobody wants some old … ”
Susan scowled, shut the kitchen window, and moved on to the closet in the front hall.
21
“Sorry, will you tell me again what it’s called?”
“Diatomaceous earth.”
Alex was at the kitchen table, eating dinner. He had made chicken parmesan, and Susan had eaten three bites before thanking him and returning to her project — she had forgotten about the pantry, of course there could be bedbugs in the pantry, why not?
“And it’s … what is it? Like, fancy dirt?”
Susan, pulling out boxes of macaroni and cheese so she could get to the back of the cabinet, recited from memory what it said on BedbugDemolition.com. “Diatomaceous earth sticks to the waxed shells of bedbugs and draws out the moisture, and the bugs die shortly thereafter.”
Alex sipped his beer and spoke hesitantly. “So, what’s the story here, baby? Have you actually seen any bedbugs since yesterday? Yes? No?”
Reaching into the darkness of the cabinet to crumble out a fistful of the powder, Susan grinned sardonically. Not that I can show you, Alex. Not that will meet your standard of proof. “No,” she said flatly, withdrawing her hand from the pantry. “I have not.”
“Oh.” Alex exhaled. “Good, good. That’s good. Hey, so Susan … do you have plans for tomorrow morning?”
“Plans?” What was this? “No.”
“Well, I was thinking I’d take the morning off. We have that Tiffany shoot at 3:30, but Vic can handle the prep. I thought maybe I’d take you over to a doctor. So someone can take a look at those bites of yours — or, or, whatever they are.”
“A doctor?” Susan shifted on her haunches and pulled open another cabinet. “I guess. What about Emma?”
“Well, won’t she be with Marni?”
“Marni doesn’t work for us anymore.”
Susan knew from BedbugDemolition.com that bedbugs are attracted not only to carbon dioxide but to body heat and will strike, night after night, at any stretch of exposed skin.
And so, after Alex went to sleep that night, Susan found a pair of his long underwear and pulled it up over her own. She dug out a long flannel nightgown from the bottom of a drawer and pulled it over her head, tugging the sleeves down as far as they could go, and then rolled on a pair of woolen socks up over the cuffs of the long underwear. Finally she tucked her hair under a shower cap and, after a moment’s hesitation, slipped on a pair of thick winter gloves.
“Well,” she asked the mirror in the bathroom off the kitchen. “How do I look?”
Pretty much like a lunatic, she answered herself silently. But there was nothing to be done about it. Susan took two and a half Ambien with a cup of water, lay down on her back on the floor of the living room, and closed her eyes.
Approximately three and a half hours later, at 3:40 a.m. on Friday, November 5, Susan awoke to the sensation of being choked.
She sat up, coughing, grabbing at her throat.
There was something crawling in her mouth, way at the back, on the slippery edge where the tongue takes root. She coughed, cleared her throat, hacking like a cat. She felt the tiny feet skittering around in the back of her mouth.
Oh my God oh my God Oh my—
She stuck two fingers into her throat and scrabbled madly for the thing, trying to pluck at it, get it out, get it out — her fingers slipped across the wet surface of her tongue. But the bug was too fast, it evaded her searching fingers, danced around in maddening circles. Or, God, was it just one, was there more than one? How many—
Susan jammed her fingers farther in, bruising the back of her throat. Stomach acids rose up, burned her esophagus. Tears of pain and shock welled in her eyes.