Bedbugs

By now, she had abandoned the idea that Emma or anyone else had snuck into the bonus room and messed around with her work. She had painted the marks—bites, the bites, the bites—but could not for the life of her imagine why. Did this strange act of automatic painting represent the emergence of some cache of artistic energy lurking in her subconscious? Was she, in fact, an artist of exceptional brilliance, whose talent lay buried beneath calcified layers of ego and superego?

“No,” she said aloud, and snorted derisively. “Probably not.” A bearded dude in a Bob Dylan T-shirt, sitting with an iPad at the next table, glanced up and scowled. Susan smiled apologetically.

So, what, then? Had a ghost painted the row of red bites? A poltergeist?

She shook her head, sipped her coffee. Susan had never had much use for the supernatural, or even the religious. At her mother’s funeral, she’d knelt by the open casket, said the required words, thinking the whole time how stupid it all was. This was not her mother laid out before her, this was a broken machine, a dead thing, ready to be lowered back into the earth from whence it came.

Susan sighed. Probably she was just a lunatic. She remembered an article from the Times magazine section, from a few years ago, about people who do bizarre and unaccountable things in their sleep: punch their spouses, eat raw steak, urinate on the floor. She’d sleepwalked down the stairs in the middle of the night, Friday night, or maybe it was Saturday, added the dots to the painting, and slipped back into bed.

That had to be it.

The other thing that kept playing in her head was a vision of Louis, standing in the newly cleaned bonus room with his hands knotted together anxiously: “This house has always had sort of an atmosphere to it. Something. And well, there’s a whole lot of sadness in the place, since Howard died.”

… a whole lot of sadness in the place …

Oh, would you stop it, Susan told herself. The Bob Dylan guy scowled at her again. Susan smiled very politely, gave him the finger, and got up to leave.

On the way home, Susan stopped at Dashing Diva on Smith Street for a manicure, pedicure, and waxing.

“You bite your nails, ah?” said the manicurist, a small Korean woman named Lee with a tall pile of shellacked black hair and a frozen smile.

“What? Oh, years ago.”

Susan had developed the habit in the months after her mother died and cured herself only years later, with a combination of hypnosis and the gross pepper-spray-type stuff parents smear on the nails of their thumb-sucking children. But now Lee’s plastic smile flickered with confusion, and when Susan looked down she saw that her nails were raw and ragged, with red spots at the corners where she had chewed away the skin.

That night the family ate in silence. After Emma was in bed, Alex did the dishes, complaining several times about the “bucket of crap” under the sink. Susan had dutifully been tossing vegetable matter under there, periodically running the plastic containers down to the foot of the steps for Andrea to compost. When he was done with the dishes, Alex turned on his laptop and sat on the sofa, his glasses pushed up into his hair, his palm pressed to his forehead. Susan puttered around, sending out small feelers—“Do you mind if I put on some music?” “I thought we’d try that place Jack the Horse this weekend, if we can get Marni on Saturday night”—and earning only caveman monosyllables in return. Once she glanced at the screen and was surprised to see not a photograph of a diamond or a watch, blown up to full-screen view so Alex could scour it for flaws. Instead, there was a long column of figures, which he was scrolling through, jotting notes on a yellow pad beside him and muttering.

“Honey?” she ventured at last, knowing she was being nosy and annoying but unable to help herself. If the company was in financial trouble, if he was in financial trouble, then she was, too. “Whatcha looking at?”

“The books,” Alex said curtly.

“Of the company?”

“Yes.” Alex snapped the computer shut and stared at her challengingly. “Of the company.”

“And—”

“Don’t really feel up to chatting about it, OK?”

Susan tensed, flew up her hands, and retreated. This kind of outburst was so unlike Alex, and it confirmed exactly what she’d been thinking all that day: something was wrong around here, something had … had darkened somehow. It was more than just a few red dots on a painting. It was like since moving to Cranberry Street, her family couldn’t quite get their footing. Alex was tense and distracted; she was going on somnambulant painting sprees. And wasn’t even Emma quieter than usual, more distant?

Or wasn’t it more likely that she was imagining things, casting into the anxious waters of her mind, fishing for new things to worry about? Alex was having a rough patch at work, that was all. Hadn’t this past weekend been nice? More than nice — it had been perfect.

Things would revolve back to normal, to happy, as they always did. They had their problems — had had them in the Union Square apartment, too — but happy was the default setting.

Susan went upstairs, brushed her teeth, took a whole Ambien, and lay in bed thinking mistake mistake mistake, I made a terrible mistake.

The bedside clock read 1:12 a.m. when Susan gave up on sleep and went downstairs. In the kitchen she poured herself a tall glass of red wine, drank half in a long swallow, and then refilled it to the brim. Clutching the wineglass in one hand, she walked through the living room in the darkness, drawing up her bathrobe against an unsettling sensation of eyes peering at her from the corners of the room: hundreds of eyes, thousands of them, staring at her. Living things tracking her hesitant steps in the darkness.

Slowly, with dread uncoiling itself in her stomach, Susan pulled open the door to the bonus room and then let out a low, shuddering moan. There was just enough moonlight to see the half-finished portrait of Jessica Spender, and it was covered in bites. Dozens and dozens of the nasty red spots, clustered in groups of three: three on the neck, three above and three below the eyes, two groups of three along the ridge of the nose, more circling the chin and cheeks.

Susan barely made it to the kitchen in time to retch, emptying the contents of her stomach violently and painfully into the sink, thick wine-stained vomit choking up into her throat. She coughed and gagged, loudly, hoping to hear Alex’s groggy voice from the top of the stairs, calling down with hushed nighttime kindness, asking her if she was all right.

But the house radiated silence. Susan drank three glasses of water in the empty kitchen and went back upstairs to try again for sleep.

When Emma began to chirp over the monitor on Wednesday morning, Susan had slept for two hours, three at the most. She stumbled through the morning routine with a cup of strong coffee and a dazed expression. Alex declined breakfast and hurried out, unsmiling, at 7:25; an hour and a half later, Emma was gone, too, on her way down the steps with Marni, crying bitterly that she didn’t want to leave mommy, a performance she hadn’t put on in many months.

Susan settled heavily into a kitchen chair, ran a hand through her greasy hair, and laid her palms flat on the table. “Let’s get some shit done,” she told herself. “Forget all this haunted-house BS and get some shit done.” There was a friend of hers from college, Kerry Feigue, who talked like that: brash, hyperconfident, unapologetic. Susan liked to conjure up an internal version of Kerry at times like this, when she could use a swift internal kick in the pants. She opened her MacBook at the kitchen table and let her hands hover over the keys. Alex had asked her, a few days ago, to order a new nonstick frying pan to replace one scratched in the move; she could go to Amazon.com, read customer reviews for ten minutes, and buy one. She’d also been meaning to follow up on the first couple suggestions that Vanessa, Shawn’s mom, had given her for local preschools.

Instead, she Googled “bedbugs” and clicked on the first search result, a site called BedbugDemolition.com. The site was chaotic and unstructured, with one page titled “Sleep Tight,” one called “Ask the (Sort of) Expert,” and one just called “Pictures! Pictures! Pictures!” The webpage was amateurish in its design, studded with arbitrarily bolded paragraphs and bristling with blinking pop-up ads for exterminators and cleaning services.

Susan clicked, almost at random, on a link that said “Everything You’ve Always Wanted to Know about Bedbugs But Were Afraid to Ask” and quickly scanned the bulleted list, which looked like it’d been written by a