Bedbugs

of each small act of creation. The Mass crescendoed, the Credo, and Susan moaned with exultation, lost to the world.

When she heard the knock at the door, her hands froze. She looked around wildly, heaving breath, scared and guilty like an animal caught feasting on something forbidden. Susan shut off the music, unplugged the baby monitor from the wall, and slipped out of the bonus room, carefully pulling the door shut behind her.

Alex was at the front door. “I’m so sorry. I forgot my keys,” he said, then paused. “Honey? Are you OK?”

“Why?” she asked. “What?”

“What do you mean, what? You’re naked. You’re covered in paint. That is paint, right?”

Susan looked down. She was streaked and splattered, bright jagged lines of reds and blacks crisscrossing her chest and torso.

“Also, it’s two in the morning.”

“What?”

Two? That couldn’t be right. She hadn’t been in that little room for five hours, had she? “I was just doing some painting, is all. I got really into it.” Susan’s own voice sounded distant and unnatural. She felt exhausted; her muscles ached and her head swam. “Really? It’s two o’clock in the morning?”

“Yeah. I’m really sorry I’m so late,” Alex said. “After the shoot was finally over, I ran into Anton on the way to the subway, and I bought him a beer. He and Blondie are on the outs again, apparently.”

Susan nodded, blinked. How had it gotten to be two o’clock?

She was so tired she could barely make it up the stairs. But once she had brushed her teeth and peed and collapsed into bed, Susan couldn’t sleep. Alex, of course, passed out easily and immediately, and she lay watching him for half an hour before slipping out from under the sheets. She considered taking an Ambien but decided it was too close to morning, and she was already pretty drunk on the wine. She went to the bathroom, peed again, and then washed her face and hands, watching as flecks of paint spiraled down the drain. On her way back to bed, she lifted Alex’s jeans from where he’d shed them onto the bedroom floor and was halfway to the laundry hamper when she noticed a curious square bulge in the pocket. Susan hooked two fingers into the pocket and came out with a matchbook from the Mandarin Oriental Hotel.

Two in the morning, Susan thought immediately, and looked over at him in his easy slumber. Hotel matches?

It took her about five seconds to remember that the girl they called Blondie, the on-again-off-again girlfriend of Alex’s college friend Anton, worked at the Mandarin Oriental as a concierge. She’d occasionally gotten them theater tickets, before they had Emma and could still occasionally leave the house at night. A warm wash of relief flooded Susan — Alex had used Anton’s matches, and Anton had gotten them from Blondie, who worked at the Mandarin. Hotel matches, indeed. Moping around like the wife in a country-western song …

She slipped back under the covers, laughing uneasily at her own paranoia. Jesus H. Christ, she thought distantly, as sleepiness began to settle over her, what is this place doing to you?

It was very early in the morning on Saturday, September 18. Susan, Alex, and Emma Wendt had been living in Brooklyn Heights for six days.

9

Five hours later, Susan opened her eyes and saw a single tiny spot of blood on her pillow.

Except it wasn’t blood. Except maybe it was. The room was dark, she was half asleep, and Susan couldn’t really tell. It looked like blood. She rolled over, blinked at the glowing red lines of the clock radio, and moaned softly: 6:36 a.m. A good twenty minutes before Emma’s usual wake-up time, and there was no reason for Susan to have woken.

The spot on the pillowcase was a few inches from where her face had been, just below the line of her mouth; it might even have been a puddle of drool, but it was too small and too contained. A dark crescent-shaped speck, ragged at the edges, the size and rough shape of a chewed-off fingernail. Alex slept on, snoring and open- mouthed. Susan propped herself on one elbow, listening to her breath, and peered at her pillow. Now the speck looked a deep muddy gray against the lemon yellow pillowcase; now, as dead orange glimmers of day crept under the shades, it resolved itself into a dull brownish red.

Oh, she thought. It’s paint. Duh.

Susan flicked at the speck with the nail of her pointer finger, expecting it to come right off. But the speck stayed where it was, bled into the cloth of the pillowcase. Susan pressed at it gently with the pad of a fingertip, and the firm pillow gave way slightly under the weight of her push.

It’s nothing. Just — it’s nothing.

Susan let her head drop back to the pillow and closed her eyes to the dot. She willed herself back to sleep, knowing it was futile. At last, at 7:12, Emma began to fuss over the monitor, and Susan smiled, as always, at the sound of her daughter’s sweet morning noises. The rustle of the sheets, the give of the springs as Emma shifted her weight on her thin IKEA mattress, the first purring, hushed, “Mama?”

Susan opened her eyes, thinking maybe the tiny spot would be gone, faded like a fragment of a dream. But it was still there.

Five minutes later, Susan was crouched beside the toilet while Emma peed. She heard Alex roll out of bed, followed by a series of rustling noises and whomps as he made the bed and tossed the throw pillows in place. Then the noises stopped.

“Hey, Sue?” he called. “Did you see this?”

Crap. If Alex had noticed the spot, even in the morning-dark of the room, even while making the bed in his inimitably hurried, that’ll-do-just-fine style, then it must be larger and more distinct — more real — than she had hoped.

“Go ahead and flush, and wash your hands, Em.”

In the bedroom, Alex had flicked on Susan’s bedside reading light and angled its gooseneck over the pillow, haloing the lamp’s sixty watts around the crescent-shaped stain.

“Is it paint?”

“Maybe. I have no idea.”

Susan, for some reason, didn’t let on that she had seen it before, that she had already eliminated the possibility of dried paint. Alex made a little “hmmm” and pushed his curly hair out of his eyes. “What about blood? I think it’s blood.”

Susan winced. All right folks, she thought. Let’s not get carried away.

“Did something bite you?”

“No.” Susan raised a hand to her neck, ran her palm searchingly along her cheek. “I don’t think so.”

“But it is blood? I’m right, right?”

“No. I mean, I don’t know.”

“What could have bitten you?”

“I seriously have no idea.”

But the answer skittered across in the back of her throat, nasty and furtive: Bedbugs, bedbugs, bedbugs. She thought of the article about the co-op board. The news, in fact, had been overrun by bedbugs lately, stories of renters suing their landlords, shops emptied of customers, hotels shut down on busy weekends so teams of exterminators could flush out the infestations.

“I’m sure it’s nothing,” Susan said. “Maybe it is paint. It probably is, actually.”

Alex crossed his arms and sighed. Emma had come in and was sitting at the foot of their bed, cross-legged in her nightgown with the owls and stars, tossing Mr. Boodle gently up and letting him fall into her lap like a parachutist.

“Is it even red?” Susan asked, squinting at the spot. “Look.”