Bedbugs

Alex squinted at it, too, then looked at her questioningly. “I mean, yeah. It is.”

“You don’t think it’s more of a brown, kind of?”

“Well …”

They stood side by side, bent at the waist and peering at the pillow, like two doctors examining a patient’s cracked-open ribcage.

“Yeah,” said Alex finally. “Actually, you’re right. I think it’s just dirt.”

“I’m not sure,” Susan said. “Maybe it is blood.”

“No way.” Alex straightened up, certain. “It’s dirt. Watch.”

He chipped at the spot, held his thumbnail to the light, and seemed satisfied. But Susan couldn’t see that anything had come off the pillowcase, nor that there was anything under his nail.

“Dirt,” he pronounced with cheerful finality and clicked off the bedside light. “Phew. Now I can go to the bathroom.” He stretched and patted Emma on the way to the door. “I mean, that’s just what we need, right? Bedbugs.”

“Seriously,” Susan said lightly, but her eyes were still trained on the pillowcase; the stain was still there, maybe slightly fainter than it had been, but still defiantly there.

Bedbugs. She had the sudden and absurd idea that by saying the word aloud, that small skittering word Susan had been trying so hard not to say, nor even to think, Alex had invited them in. He’d given the dark spot permission to turn out to be blood, after all.

Susan scratched her neck. Did she feel a small itch?

“Mama? What’s bedbugs?”

Emma had padded over and now stood on tiptoe at Susan’s side, trying to see over the lip of the bed.

“Oh, honey. They’re nothing.”

“They’re these itty-bitty buggies, Em,” called Alex from the bathroom above the steady tinkle of his urine stream. “They’re super small, and they live in beds and bite people. And drink their blood.”

Emma looked up at her mother with alarm, and Susan scooped her up.

“But guess what?” she said. “We don’t have them.”

The day bloomed glorious, with sunlight pouring through the windows, a perfect late-September Saturday. Susan put on coffee and oatmeal, played They Might Be Giants on iTunes, and led Emma through their exuberantly silly “morning exercises” while Alex showered. Then, while the girls ate breakfast, Alex did his elaborate routine where he kept appearing in different states of undress: First in just shirt and underwear; then just pants and a baseball cap; then shirt, shorts, and swim fins; each time asking earnestly “Now am I ready to go out?” and sending Emma into fresh hysterics. Susan felt flooded with pleasure and gratitude: Here they were in their big apartment with two floors, with the wide, tree-lined street outside, just a happy family clowning around on a Saturday morning in Brooklyn Heights.

We did it, she thought, plopping Emma down on the hardwood of the living room and wriggling her tiny feet into their puppy slippers. We’re here.

“Now,” Alex said, spooning brown sugar into his oatmeal. “I was thinking. Why don’t I take the ragamuffin to ballet, and then to the playground or whatever. You relax for the morning and meet us for lunch.”

“Really? Are you sure?”

“Totally.”

“Dada’s going to take me?” Emma sang, pirouetting unevenly on the hardwood. “Dada’s going to take me!”

“You’ve been working like a madwoman to get this place put together and then had to be on duty all day yesterday. Take a break.”

“OK. I mean, I still need a couple things at the drugstore. And if the bank’s open—”

“No. Sue. Chillax. I implore you.”

As she showered, Susan laughed at herself for freaking out about the teensy smudge on her pillowcase. She located her overreaction in a lifelong pattern of jumping to the worst possible conclusions. In college, for example, she had been certain on two separate occasions that she’d contracted Lyme disease, based on the scantest possible symptomatology. In her twelfth week of carrying Emma, after binging on alarmist websites, she’d frantically announced to Alex that hers was an ectopic pregnancy — a fear that proved mercifully fantastical.

Susan smiled a goony smile at herself in the mirror as she combed her hair, darkened and wet from the shower. The house is great, she told herself. The neighborhood is great. And I even did some painting last night.

She dressed quickly, not bothering to glance again at the spot on her pillow.

Susan trotted down the interior steps and out the door of 56 Cranberry Street an hour and a half later in black flats and a simple blue cotton jersey dress — a perfect ensemble for meeting one’s charming husband and daughter for lunch on Montague Street. Andrea Scharfstein was at the bottom of the front stoop, looking up at the big red front door, almost as if waiting for Susan to emerge. Her hands were planted on her hips, and she wore a wide-brimmed gardening hat, a flowing green housedress, and those crazy old-lady sunglasses Susan so admired.

“Good morning,” called Susan, waving brightly as she came down the stairs.

“Hello, hello.” Andrea squinted over the tops of the glasses. “Where’s the family? Did they leave you and find some other mother?”

“No. They’re out and about,” said Susan, thinking, strange joke. “I’m on the way to meet them for lunch.” She stopped at the bottom of the steps and turned to stand next to Andrea. “Whatcha looking at?”

“Oh, nothing. Nothing, really.”

Andrea slipped one old, sticklike arm through the crook of Susan’s arm and leaned her head against her shoulder, like they were best friends, or mother and daughter. The gesture, so intimate and unexpected, flustered Susan, but she recovered and brought her other hand across her midsection to pat Andrea on the forearm. Susan’s mother had been struck and killed by a drunk driver, two years after Susan’s college graduation. She had been on a hostel-hopping painting tour of Europe, having the time of her life, when she got the telephone call. She had cried for seven hours on a plane from Paris and signed up to take the LSAT three days after the funeral.

“I hope the apartment is OK,” said Andrea throatily, then coughed twice and turned her face toward Susan’s. “Is the apartment OK?”

There was a deep-set, unsettled melancholy under the growl in Andrea’s voice, and a sort of confusion. For the first time Susan wondered if Andrea, for all her seeming vigor and spiritedness, wasn’t beginning to slip into senility. The arm still linked in Susan’s was old but it was sturdy, yellow and clustered with age spots. Halfway up the forearm was a small open sore, red and bright and glistening in the sun.

“The apartment is just fine, Andrea. Thank you. We love it.”

“There’s nothing I can do to make it better for you?” Andrea lifted her sunglasses and searched Susan’s face. “I want so much for you and your family to be happy here.”

It occurred to Susan that Andrea wanted her to throw out a couple of problems that she could solve, that her elderly landlady somehow craved the reassurance of being responsible for someone else’s welfare. “She seems … oh, just sad, I guess,” Louis had said. “The house has a whole lot of sadness in it.”

“Well, OK,” said Susan. “Actually, there are a couple of, you know, just a couple of little things.” Quickly she ran down the short list of minor problems they’d discovered since moving in last week: the broken floorboard on the upstairs landing; the cracking paint in the downstairs bathroom; the loose outlet cover in the kitchen.

“Those aren’t little things, Suze,” said Andrea. “Not at all.”

Suze? The nickname made Susan’s skin crawl, but she said nothing. Andrea at last pulled her arm free from Susan’s, the wrinkles around her eyes and on her forehead multiplying as she furrowed her brow. “It’s an old house, as I told you. As I warned you, really. But of course, of course, I will get Louis to take a look at everything, just as soon as he can.”

“Thanks.” Susan paused, bit her lip. “I feel like there was one more thing.”

“Yes?”

The word scurried across her throat again, nearly slipped out onto her tongue: bedbugs. Bedbugs. Tell her about the—