They turned their backs to the railing and saw Emma streak by, shrieking merrily, in fervid pursuit of an adorable little boy in blue Crocs and a windbreaker, his hair in neat cornrows.
“All right, dear, moment of truth,” Susan said at last. “What do you think?”
“Well, I think a lot of things.” He let out a long breath and stroked his chin thoughtfully. “Did you hear? Her last tenants ran out on her, so she’s asking for three months’ security deposit.”
“Three months? Jesus.” Susan did some quick math in her head. “So that’s—”
“It’s ridiculous, is what it is.”
“Can we afford it?”
“We can, because the rent is crazy low. I mean, really insanely low. In fact—” Alex gave Susan his most serious pretend-serious face. “It’s probably haunted, right? Gotta be haunted.”
Susan cracked up and rested her head on his shoulder. She had a good feeling about where this conversation was going. “Totally,” she said. “Built on the only Indian burial ground in Brooklyn Heights.”
“Shame,” he said. “Because otherwise it’s fabulous.”
“It is, right? And a great neighborhood. And an easy commute for you.”
“Yup.”
“And, it’s got that … what did she call it?” Susan pretended to try and remember. “The bonus room. It’ll make a great studio, I think.”
“Right. Now, did you notice? No washer/dryer.”
“Eh. I’ll live.”
Susan looked around for Emma and found her right away, on a nearby bench with the little boy, chatting merrily with a woman Susan guessed was the boy’s mother. Susan pointed to herself and then to Emma, mouthing “she’s mine,” and the other woman smiled back and waved cheerily.
God, Susan thought. I love it here.
“So, OK,” Susan said, turning back to Alex. “Why don’t we sleep on it tonight, and …” She trailed off and broke into a surprised smile. Alex had his phone out.
“Screw it,” he said, grinning. “Let’s call her right now.”
Susan’s heart leaped in her chest.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. We both know we’re going to take it. So let’s just take it.”
As Alex dialed Andrea Scharfstein, Susan felt a sharp sting on her calf and bent to smack at the mosquito. She nailed it, and her palm came up bearing a thick bloody smear.
Andrea sent the lease three hours later to Susan via e-mail, exactly as she had promised. After Emma was asleep and after Alex left for a long-scheduled and eagerly anticipated game of Texas Hold ’Em with some college cronies, Susan sat down to review it.
“I’ll take a look when I get home,” Alex promised.
“Sure you will,” said Susan, and gave him a kiss as he headed out the door.
He would, naturally, be drunk later, or at least buzzed, and the truth was she didn’t really need his help. She was, after all, the lawyer. Well, Susan thought with a smile, as the document emerged from their sleek miniature laser printer, former lawyer.
The lease was obviously cut and pasted from a sample document floating around on the Internet. Across the top margin it said: SAMPLE OF A NEW YORK STATE RENTAL AGREEMENT, MODIFY AS NEEDED. But Andrea had not, so far as Susan could tell, modified it in the slightest. Still, it took her more than an hour to read through everything, not counting ten minutes of comforting Emma, who woke crying from an upsetting dream: in it, she said, while Susan kissed the tears from her cheeks, “Big Grandpa was chasing me”—Alex’s grandfather had died seven months ago—“and his face was all melty, like it was big chunks coming off of him.” Susan had no idea what could have inspired such an unsettling vision of decomposing, sliding flesh. She got Emma a glass of water and sang “Little Eliza Jane,” stroking her soft brown hair until she fell asleep.
Alex got home after midnight, mildly but pleasantly drunk, rambling giddily about the monster pot he’d won by making trip sevens on the river.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about. But nice work,” said Susan. “You ready to sign a lease?”
He grinned. “Totally.” Alex fell into the seat next to her and grabbed the pen. His sleeves were rolled up unevenly, and he smelled like cigars. “Oh! Wait! Shit. There was this guy at Anton’s, a lawyer, named Kodaly — Kodiak? Something. Starts with a K.”
“Uh-huh?”
“He said the person has to, like, promise the place doesn’t have bedbugs.”
“Well, no. Not exactly.” Susan turned the pages of the document and found the clause the mysterious Kodiak was referring to. “Here. ‘The landlord or lessor warrants that the premises so leased or rented and all areas used in connection therewith in common with other tenants or residents are fit for human habitation.’ Blah, blah, blah, et cetera. It’s called a warrant of habitability, and …” Susan stopped. “Um, excuse me?”
“What?” Alex asked with sing-song innocence. He had leaned over in his chair toward hers and was busily working his hands into her shirt, fumbling for her breasts. Susan leaned back into his arms.
“I thought you wanted to hear about the bedbugs.”
“Not so much, as it turns out.”
As always, Alex fell asleep almost instantly after sex, sprawled out naked on top of the sheets; Susan lay awake, reading and listening to him breathe softly. After knowing him eight years, and being married for five, she still could not say whether or not she found her husband handsome. Attractive, yes: Alex was tall and solidly constructed, with dark hair and coloring, and he radiated a kind of easy magnetism — especially when he was smiling, which was most of the time. But there was also a kind of roughness about him, a coarseness in his features when you caught them in the wrong light. And the largeness of his body and features, the same largeness that made Susan feel safe and protected when he laughed and threw his arms around her, was a little scary when he was being sullen and aggressive.
Susan pulled on her robe, poked her head into the curtained nook to check on Emma — sleeping soundly now, looking startlingly like her father in her open-mouthed dead-to-the-world repose — and padded back to the kitchen table and her MacBook. She e-mailed Andrea and said the lease would be on the way back tomorrow with the appropriate checks; she e-mailed their management company to let them know this would be their last month on their month-to-month lease; she went to the website of Moishe’s, a moving company she had used in the past, filled out their detailed move-request form, and pressed “submit.”
It was now 2:47 a.m. on August 16, 2010. They were traveling to visit Alex’s parents on Labor Day weekend, so on the move-request form Susan had indicated they’d like to move to Brooklyn on September 12, a Sunday.
3
The week after Labor Day, the week preceding their move, the news was dominated by a grisly murder that had occurred in Downtown Brooklyn, just one neighborhood over from the Heights. As was relentlessly reported on 1010 WINS and WCS-880, the twenty-four-hour news stations Susan listened to compulsively — especially when she was at home working on a large project, like packing — a young mother had killed her three-month-old twins. It was an unsettling crime, irresistible to the news stations because of the horrific and strange way the children had been killed; and, as Alex pointed out, because the alleged murderess was young, privileged, and white. The woman, whose name was Anna Mara Phelps, had taken her two daughters in their big black Phil and Ted’s double stroller to the roof of their sixteen-story luxury building and then rolled it off the edge, with the infants still inside.