“Mama? Are you worried about the buggies, Mama?”
“A little bit, honey. Just a little bit.”
Emma bit at her pretty red lips. “Are the buggies going to hurt me?”
“No. No, no, no.” She squeezed the girl to her lap. “I promise.”
The promise was like ash in her mouth. How could she promise that? She let go of Emma’s hand, thinking that with every touch, every loving gesture, she provided a bridge by which the monsters were jumping from her flesh onto her daughter’s. The things she had read in the book were a mad jumble in her mind. The bugs were not her imagination, not the symptom of some psychiatric illness or hallucination. Something terrible had happened to her — was still happening. The bedbugs were more than bedbugs, they weren’t going anywhere, and they could not be escaped.
The 2 train rolled to a stop at Clark Street, the doors swooshed open, and Susan and her daughter got off.
24
The rest of that day, the bugs would not let Susan be.
She went through the motions of the afternoon like a robot, her body enacting the familiar movements: unclip Emma from the stroller, heave her up the stairs and through the door, prepare lunch, feed lunch, put her down for nap. When Emma woke up, Susan mustered the wherewithal to play a couple rounds of Candy Land.
Meanwhile the bugs were busy, busy, busy, flickering in the corner of Susan’s eyes, dancing across her knuckles, alighting on and off the back of her neck. Susan could feel them thick in the air around her, and she caught occasional whiffs of their tell-tale scent — a musty, too-sweet stink of raspberries and coriander. But when Susan looked up from Candy Land, or from the counter where she was making coffee and preparing lunch — when she turned her eyes directly upon the bedbugs—the badbugs, badbugs, bad bad bad—that she knew were there — she knew they were there — when she looked closer at the cluster writhing on the countertop, or at the line marching up the side of the trash can — they would transform under her gaze into specks of dirt, or twists of fabric, or nothing … just, nothing at all.
“Your turn, honey,” Susan murmured, setting her yellow plastic man on a blue rectangle, and rubbed her eyes with her knuckles until bright red spots danced across the back of the lids.
Alex came home a half hour earlier than his usual 6:30, acting as though not a thing were amiss in their charming little life. He was chatty and cheerful, brimming with positive news about GemFlex. The Tiffany shoot, in contrast to the Cartier debacle of last month, had gone off without a hitch. (“You were absolutely right, by the way,” Alex reported with a grin. “Vic would have been lost without me.”) What’s more, there had been a flurry of freshly signed clients, a big uptick in receipts going into the year’s end. But even as Alex prattled on, Susan could smell his nervousness, could feel his tentative movements; he was handling her with kid gloves, eyeing her anxiously, checking to see if Dr. Gerstein’s prescription had begun to take effect. To see if, in the doctor’s hideously condescending phrase, “the situation had begun to improve.”
Sorry, pally, Susan thought grimly as she walked slowly down the stairs from putting Emma to bed. The situation has not improved.
She had decided that, over dinner, she would make her husband understand that precisely the opposite was true: the situation was much, much worse. Worse than Susan had ever imagined.
“You’re not going to like what I have to say. But I need you to listen, and to try to understand.”
Alex looked up from his plate, a spot of salad dressing on his chin, and examined Susan through the flowers that sat in a vase in the center of the kitchen table. It was a gaudy autumnal bouquet he’d brought home from Trader Joe’s, flushed with russet and orange, but all Susan could see in it were hiding places. She knew that the bugs were slipping up and down the stems, paddling in the stale water at the bottom of the vase. Susan hadn’t touched her salad. She sipped from a cup of coffee, the last of the pot she’d brewed hours ago, bitter, thick and gritty with sediment.
It was Friday November 5, at 8:40 p.m. The Wendts had been living at 56 Cranberry Street for fifty-four days.
“Go ahead,” Alex said gently. “I’m listening.”
Susan took a breath and pushed her fingers with difficulty through her knotted, greasy hair. To have even a chance of getting Alex on her side, Susan knew, she needed to make all this insanity sound as nice and not-insane as she could. As normal as she could.
“OK, so, I found this book.”
“OK … ”
She told Alex about Cimex Lectularius: The Shadow Species, making it sound basically like an entomological textbook, very scientific, very dry and serious.
“The bottom line is, we somehow got these bedbugs,” she continued, while Alex sat stone faced on the other side of the table. “This particular strain of bedbugs, you might say. And, basically, they’re not going away.”
“So.” Alex took off his glasses and exhaled deeply. “This is about moving again.”
“No. It’s not above moving. God, I wish it were. Something very bad happened in this house. I think it has to do with the old tenants, with Jack and Jessica Spender.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Something happened. Something — something awful. And moving won’t help. They’ve got me now, Alex. They’ve got me.”
“Susan?”
She waved away his hand, gritted her teeth, ordered herself to keep it together. The tingling itch made itself known on her inner thigh, and she fought a need to scratch.
“There’s only one way to end the curse, you see.”
Alex’s eyes narrowed. “Did you say a curse?”
Well, Susan thought. So much for keeping it nice and not-insane.
“Yes, Alex. This house is cursed. The book uses the word “blighted,” but it’s the same difference. And the thing is, now I’ve … I’ve got it somehow. I’ve got the blight. I think I know how to end it, but it’s …” Her voice descended into a rasping whisper. “I don’t know if I can do it.”
Susan looked searchingly into her husband’s eyes, looking for some glint of understanding, of empathy. They had met eight years ago and had been married for five. They had honeymooned in Finland, after putting sixteen countries in a hat and both swearing to abide by whichever came out first. Finland had been amazing, a wonderland of saunas and smoked fish and dreamlike bogs.
Please, just let him — let him understand. Let him try to understand.
Alex’s mouth opened slightly, and then, after a moment, he said, “Did you pick up the Olanzapine prescription?’ ”
Susan squeezed her eyes shut and groaned, and in the silence that followed, she heard it, loud and vivid: a terrible deep hissing, a sibilant thrum in the back of her worn-out brain pan. The badbugs were laughing, a hideous insectine laughter, the devil’s own gleeful laughter. They were all around her now, in their colonies, in their swarms, massed and ready to strike … beneath the floorboards, under the sink, in the closets and the mattresses. Waiting. Susan gave in to the need to scratch, dove her hand into her lap and worked urgently at the fiery itches on her thighs.