Bedbugs

“Oh, you know. This and that, dear. The equipment is old. Still works, but it’s old.” She gave Emma her big comedienne’s wink, which Emma returned enthusiastically.

Susan smiled. “So, Staubitz?”

“Staubitz.”

She gave Andrea a little mock salute and continued down the steps. Halfway down Cranberry Street, she remembered the person she’d seen, or maybe imagined seeing, lurking in the backyard on Sunday night, staring up at the house.

She stopped and turned back. “Oh, hey, Andrea?”

But the door was just closing; Andrea had slipped back inside.

Tuesday began on an unexpectedly delightful note: Emma woke up early, and Susan, feeling unusually well rested and at ease, decided they should whip up a batch of cookies. Emma, naturally, thought this was pretty much the best idea she’d ever heard. They spent a happy and loud half hour, clanging around the kitchen in matching polka-dot aprons, mixing, pouring, and giggling, until Alex came down for his coffee at 7:45 to find both wife and daughter flour-caked and giddy.

“Oo! They’re ready! They’re ready!” announced Emma, dancing in front of the oven while Alex yawned and scratched his butt.

Susan slipped on an oven mitt, pulled out the tray, and handed Emma a sample, which she ate in one bite before throwing her arms around her mother’s waist. Susan sipped her own coffee, shot Alex a grin. “What can I say? The kid loves me.”

Four hours later, Susan was bustling about in the master bedroom, hanging a few small framed photographs and waiting for the cable guy, when she was struck by a strong pang of guilt and self-recrimination. It was all well and good to take on these endless logistical rounds — shopping, unpacking, hanging pictures, hanging clothes — but when was she going to set up her easel and do some painting?

That’s right, mess around forever, whispered the accusatory inner voice she knew too well, arch and recriminatory, and then you never have to put your money where your mouth is … right? Never have to try. Susan was frozen in place, holding her favorite red cardigan sweater up by the arms like a dance partner; she had just dumped out an entire box of packed clothes that needed to be folded and put away.

Never try, never fail.

Susan knew what she should do: put down the sweater, march downstairs, and start painting. No time like the present, right? There was nothing she was doing that couldn’t wait. Instead, she lay down the sweater on the bed and brought its arms down and across, one by one, then folded it deliberately upward from hem to collar, smoothed the crease, and stowed it in the dresser.

Very nice, Frida Kahlo, said the voice of self-recrimination, soft and insistent. Very nice.

The man from Time Warner rang the bell at 11:58, two minutes before the expiration of the four-hour window in which the dispatcher had prophesied his appearance. His name was Tony, and he made small talk in a thick Brooklyn accent as he installed the cable box. Susan offered coffee—“No, tanks,” said Tony — and then hovered in the living room, scanning the Arts section and waiting for him to finish.

“Hey,” Tony said all of a sudden, and looked up from his squat before the entertainment center. “Wassat?”

“What’s what?” Susan asked.

“Dat. Ping. Ping. Hear dat?”

She narrowed her eyes and listened. It was very low, barely audible, but the cable guy was right: there was a light ping, every ten or fifteen seconds, coming from … somewhere. She walked a slow circle around the room, then up and down the hallway, but couldn’t figure it out. “Weird,” she said.

“Yeah,” said the cable man. “Anyway, dat’s it. Finished. Lemme show ya the remotes.”

When Tony from TimeWarner was gone, Susan grabbed the dustpan and handbroom from under the kitchen sink and swept a tidy circle around the entertainment center, gathering up the little bits of clipped wire he’d left in his wake. Before she went back upstairs, she cast a quick, worried glance at the door to the bonus room.

“Tomorrow,” she said firmly. “I’ll do some painting tomorrow.”

As was perhaps inevitable, given the speed with which Alex and Susan had decided to take the apartment on Cranberry Street, they started to discover small problems they had overlooked during their one brief tour. The face plate on an electric outlet in the kitchen was slightly askew, so Susan had to angle the prongs awkwardly to plug in the toaster. A long ugly crack marred the wall above the sink in the downstairs bathroom, and the faucet in the kitchen sink had to be tightened with unusual force, or it dripped.

And then, on Tuesday night, carrying Emma out of the bath in her oversized ducky towel, Susan jammed her big toe on a floorboard on the landing.

“Ow!” she shouted, “Damn it, damn it, damn it!”

Emma’s eyes went wide. “Mama?”

“I’m OK, I’m OK, honey.” She put Emma down and clutched at her throbbing toe like a cartoon character. “Alex, can you come up here, please?”

“Just a sec.”

Examining the floor while Emma wrestled herself into her underpants, Susan discovered a slight but undeniable gapping between two of the floorboards. One of the boards was minutely raised, creating just enough of a little cliff to jam your toe against.

“We gotta be careful here,” she said. “OK, Em?”

“Yeah,” Emma agreed solemnly. “Careful.”

“It’s not a big deal,” Alex concluded, when he took a look. “If we owned the place, maybe I’d pay someone to sand it out.” Susan raised an eyebrow, and Alex shrugged. “Or whatever you do to floors. But I mean, whatever, I think we can just step around it.”

“Yeah,” said Susan. “I guess. But let’s keep a lookout for other spots like that. I hadn’t noticed it before, had you?”

“Nope.”

Alex padded back down the stairs and returned to the living room, where he’d been basically camped out, staring at his computer screen, cutting and cropping digital images. It was a bummer to have him so distracted during their first week in a new home, but Susan understood the reason. GemFlex was a small company, and the only way they’d become a bigger one was by getting a “rep”: a professional middleman who would tout their services to the big jewelry outfits, and handle all the negotiating and billing — all the tedious busywork that had the least relation to what Alex really enjoyed, which was taking pictures. Now there was a rep named Richard Hastie who’d called them, first thing Monday, with a week’s worth of work for Cartier, shooting three watches for a small print advertisement. And though nothing had been stated explicitly, Alex and his partner felt they were being tried out, with the potential reward of not only steady work from Cartier, but ongoing representation from Hastie.

“So?” Susan ventured, hours later, when Emma was long asleep. She’d settled on the other end of the sofa, with a glass of wine and the crossword puzzle. “How’s it going?”

“You know, I don’t know,” Alex answered slowly, looking up from his computer with a tired smile. “All right, I think.”

“You think you’ll get it?”

“Well, like I said, I don’t know.” He yawned and turned back to the screen. “I hope.”

Susan returned to her puzzle, feeling a mild, prickly wash of irritation. Yes, he was busy, but it was unlike Alex not to say something along the lines of, “And how are you doing?” Never mind “the house looks great” or “thanks for working so hard to get us set up.”

His focus on this opportunity actually frightened her a little, made her wonder how important this contract was to their financial health, especially after the considerable expense of the move.

Susan folded up her crossword and kissed Alex gently on the top of the head on her way upstairs.

Even after taking half an Ambien, Susan took what felt like an eternity to drift off, and when at last she did, it was into the grips of an awful nightmare. She was walking down Cranberry Street when she jammed her toe on a crack in the sidewalk, just as she had jammed it between the two floorboards on the landing. But this time the pain was intensified a hundredfold, out of all proportion to a stubbed toe, sending wave after wave of burning agony up