Andrea had a free hand with the sugar, but Susan sipped the tea gratefully, enjoying the sensation of sweet burn on her throat. The older woman remained standing, leaning back against the counter with her stick arms crossed, peering at Susan over the rims of her reading glasses while they drank their tea.
“All right, young lady,” she said at last, playfully stern. “You want to tell me exactly what’s going on here?”
Susan looked up.
“Because I’m going to be honest with you, hon. You don’t look so hot.”
Andrea leveled Susan with a caring, motherly gaze. “You can tell me, sweetheart. What are landladies for? Is it—” She angled her chin upward, toward the bedroom, and brought her voice down to a low and raspy voice. “Is it Alex?”
“No. No, not exactly.”
Susan felt the rising tide of anxiety and desperation welling up from her stomach, filling her chest. She didn’t think she could bear telling the whole story to Andrea, to have one more person tell her how crazy she was being. But it was too late; she put her head down on the table and moaned long and loud.
“Oh, God, Andrea. Oh, God, oh, God.”
The older woman rushed over, her slippers shushing across the hardwood, and sat down beside her. “Susan, Susan, Susan.” Andrea patted her on the shoulder, laid her head across her back, like a mother bird. “My goodness, what’s happened?”
Susan raised her head from the table, wiping tears from her eyes with the rough, rutted backs of her hands. “It’s bedbugs, Andrea. This apartment has bedbugs, after all.”
“Oh, no!” Andrea said, her hand flying to her mouth. She looked around anxiously. “But I thought the exterminator, that young lady, said you were clear.”
“She did—” Susan stopped to blow her nose in a napkin. “She said so, but unfortunately she was wrong. Just … she was wrong.”
A tiny bedbug appeared on the arm of Andrea’s chair. As Susan watched in mute horror, the insect skittered onto Andrea’s shirt sleeve and down the withered line of her arm.
“Well, you know, Susan,” Andrea was saying, “If it’s necessary, I will of course pay for an exterminator.”
“Andrea … ”
“What, dear?”
The bedbug—badbug, Susan reminded herself with a shudder, bad bad bad—was advancing toward the wet pink sore that glistened on Andrea’s forearm. The bug would slip into it, swim around in that pool of exposed blood. Susan’s hand jerked forward, slapped at the bug. Andrea looked up, stunned at the sudden violence.
“Sorry — there was—”
Susan turned over her hand. Nothing. No broken husk, no smear of brown and red. It had escaped. Oh, God. Oh, dear God, don’t let me be crazy. She dug her ragged, clawlike fingernails into her palms and began a desperate internal incantation: I am not — I am not crazy. I am not crazy. Susan looked at the floor, and the fallen ceiling tile was still there; as she watched, a bug, small and brown like a lentil, slipped out from underneath it and darted to the pantry.
“Now, listen,” Andrea said. “Because this is very simple. We are going to call back that lady who came. No, that’s silly. We are going to call someone new. I am sure that in Howard’s Rolodex there are a zillion exterminators.”
Susan shook her head, still working at the insides of her palms, feeling blood well up where she had broken through the flesh. She knew what would happen if Dana Kaufmann came back, or anyone else: they would look everywhere, turn the apartment upside down, and find nothing.
The bugs were for Susan — for Susan alone. Body and soul.
She moaned again and trailed out into a kind of desperate hiss. Andrea made a soft sympathetic exhale, brought her chair closer to Susan’s, and draped one thin bony arm over her shoulders.
“What does Alex think?”
Susan shook her head and gulped tea, wishing it were coffee. Her eyes ached, her brain thumped inside her skull.
“Alex is not being that helpful.”
“Men,” Andrea barked. “Men and their secrets.”
Susan looked up, struck by the change in Andrea’s voice. The thin comedienne’s growl had transformed in that one sentence, dropped into a deep, angry rasp: “With their hiding. And their lying. And never there when you need them to be. Never, never.”
As she spoke Andrea looked off into the distance, out the windows above the stove at the streetlights punctuating the darkness beyond, and Susan examined her face. There was a coldness behind her eyes, a steely sadness that Susan had never seen before: the old lady was reliving some memory, something painful and raw. Susan studied her, rubbing together her bloodied palms.
“Andrea?”
“Yes, kiddo?”
It was as if a hypnotist had snapped his fingers: the light came back into Andrea’s eyes, and with a smile she turned her attention back to Susan. “Here’s what we’ll do. If you’re worried, we’ll just get you the heck out of here, that’s all. Right now. Tonight.”
“It won’t work.”
“What do you mean it won’t work?” Andrea was on her feet, all business, retying her robe with brisk movements. “Just for a couple nights, you and the whole gang, a nice hotel. On my dime, of course. Heck, maybe I’ll come with you. The Marriott, right here on Adams Street, isn’t a bad hotel, all things considered, though of course I haven’t stayed there in years. A nice hotel, doesn’t that sound just the thing, Susan?”
Hotel.
As soon as Andrea said it, the word clanged like a bell in Susan’s mind. Rang again each time she repeated it.
Hotel.
Hotel.
Hotel.
Susan stared at the kitchen table, boring into it with her eyes, picturing the badbugs working through the swirls in the wood, just below the surface. And her mind worked at that word—hotel—like a tongue works at a dead tooth.
Hotel
.
With their
hiding.
And their
lying.
The matchbook in Alex’s pocket.
The matchbook from the Mandarin Oriental Hotel.
Someone has to commit the act
Susan had laughed at herself for being so silly. Ever to think that her husband would do such a thing, would go out to some hotel …
that throws open the door to the darkness.
But, oh, he had been out so late, hadn’t he? Two in the morning. That night, that Friday night, just after they moved to Brooklyn. She had finally started painting again, and she’d slipped into some bizarre unconscious state and added violence into her art, covered poor Jessica Spender with bedbug bites. Meanwhile, where was handsome hubby? Why, just over at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, and not alone … and then she had laughed at herself for being such a shrew, a jealous little wifey.…
Someone has to commit the act, think the thought that throws open the door to the darkness.
The Mandarin Oriental Hotel. And then — the next morning—the next morning—a spot of blood on her pillow.
For as bedbugs are drawn to heat and carbon dioxide, badbugs are drawn to the hot stink of evil.
“Susan?”
Andrea was waving her hands in front of Susan’s eyes, snapping her fingers. Susan stood abruptly, and the legs of her chair scraped loudly on the kitchen floor.