Bedbugs

itself didn’t look safe for kids, let alone whatever power tools and flammables were padlocked behind it. Whatever Louis’s story was, Susan concluded, it was a good thing he had warned Emma away from that door.

“Everything’s OK, my love,” she told her daughter again, feeling the wet warmth of the girl’s breath as she snuggled into her throat. “Everything’s OK.”

* * *

Once they were inside, Susan told Marni she could go ahead and get going.

“Susan, I am really, really sorry about that. It won’t happen again. Seriously.” Susan glanced at Emma, who had wiped the last of the tears from her eyes and was settled on a kitchen chair, flipping through an Elephant and Piggie book called I Love My New Toy.

“All right, Marni.”

“I’m serious.”

“I know you are,” Susan replied flatly, not ready to let the girl off the hook. “Thanks.”

A couple minutes after Marni left, Andrea was at the door, her headscarf retied and her big old-lady sunglasses pushed up over her hair. She was smiling sheepishly, a girlish affectation that was slightly ghastly on her age-lined face, and bearing an old-fashioned toy: a wooden stick attached to a rolling chamber full of little plastic balls that popped and danced when you pushed it.

Emma looked up immediately. “Is that for me?”

“First you say hi, honey,” said Susan, wearily. She’d had more than enough of Andrea for today.

Andrea laughed and handed over the toy. “Now, Susan, listen,” she said, “I feel just awful over what happened, I do, and I wanted to say again how sorry I am.”

“It’s fine, Andrea.”

“And for the record, Louis is a very good person. Absolutely a gentleman. He doesn’t look like much, but he gets the job done. You’ve got my word on it.”

Emma scooted past, pushing her new popper toy, howling with pleasure as the balls danced in the chamber. Susan smiled at her little girl’s happiness; Andrea, smiling too, laid a spidery hand across Susan’s upper arm.

“Now, isn’t that the most darling thing?” she said. “My Howard, he just loved toys. He used to buy old ones and restore them, then we’d give them out at Christmas to the kids in the neighborhood. He had all sorts of hobbies, Howard did. Toys. Trains. Civil War. A man of wide-ranging and restless intelligence, my Howard.”

“Sounds like he was quite the catch.”

“Oh, forget it,” Andrea growled with sudden sharpness, waving her hand angrily, as if dismissing an unpleasant topic that Susan had brought up. “We don’t have to talk about him.”

Whoa, thought Susan. What just happened?

But just as quickly as the overlay of anger had entered Andrea’s voice, it disappeared, and the old lady grinned engagingly. “Anyway, I thought Emma would like the toy.”

On cue, Emma crashed the push-toy into the kitchen wall, squealed with delight, and executed a wobbly three-point turn. “Thanks, Andrea. It’s really very sweet.”

Andrea waved away the thanks. “Just one more thing. About the basement.”

“I know. Stay out of the basement. We got it.” She needed to get Emma her lunch and put her down for a nap. The truth was, Susan felt like she could use a little nap of her own.

“No, it’s just, I keep forgetting to mention. Go ahead and bring any biodegradable trash to the bottom of the stoop, or even just outside my door, downstairs. Fruit and veggie peels, eggshells, teabags, coffee grounds. I’ll take it down to the basement for composting.”

“Sure, Andrea. That’s fine.”

“And that’s just one more reason we want the little one to steer clear of the basement. Stinks something awful, it really does. Two big fifty-five-gallon drums of decaying trash. No fit playground for our little duck, right?”

“Right.”

After she had tucked Emma in for her nap, Susan paused at the window to close the shade and saw Louis on his hands and knees at the edge of the garden. He was hunched over and drenched in sweat, grunting with the effort of tugging free the weeds. She watched for a moment, to see if he’d look up, but he did not.

Susan tugged down the shade, whispered “good nap” to Emma, and shut the door.

6

Marni, no doubt shaken by Susan’s anger and thinking her gig might be on thin ice, showed up the following morning at 8:22 with a comprehensive vision for the day. “I thought, as long it’s still so hot, I could take Emma down to that park at the end of Atlantic Avenue, the one that’s got all the water slides and sprinklers?”

“Sure.” Susan smiled at Marni’s puppy-dog eagerness to please. She hoped she hadn’t been too harsh with her the day before.

“And we can get lunch out, if it’s OK?” Marni’s auburn hair was swept up in a thick pile on top of her head. “My friend Lucy, who sits for these twins in Park Slope, told me about this place right on Atlantic called the Moxie Spot, where you can get grilled cheese, sweet-potato fries, that kind of stuff.”

“Sounds good to me,” said Susan, brushing a tangle out of Emma’s hair with her Dora the Explorer brush. “Does that sound good to you, Emma Loo Hoo?”

It sounded very good to Emma, judging by the speed with which she bolted up the stairs to get ready, Marni chasing after to find her swimsuit.

“Lots of sunscreen, please!” Susan called up the steps.

When the girls had gone, Susan put her coffee cup in the sink and stood motionless in the kitchen for a long moment, looking out the window. On Cranberry Street, the first leaves were beginning to turn, with striking bursts of orange appearing amid the clusters of green. A squirrel leaped daringly from an upmost branch to a telephone line, sending a shower of acorns down from the tree and a ripple down the line.

This was it. There was nothing else to do. Small tasks, of course, still clung stubbornly on the to-do list: she needed a couple new coat hangers to replace those broken in the move, for example, and at some point she would need to dig out a flathead screwdriver and tighten that loose outlet cover above the kitchen counter, or get Alex to do it. But all the big things and urgent things had been accomplished. Their renter’s insurance policy and newspaper delivery and banking statements had been transferred to the new address; the shower curtains and mirrors had been hung; the furniture was in place and all the lamps had been reunited with their bulbs.

Susan took a deep breath and strode down the long front hallway like a toreador. There was a single box still sitting unopened beside the doorway to the bonus room; inside were her brushes, rolled-up canvases, and a fresh tin of oil paints. She lifted the box, tucked it under one arm, and pulled open the door. A strong reek of cat piss, warm and cloying, came rolling out, and Susan coughed.

“Oh, God,” she said, pinching closed her nose. “What the hell?”

Susan put down the box and sniffed again, gingerly, then recoiled and clamped her hand over her face. It was urine, definitely, a thick gross cloud of pee-stink, coming in waves from the bonus room. How could she not have noticed a smell like that before? And then Susan remembered the fleeting moment when she had noticed it, when her powerful, almost supernatural tug of love for the apartment had been briefly troubled by a bad smell from this room. But it couldn’t have been as strong as this, could it? Had something happened since they moved in?

Wouldn’t that just serve her right: while she was procrastinating, avoiding her supposedly beloved art, some ungodly stench had been festering in her beautiful new studio.

It’s my own fault! Susan thought, banging her fists against her thighs. My own fault!

Tears trembled in her eyes, and she ordered herself to chill. It’s just not that big a deal. Breathing through her mouth, Susan walked briskly across the bonus room and opened the window. It slid up easily, but then the top of the window banged against the frame, and it slid right back down.

“Oh, come on,” Susan muttered. She tried again, sliding the window up and watching it sail back down