Bedbugs

from the open cut on Andrea’s arm into the shattered wreck of Dana’s face, like a child cannonballing into a swimming pool.

Dana’s broken frame sunk to the floor, and Andrea Scharfstein looked up at Susan with a daffy grin. “Oh, dear,” she said, clucking. “What a shame, what a shame.”

The bugs appeared from everywhere at once: they poured from the loose electrical outlet; they swarmed up out of the floorboards; vomited up from the sink. Susan raced for the knife block and slipped on the fallen ceiling tile, still lying at an odd angle in the center of the kitchen floor. Her foot danced out from under her and she landed with a painful, spine-rattling thud, sunny-side up on the kitchen floor. Spots flickered before her eyes while badbugs advanced from all directions.

Andrea was coming, too, padding toward Susan in her god-awful lime green house shoes, step by step. The bugs crawled up and down Susan’s arms in exultant figure eights. Susan felt them in her hair.

* * *

Though Susan’s body was weak and frail, it nevertheless took Andrea a full half hour to drag her down the long hallway into the living room, and then across the room to the air shaft. At last she made it and then, with a slippered heel, managed to kick open one of the windows lining the shaft. Cold air whistled into the room, and a moment later Susan heard the distant crash of glass hitting the basement floor.

“Now, listen, dear,” Andrea said, bending over Susan. “This is going to hurt. And there will definitely be some blood. Actually, if I’m being totally honest, there will be a lot of blood.” Andrea grimaced apologetically, her thin tight face a map of lines and spots. “But the thing is, dear, that’s how they want you.”

Andrea lifted her just far enough to get her up and over the sill and shoved her into the air shaft. As she tumbled down two floors to the basement, Susan imagined herself as a baby carriage, spinning end over end, filled with blood, about to burst on the floor below.

29

The pain was terrible. It radiated upward from the lower part of her body, from her legs and her pelvis.

Susan could not actually see the lower part of her body. Or anything, really. She was propped upright, somehow, and could move her head around a little, but not enough to look down. And anyway, it was dark. Terribly dark. But she could feel it, that was for certain. She could feel the pain, searing and intense, wave upon wave of agonizing pain radiating up from her legs. They were broken, she was sure of that. She tried, tentatively, to move them, and the waves of pain doubled, crested. Her right kneecap was facing the wrong way, is what it felt like. Her left leg she could not feel at all.

Next Susan became aware of the stench. Wherever she was—the trunk of a car? stuffed upright in a hole somewhere? — it smelled awful. The smell filled her nose and mouth, stung her eyes with tears. It was like the hot rancid odor that trails after trash trucks, that lifts from the muggy city streets on scorching August mornings: a reek of garbage and shit and death and decay. The smell was all around her. She was inside it.

She could move her shoulder and her arms. The joints were stiff and resistant, but they moved. She wiggled her fingers and they moved through something, something loose and slippery, crumbling.

Garbage — she was buried in garbage. She pushed her fingers around her, expanding the radius of discovery: soil and dirt. Hunks of slimy, roughly textured vegetable matter, slippery shreds and waxy peels, crumbling wet hunks of what felt like cardboard.

Oh, Susan thought simply. I’m in the compost bin.

She extended her fingertips as far as they would go, swimming them through the clustered muck, and they brushed against walls of hard plastic. She reached up, wincing as the joints in her shoulders cracked, and touched the lid of the bin above her head. She was able to raise the lid the tiniest bit before it fell closed again.

Slowly, she lowered her hands again, and they brushed against flesh. Susan screamed. As she screamed, Susan stared forward, and her eyes had adjusted to the darkness enough to see that Jessica Spender was staring back at her, her eyes wide open, bugs crawling across the milky flesh of the eyeballs.

Susan screamed and screamed and screamed, the stench of rotting trash filling her mouth and rolling like fog down into her lungs.

In time, Susan stopped screaming, lapsed into a low animal moan, and then into terrified silence.

The minutes rolled past.

There was nothing to do, nothing to think. She couldn’t move. She kept her eyes closed, rather than stare into the dead eyes of Jessica Spender. But with her eyes closed, she imagined the body of Dana Kaufmann, slowly being covered over with gleeful triumphant bugs, her blood leaching onto the kitchen floor, a bloodsucker’s feast.

Susan flickered in and out of consciousness, her head lolling forward on occasion, then jerking back up when her mouth sank below the line of the garbage. The pain, which had been so sharp when she woke, dampened to a low constant ache. In time, Susan began to feel a strange fondness for this pain, radiating up from the wreckage of her legs: it distracted her from the itching, rashy sensation that had been her constant preoccupation for so long. It was a different kind of pain, and for that she felt a perverse gratitude.

She waited, not knowing what she was waiting for. Andrea had stuffed her in here and gone somewhere — but would she be coming back? One thing she knew was that Dana Kaufmann, poor, dead Dana, had been very wrong. So had Alex, and so had stupid Dr. Lucas Gerstein. Pullman Thibodaux was right, lunatic or not. The badbugs were real, though they had come to 56 Cranberry Street long ago … before Susan and Alex, before Jessica and Jack.

Susan eyes slipped closed. She didn’t care. She wanted to die.

Except for Emma. Oh, my dear little darling girl, Susan thought, and slipped away again.

Susan did not die.

Sometime later — there was no time in here, no sense of time, only dull pain and stretches of sort-of sleep, and the smell — Susan heard the door. Heavy wood dragging against unfinished concrete with a dismal, echoing scrape. The strange small door that led from beneath the stoop into the basement. Susan’s heart began to pound. Let it be anyone, she thought. Anyone but her.

“Please …” Susan croaked, her voice thin and broken, the metal scritch of a broken spring. “Please, help.”

The lid of the compost bin yawned open, and Andrea’s wrinkled old face, with the cat’s-eye glasses balanced on the end of her nose, hovered into view above Susan’s eye line, like a horrid bizarro-world sun rising on the horizon. Andrea made kind of a tsk-tsk noise, a parent disappointed at her daughter’s dirty dorm room.

“I didn’t mean for any of this to happen,” Andrea began abruptly, “So don’t go around blaming me.”

“Andrea,” Susan managed. “Andrea, please.”

Still holding up the lid with one hand, Andrea removed her glasses with the other, and Susan saw in her eyes that steely faraway look, the one she’d seen last night … or was it last week? Whenever Andrea had come for help with her phone. Except that’s not why she came. She came to make sure you didn’t leave. To remind you of the hotel. To make sure you drove Alex away, to get you alone—

“Andrea, please.”

“If you must blame someone, blame Howard. Forty-six years we were married!”

“Please. My daughter, Andrea.”

“Forty-six years!”

Andrea propped the lid open with a hunk of two-by-four and walked away, her face disappearing from Susan’s view. But she kept talking, the sound of her voice now drifting to Susan from the far side of the room.

“Can you imagine how it felt to be told, after all those years, that he is not in love with you anymore? That he is now in love with your neighbor? With stupid Norma Frohm? That he has been making love with her, every Saturday afternoon he has been making love with her, while you are at the grocery store, for seventeen years?”