Bedbugs

1

“Hey, Al. Come look at this one.”

Susan Wendt studied the screen of her MacBook while her husband, Alex, paused the DVR and walked over to the kitchen table. He read the Craigslist ad over her shoulder and delivered a quick verdict: “Bull crap.” He cracked his knuckles and scootched behind her to get to the fridge. “It’s total bull crap, baby.”

“Hmm. Maybe.”

“Gotta be. You want?”

He held up a Brooklyn Lager by the neck and waggled it back and forth. Susan shook her head, scanning the Craigslist ad with a slight frown. Alex opened the beer and went to crouch beside her. “It’s one of those where the broker lures you in and then goes, ‘Oh that place? That place got taken yesterday! How about this one? Rent is joost a leeeeedle beeeet more expensive.…’ ” He slipped into a goofy gloss on the thick Brazilian accent of the most recent broker to take them on a wild-goose chase through half of south Brooklyn. Susan laughed.

“But wait,” she said, pointing at the screen again. “It’s not a broker. See? ‘For rent by owner.’ ”

Alex raised his eyebrows skeptically, took a swallow of the beer, and wandered back to the TV.

Their apartment search, now two and a half months old, had been her thing more than his all along. He felt that their current place, a one-bedroom-plus-office-nook off Union Square, was perfect. Or, if not perfect, then at least perfectly fine. And the idea of moving, the logistics and the packing and the various expenditures — it all made him want to tear his own head off. Or so he rather vividly expressed it.

“Plus,” Alex had argued, “I’m not sure this is the time to jack up our rent.”

Susan had been calm but insistent: it was time. It was time for Emma to have a proper bedroom, one that wasn’t a converted office nook; time for Susan to have a place to set up her easel and paints; time for Alex to have a real kitchen to cook his elaborate meals. “And rents are a heck of a lot lower than they used to be, especially in Brooklyn. Besides, Alex,” she had concluded, making a blatant appeal to his vanity, “you’re doing really well right now. Come on. We can just look, right?”

Alex had relented, and “just looking” rapidly escalated into a full-on search. Every evening that summer, after Emma had her bath and went to bed, while Alex settled in for his nightly dose of god-awful reality television, Susan trolled Craigslist and Rentals.com and the Times real estate section, entering rents and square footage and broker’s phone numbers on a master spreadsheet dotted with hyperlinks. On the weekends the family tromped from open house to open house, from Fort Greene to Boerum Hill, clutching cups of deli coffee and informational folders from Corcoran, pushing Emma in her bright-pink Maclaren stroller.

They’d found places they loved for way too much, places in their price range that they hated, and, for occasional variety, places they couldn’t afford and hated anyway. Last weekend they’d schlepped all the way to Red Hook, riding the F train to Smith and Ninth and then the B61 the rest of the way. The apartment they’d seen there, a converted artists’ loft on Van Brunt Street, was Susan’s favorite so far. It was footsteps from Fairway, cater-corner from a hipster bakery famous for its salted-caramel tarts, and featured a master bedroom with a thin slice of East River view.

But the apartment was forty-five minutes from the city, and with no utilities included it was just north of their budget.

“We really can’t push it on price,” Alex said, shaking his head. “Especially with you not working right now.”

Susan had smiled tightly, hiding her deep disappointment at his veto. She’d been increasingly and painfully aware, as the apartment search continued, that she had little leverage on the question of cost. It was true — she wasn’t working just then, a state of affairs Alex had totally supported, but it didn’t give her a lot of leeway on rent. She carefully transcribed the details of the “for rent by owner” Craigslist ad into the spreadsheet on her MacBook. They hadn’t even looked in Brooklyn Heights, because — well, what the hell for? No one was renting two-bedrooms in the Heights for under four thousand dollars a month, recession or not. No one except (Susan copied the name carefully from the ad) Andrea Scharfstein, who was offering the top two floors of her Cranberry Street brownstone: “1300 sq. ft., 2BR 2B, d/w, ample closets.” All for a startling $3,550.

“Thirty-five-fifty?” Alex snorted, fast-forwarding through a commercial break. “Bull crap, baby. Guaranteed.”

When Alex, Susan, and Emma arrived on Cranberry Street a little before their scheduled appointment at 10:30 the next morning, Andrea Scharfstein was waiting for them on the top step of her front stoop, reading the Sunday New York Times and sipping tea from a big yellow mug with the WNYC logo blazoned on the side. As they approached, their pink stroller bouncing over the uneven slate of the sidewalk, Andrea folded the newspaper and stood squinting down at them with her hands on hips: a thin and frail old woman with a big cloud of curly steel-gray hair, wearing a sixties-fabulous peach sundress, a gauzy taupe shawl, and big chunky bracelets on both wrists.

“Look at this! Right on time,” she said approvingly, glancing down at her watch. Susan unbuckled Emma and scooped her out so Alex could fold the Maclaren. “I like you people already.”

“Hi!” called Emma, climbing the tall steps with an exaggerated, marching stride, clinging to the banister. “I’m Emma.”

“Of course you are, dear! And a lovelier specimen of Emma I’ve never seen. Did you pick your name?”

“No!” Emma giggled. “My mama and dada picked it.”

“Good for them. My name is Andrea.”

Alex followed Emma, steadying her with a hand at the small of her back, while Susan lingered at the bottom, taking in the facade. The house at 56 Cranberry Street had steep concrete front steps, ascending from a little black wrought-iron gate to the oversized front door, which was painted in a rich and pleasing orangey red. Surrounding the stoop was a front garden, overgrown with azaleas, crab grass, and small flowering trees. The house itself was red brick, with wooden shutters framing neat lines of windows, three per floor. There were window boxes, growing what looked like herbs, in the windows of the first-floor apartment — Andrea’s apartment.

I bet it has pressed-tin ceilings, thought Susan, and then — suddenly, fiercely—I really want to live here. She teased herself as she caught up with Emma and Alex at the top of the steps.

Down, girl. You wanna see the inside first?

“You folks move quickly, I’ll give you that,” said Andrea Scharfstein, shaking their hands briskly. “You called maybe five minutes after I wrote that ad. Or what am I supposed to say? After I ‘posted’ it. Anyway, ten minutes, at the most.” Andrea’s hand in Susan’s was dry and papery. She spoke quickly, with a voice that was thin and the slightest bit gravelly, like she was on the verge of a cough. Beneath the bushy mass of hair, her face was a map of small lines and spots — from her face and body, which was slight and stooped, Susan would have put Andrea at seventy or older. But there was a sharpness and snap about her movements, a vigor that defied her physical appearance.

“Well, follow me, this way, here we go,” Andrea said briskly, turning the handle of the big front door and leaning into it with a thin shoulder. Susan was fleetingly and pleasantly reminded of Willy Wonka leading the wide-eyed contest winners into his chocolate factory for the first time. “Grab that mug for me, Alex. Is it Alex? It is, yes? If I leave a mug out here with even a drop of tea in it, we’ll have ants in no time.”

Emma trotted fearlessly inside, a step ahead of Andrea, looking around in the dimly lit downstairs landing. “Is this your house?” she asked.

“It is,” answered Andrea, patting the girl on the head. “What do you think?”

“It’s really good.”

Andrea took Emma’s hand and helped her up the interior stairs to the second-floor landing. I want to live here, Susan thought again, almost defiantly, and this time she didn’t bother to chastise herself. Instead she glanced at Alex, who had paused beneath the one dusty light fixture, a cheap chandelier shedding haphazard illumination on the stairwell. Susan felt like she could read his mind — he was cataloging flaws, looking for reasons to reject this charming and quaint old house. The stone of the stoop is slightly crumbling; the paint on the door is chipped and fading.

Susan didn’t care. This was where she wanted to live.

The interior stairway led one flight up and ended at a small carpeted landing with a single door.

“It doesn’t say ‘number two’ on the door,” said Andrea. “I hope that doesn’t bother you. You’d have to be pretty stupid not to find your own apartment. You just come in, come up the stairs.” Susan laughed politely, and Andrea smiled gently at her. “It was one big house, of course, until I lost my husband, Howard. I suppose it’s possible I’m still resistant to the change.”

As Andrea cleared her throat noisily and led them inside, Susan wondered how long ago that change had occurred; how many other tenants had there been? There was something about Andrea that suggested the sturdy, independent spirit of a longtime widow. Following her bent back down the long front hallway of the apartment, Susan felt a wave of sympathy for this woman, smart and lively as she was, growing old and dying here alone.

The door opened onto a hallway that ran lengthwise down the entire apartment, and featured not one but two coat closets. The expansive hallway ended, on the Cranberry Street side, in a bright and cozy kitchen, with granite countertops and a decent, if not overwhelming, amount of pantry space. “So the kitchen’s not eat-in?” asked Alex, and shot a significant look over Andrea’s head, which Susan could easily translate: not a lot of space for cooking.…

Susan just smiled. The kitchen in their current apartment was so small, the refrigerator and oven couldn’t be used at the same time, because the doors banged into each other. She ran her fingers along the countertops and crouched to open and close the cupboards while Emma played don’t-step-on-the-crack on the hardwood floor. Above the stove a pair of windows faced onto Cranberry Street, filling the room with gorgeous midmorning sunlight that cast the floorboards in lustrous browns.

“Floor’s maybe a little uneven,” Alex noted, crouching to run his palms disapprovingly along the ground.

Andrea shrugged. “Yes, yes. Actually, Howard was meaning to redo the floors in the whole place, but somehow we never had time.” Alex nodded as he straightened. Susan glanced down; the floors looked A-OK to her.

“This building was first constructed in 1864, the same year as the Brooklyn Bridge. But it’s a solid old thing, and it’s got plenty of character. Much like myself.” She gave Alex a broad, almost vaudevillian wink, then brayed throaty laughter. Alex smiled politely and gave Susan another meaningful glance: We’re sure we want this old loon as a landlord? But Susan ignored him and laughed along with Andrea. Emma, too, squealed and hid her mouth behind her hands — at three and a half years old, she loved jokes, even when she had no idea what they were about.

“Oh, by the way, in case you happen to care, the ceiling?” Andrea gestured upward with a thumb. “That’s pressed tin.”

2

If Susan had any doubts about the apartment, the thing that sold her on it, absolutely and irrevocably — what made her certain in the core of her being that she had to live at 56 Cranberry Street #2—was the bonus room.

At the opposite end of the apartment’s first floor from the kitchen, back down the long entrance hallway and through an arch framed by two funky old-fashioned sconces, was the living room, spacious and irregularly rectangular, with light flooding in from two big back windows. The center of the far wall bulged into the room like a semicircular column; it was an odd architectural detail, and at first Susan thought there might be a pillar behind it. Closer inspection revealed it to be an air shaft, separating 56 Cranberry Street from the house next door. It even had two decent-size windows, which let in yet more light.

“Very strange, I know,” said Andrea of the shaft, tapping on one of its windows with a big costume-jewelry gold ring she wore on her pinky. “It runs from the roof all the way down to the basement. You’ll see when we go upstairs, it cuts through the bathroom up there. Lots of light, though, lets in lots of light.”

“Cool,” said Susan, and Alex peered through one of the windows, craning his neck to look up and down the shaft.

“My best guess is, it was a dumbwaiter when this house was first built,” Andrea continued. “Run drinks from the kitchen up to the second floor, that sort of thing. One time a bird got in there somehow and couldn’t get out. Flapped around and made the most pitiful noises until it died. Awful. Just awful.”

Even Alex couldn’t criticize the living room, considering their current apartment didn’t even have one. While Andrea stood with hands on hips in the archway and Emma walked the room’s periphery, playing some complicated game of counting steps, Susan slipped next to him and squeezed his hand.

“What are you thinking?” she whispered.

Before he could respond, Andrea strode across the room and pulled open a door in the left rear corner — a small door, painted the same color as the wall, so innocuous that Susan hadn’t even realized it was there.

“Back here is this funny little room,” she said, gesturing them over for a look. “I call it the bonus room, because it’s sort of, you know, a bit of something extra. It’s what we would have called the ‘sewing room,’ when I was a child. Of course, when I was a child we were sewing sweaters for our pet dinosaurs.”

“Pet dinosaurs!” Emma shrieked, raising her hands to her mouth in exaggerated amazement. “Whaaaat?!”

“This one, I like,” said Andrea, patting Emma on the head while Alex smiled.

Susan stepped into the bonus room. It was barely a room at all, really, more of an overgrown closet, with the one door and a single window, letting in a steady and unbroken stream of golden light.

This is it, Susan thought, experiencing such a powerful wave of joy that she had to clamp her hands to her mouth to keep from whooping aloud. This is it!

She’d had second thoughts galore since leaving her job last year. Second thoughts, third thoughts, and more — it seemed so audacious, so unrealistic, so selfish, after all this time to abandon her career and “go back to her painting.” But she had done it. She had worked up the nerve to tell Alex what she was considering and found him to be not only understanding, but incredibly supportive: “Of course,” he’d said. “If that’s what you want, we’ll make it work.” She’d given her notice and gone to Sam’s to supply herself with new brushes, new oils and pastels and turpentine. And then … somehow, the subsequent months had flown by, and Susan found one reason after another to put off starting. She’d gotten involved in a friend’s run for city council, spent a month going door to door with pamphlets, collecting signatures; Emma had been seriously ill for five days, ended up at New York-Presbyterian one harrowing night with an IV line; they’d gone to Alex’s parents for a week in July; and then of course she’d decided their apartment was too small, and they had to move.

Things kept interfering — or, as Susan knew very well, she let things keep interfering, so that she wouldn’t have to face this enormous life change she’d set up for herself. But now, in this room …

When she was at Legal Aid, counting the hours until she could go home, feeling like a fraud and a liar, her toes throbbing in her pinchy black work shoes, she would indulge flights of fancy in which she stood painting on a sunny midmorning, bathed in a shaft of sunlight and lost in a cloud of artistic effort. On such occasions it was just this kind of room in which she always imagined herself.

God, Susan thought, tears welling in her eyes. I don’t even think it was this kind of room. It was this exact room.

“I didn’t even mention it in the ad,” said Andrea, as she and Alex ducked into the room and stood next to Susan. “I’d feel like a huckster, because you can hardly count it as a room. Good for storage, though. Or a nursery.”

“Or a studio,” Susan said softly.

“Oh? Are you an artist?”

“Well, it’s kind of a long story. I was — I mean, I am. But—”

“Yes,” interrupted Alex, throwing his arm over her shoulder. “She is.”

Emma was getting antsy, so Susan set her up in the center of the empty living room, producing from her oversized pocketbook a box of crayons, a stack of construction paper, and a small snack of dried fruit and cheese.

“Stay in this room, please,” said Alex, and Emma nodded without looking up, already deeply engaged in her coloring.

“My goodness, she’s a happy duck, isn’t she?” said Andrea as she led Susan and Alex up the narrow uncarpeted staircase to the second floor. “Howard and I never had any of our own, but I’ve always loved children. Even the miserable snot-nose types, but especially happy little ducks like yours.”

The second floor was really just two large rooms, a master bedroom and a second bedroom, separated by the staircase landing and a decent linen closet. The upstairs bathroom, where the air shaft ended in a small arced skylight, was large, with room for both a shower stall and a full jetted tub. At the sight of it, Alex whispered a mock-lascivious “hey now” into Susan’s neck, and she nudged him playfully. The master bedroom, like the kitchen downstairs, faced Cranberry Street and was similarly bathed in warm and generous light.

“All these windows are double paned, by the by,” said Andrea, rapping on the sturdy glass. “Noise reducing. Work like the devil. I got ’em downstairs in my apartment, too.”

On the way out, Susan asked to see the bonus room one more time. While Alex spoke to Andrea in his low, all-business voice, she walked in a slow, enchanted circle around the tiny room and then stopped to rest her hands on the windowsill and gaze outside. The small back lot was separated from the mirror-image lot, belonging to a house on Orange Street, by a weathered wooden fence. The lot was overgrown with wild grass and dotted with bent and spindly trees; Susan wondered which of these gnarled beauties she would paint first.

From all the way down the hall she heard Andrea’s voice saying, “So I’m sorry about that …” and then something she couldn’t hear, to which Alex replied, “… I know how it is …” Then Andrea laughed a dry rustling titter and said, “Well, the less said about them, the better.” Emma could be heard giggling and hooting, having coronated herself princess of the living room, with a host of invisible subjects.

Turning from the window, Susan was suddenly struck by a sour unsavory odor, a nasty staleness in the closed air of the room. She crinkled her nose, and in the next breath it was gone.

She shut the door of the bonus room behind her, gathered up her daughter, and found Andrea and Alex in the kitchen, framed by the slanting sunlight. Andrea was nodding vigorously, eyes narrowed with interest, leaning into the conversation.

“A photographer?” she said. “Is that a fact?

“It is,” Alex said.

“Two artists! My humble abode will be quite the atelier. ”

Susan glanced uneasily at her husband. Alex was not an art photographer — not anymore. Like Susan, he had begun his postcollege life a decade ago with high artistic aspirations. Unlike Susan, who had folded up her easel after eighteen months of desultory effort and gone to law school as her parents had always intended, Alex had bopped along for a while, enjoying just enough success to encourage him but never enough to make a living. What he had found instead was an unusual niche in the world of commercial photography, at which he had been unexpectedly successful — so successful, in fact, that he hadn’t taken what he would consider a “real” photograph in years.

“I’m not really an artist,” Alex told Andrea. His tone was light, unoffended, and Susan exhaled. “I own a small company called GemFlex. We take pictures of diamonds and other precious stones, for jewelry catalogs and advertisements.”

“Really? How interesting!”

“Ah. That’s where you’re wrong,” said Alex, giving Andrea an easy lopsided grin. “But it pays the bills.”

Back outside on the stoop, they all shook hands. Andrea knelt with some effort to give Emma a hug, which the girl surprisingly accepted.

“Thank you so much for showing the apartment to us,” said Susan. “We’ll be in touch soon, OK?”

“Take your time, take your time,” said Andrea, and coughed. “But I’ve got a good feeling about you people. I do.”

They had Emma all buckled in when Alex turned back and called, “Oh, hey, Andrea? One more thing.”

Susan squeezed her eyes shut: here we go. He was fishing for a problem, for a reason to exercise his magical with-you-not-working-right-now veto, to keep them entombed in their one-bedroom on Twelfth Street for all eternity. The place is amazing, Alex, she thought. This is where we’re going to live. Just accept it.

“You seem like you’d be a great landlord,” he was saying. “But if there are, I don’t know, problems, with the heat or the toilet or whatever—”

Andrea interrupted with her high, throaty, barking laugh.

“Oh, good heavens! No. These ancient hands will not be plunging your toilet.” She held up thin, knotty fingers. “There’s a nice gentleman, an old friend, who is very handy and takes care of all that sort of thing for me. He can handle anything. I promise.”

“Oh,” said Alex, seeming mollified. “Well, great, then.”

That’s my girl, thought Susan, and beamed up at Andrea, who waved.

“All right, folks. See you soon.”

It was three or four blocks down Cranberry Street to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, where Emma hopped out of the stroller for some much-needed running around. Susan and Alex leaned on the railing and stood side by side, gazing out across the broad expanse of the East River at the Statue of Liberty, the Chrysler Building, and the skyline hole where the World Trade Center had once stood. Susan glanced furtively at her husband over the top of her Ray-Bans, trying to assess his state of mind. It was turning into a hot day, and she wore not only her sunglasses but a big floppy hat to protect herself from the sun. She had sensitive blue eyes and the kind of pale Scandinavian skin that burned easily; Alex, rugged and dark, had no such problems. He never bothered to wear sunscreen, which made Susan envious and, occasionally, mildly irritated.

They turned their backs to the railing and saw Emma streak by, shrieking merrily, in fervid pursuit of an adorable little boy in blue Crocs and a windbreaker, his hair in neat cornrows.

“All right, dear, moment of truth,” Susan said at last. “What do you think?”

“Well, I think a lot of things.” He let out a long breath and stroked his chin thoughtfully. “Did you hear? Her last tenants ran out on her, so she’s asking for three months’ security deposit.”

“Three months? Jesus.” Susan did some quick math in her head. “So that’s—”

“It’s ridiculous, is what it is.”

“Can we afford it?”

“We can, because the rent is crazy low. I mean, really insanely low. In fact—” Alex gave Susan his most serious pretend-serious face. “It’s probably haunted, right? Gotta be haunted.”

Susan cracked up and rested her head on his shoulder. She had a good feeling about where this conversation was going. “Totally,” she said. “Built on the only Indian burial ground in Brooklyn Heights.”

“Shame,” he said. “Because otherwise it’s fabulous.”

“It is, right? And a great neighborhood. And an easy commute for you.”

“Yup.”

“And, it’s got that … what did she call it?” Susan pretended to try and remember. “The bonus room. It’ll make a great studio, I think.”

“Right. Now, did you notice? No washer/dryer.”

“Eh. I’ll live.”

Susan looked around for Emma and found her right away, on a nearby bench with the little boy, chatting merrily with a woman Susan guessed was the boy’s mother. Susan pointed to herself and then to Emma, mouthing “she’s mine,” and the other woman smiled back and waved cheerily.

God, Susan thought. I love it here.

“So, OK,” Susan said, turning back to Alex. “Why don’t we sleep on it tonight, and …” She trailed off and broke into a surprised smile. Alex had his phone out.

“Screw it,” he said, grinning. “Let’s call her right now.”

Susan’s heart leaped in her chest.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. We both know we’re going to take it. So let’s just take it.”

As Alex dialed Andrea Scharfstein, Susan felt a sharp sting on her calf and bent to smack at the mosquito. She nailed it, and her palm came up bearing a thick bloody smear.

Andrea sent the lease three hours later to Susan via e-mail, exactly as she had promised. After Emma was asleep and after Alex left for a long-scheduled and eagerly anticipated game of Texas Hold ’Em with some college cronies, Susan sat down to review it.

“I’ll take a look when I get home,” Alex promised.

“Sure you will,” said Susan, and gave him a kiss as he headed out the door.

He would, naturally, be drunk later, or at least buzzed, and the truth was she didn’t really need his help. She was, after all, the lawyer. Well, Susan thought with a smile, as the document emerged from their sleek miniature laser printer, former lawyer.

The lease was obviously cut and pasted from a sample document floating around on the Internet. Across the top margin it said: SAMPLE OF A NEW YORK STATE RENTAL AGREEMENT, MODIFY AS NEEDED. But Andrea had not, so far as Susan could tell, modified it in the slightest. Still, it took her more than an hour to read through everything, not counting ten minutes of comforting Emma, who woke crying from an upsetting dream: in it, she said, while Susan kissed the tears from her cheeks, “Big Grandpa was chasing me”—Alex’s grandfather had died seven months ago—“and his face was all melty, like it was big chunks coming off of him.” Susan had no idea what could have inspired such an unsettling vision of decomposing, sliding flesh. She got Emma a glass of water and sang “Little Eliza Jane,” stroking her soft brown hair until she fell asleep.

Alex got home after midnight, mildly but pleasantly drunk, rambling giddily about the monster pot he’d won by making trip sevens on the river.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. But nice work,” said Susan. “You ready to sign a lease?”

He grinned. “Totally.” Alex fell into the seat next to her and grabbed the pen. His sleeves were rolled up unevenly, and he smelled like cigars. “Oh! Wait! Shit. There was this guy at Anton’s, a lawyer, named Kodaly — Kodiak? Something. Starts with a K.”

“Uh-huh?”

“He said the person has to, like, promise the place doesn’t have bedbugs.”

“Well, no. Not exactly.” Susan turned the pages of the document and found the clause the mysterious Kodiak was referring to. “Here. ‘The landlord or lessor warrants that the premises so leased or rented and all areas used in connection therewith in common with other tenants or residents are fit for human habitation.’ Blah, blah, blah, et cetera. It’s called a warrant of habitability, and …” Susan stopped. “Um, excuse me?”

“What?” Alex asked with sing-song innocence. He had leaned over in his chair toward hers and was busily working his hands into her shirt, fumbling for her breasts. Susan leaned back into his arms.

“I thought you wanted to hear about the bedbugs.”

“Not so much, as it turns out.”

As always, Alex fell asleep almost instantly after sex, sprawled out naked on top of the sheets; Susan lay awake, reading and listening to him breathe softly. After knowing him eight years, and being married for five, she still could not say whether or not she found her husband handsome. Attractive, yes: Alex was tall and solidly constructed, with dark hair and coloring, and he radiated a kind of easy magnetism — especially when he was smiling, which was most of the time. But there was also a kind of roughness about him, a coarseness in his features when you caught them in the wrong light. And the largeness of his body and features, the same largeness that made Susan feel safe and protected when he laughed and threw his arms around her, was a little scary when he was being sullen and aggressive.

Susan pulled on her robe, poked her head into the curtained nook to check on Emma — sleeping soundly now, looking startlingly like her father in her open-mouthed dead-to-the-world repose — and padded back to the kitchen table and her MacBook. She e-mailed Andrea and said the lease would be on the way back tomorrow with the appropriate checks; she e-mailed their management company to let them know this would be their last month on their month-to-month lease; she went to the website of Moishe’s, a moving company she had used in the past, filled out their detailed move-request form, and pressed “submit.”

It was now 2:47 a.m. on August 16, 2010. They were traveling to visit Alex’s parents on Labor Day weekend, so on the move-request form Susan had indicated they’d like to move to Brooklyn on September 12, a Sunday.

3

The week after Labor Day, the week preceding their move, the news was dominated by a grisly murder that had occurred in Downtown Brooklyn, just one neighborhood over from the Heights. As was relentlessly reported on 1010 WINS and WCS-880, the twenty-four-hour news stations Susan listened to compulsively — especially when she was at home working on a large project, like packing — a young mother had killed her three-month-old twins. It was an unsettling crime, irresistible to the news stations because of the horrific and strange way the children had been killed; and, as Alex pointed out, because the alleged murderess was young, privileged, and white. The woman, whose name was Anna Mara Phelps, had taken her two daughters in their big black Phil and Ted’s double stroller to the roof of their sixteen-story luxury building and then rolled it off the edge, with the infants still inside.

Horror-struck bystanders had watched the giant carriage flipping end over end as it plummeted toward Livingston Street, where it shattered, killing the babies on impact. Phelps was charged with double homicide and considered likely to plead guilty by reason of insanity. On the day of the move, while Alex supervised the crew from Moishe’s, Susan took Emma to buy picture hangers at a hardware store on Court and Livingston. She stopped to stare at the spot where the stroller had landed, now marked by a massive shrine of flowers and toys and dolls.

“Well,” Alex said sardonically when she described the mournful scene, “welcome to the neighborhood.”

The movers were done by quarter to five, and Alex dipped into his low, all-business voice to thank each one for his hard work and slip him a twenty. Then Emma, Susan, and Alex wandered around their new home, navigating the monolithic wardrobe boxes, upside-down furniture, and lumpy duffel bags filled with clothing, pillowcases, and knick-knacks.

“Well, folks, we’ve got our work cut out for us,” said Susan.

“First we get the TV set up, right?” Alex replied, half joking.

“Where’s Mr. Boogle?” said Emma.

“We didn’t put Mr. Boogle in a box, honey. He’s around.”

Just before six, Andrea Scharfstein knocked on the door holding a bottle of cheap champagne and an autumnal bouquet in a disposable plastic vase.

“You made it!” she growled pleasantly.

“That is so sweet of you,” said Susan, and she meant it. The last time she’d been welcomed, when she and Alex moved in together on Union Square, it was with a three-page bulleted list of rules and regulations that had been slid under the door by someone from the management company, even though they were home at the time. Andrea’s hair was tied back with a green cotton headband, and she wore a plain blue sheath dress. Susan reflected in passing how pretty she must have been, years ago — and still was, in her old-lady way, with wide deep-set eyes and high cheekbones.

“Hi, Andrea!” piped Emma.

“Hello, young lady.”

“Did you bring your pet dinosaur?”

“So clever, this one is! You should be on television, dear heart.”

Alex invited Andrea to join them for dinner, but she declined, to Susan’s relief.

“Oh, please. Get settled first. Another time.” On her way out, Andrea gestured to a thin stack of take-out menus she had left on top of a box, and Susan noticed that her hand trembled just the slightest bit. “Try the vegetarian Chinese place, on Montague. I forget what it’s called, but it’s good.”

The vegetarian Chinese place on Montague Street was called the Greens, as it turned out, and it was good. They ordered vegetarian moo goo gai pan, miso mushroom soup, and something called General Tso’s Soy Protein, which Alex proclaimed “vastly better than it sounds.” After dinner they dug up towels and shower stuff, plus enough books and toys for Emma to have a decent playtime before she bustled happily off to bed.

“I don’t miss old house at all,” Emma intoned solemnly as Susan tucked her carefully into her white IKEA bed, which the movers had reassembled before leaving.

“Really, sweets? It’s OK if you do.”

“Of course it’s OK,” said Emma, her eyes already drifting shut. “But I don’t.”

The movers had also reassembled the big queen-size bed in the master bedroom, a process that Susan had anxiously overseen. The bed was very possibly her favorite possession, and she had agonized over its purchase for several months for reasons both aesthetic and financial. It was a sleek low-slung modernist beauty with a sturdy slatted frame and a black-oak headboard, sold by Design Within Reach for $2,550 plus tax — a significant chunk of change, even back when she was working.

True to form, Alex had protested, mildly, that their old double bed was just fine. “What’s wrong with it?”

“Well, I’ve had it since college, for one thing. Plus we’re two people. We need a queen.”

“But aren’t doubles for two people? Two? Double?”

Susan had prevailed, arguing in part that a decent bed would help her sleep. She was a chronic insomniac, unlike Alex, who bragged that he could fall asleep in a muddy ditch or stay sleeping through artillery fire — a gift that had been maddening to Susan during Emma’s infancy, when he slumbered peacefully through many a late-night screaming session.

After Emma was down they puttered around for a couple hours, drinking Andrea’s champagne from plastic cups and unpacking a few boxes marked UNPACK ME FIRST! Susan found the box of perishables and arranged its contents in the pantry while Alex focused on his treasured kitchen gadgets: the coffee grinder, the rice cooker, the nonstick frying pans, the knife block and full set of Henckels Twin Select cooking knives. Finally he yawned, announced that he was exhausted, and headed upstairs.

“I can’t believe we have two floors,” he said, pausing midway up the steps and gesturing expansively at all their space, in the manner of a Roman emperor. “Nice work, Sue.”

Susan finished her champagne and poured herself another cup, adding new items to her to-do list, until her eyes were drooping shut and she admitted to herself there was nothing else that could realistically be accomplished that night. She went upstairs to the bathroom, unzipped her gold toiletries bag, and fished around until she found the Altoids tin in which she kept her Ambien. She counted the pills, each one a perfect little white oblong: there were twenty-seven ten-milligram tablets left, out of an original stash of fifty, prescribed eighteen months ago with instructions to take half a pill when anxiety made it impossible to asleep. On nights like this one, however, with her mind racing through all the upcoming tasks, Susan gave herself a dispensation. Carefully she split a pill with her fingernail, put one half back in the Altoids tin and placed the other half on her tongue, cupped her hands to collect a scoopful of water from the faucet, and washed it down.

But if the Ambien worked, it didn’t work nearly enough. The minute Susan’s head hit the pillow, her mind busily began annotating and revising the to-do list, which she could see in her mind’s eye as clearly as if it were displayed on the iPhone screen in front of her. Unpacking, of course, was at the top of the list, broken down into several subcategories: Emma’s things, her and Alex’s things, kitchen things, sheets and towels. Now that they had more space, they would need more furniture, and there was a sublist for that, too: small end-tables for the living room, some sort of sideboard for the kitchen.

… and could they afford new furniture? How much had the movers ended up charging? Alex would know the exact figure, but Susan couldn’t remember — four thousand? five? — plus that massive security deposit — moves were a money sieve, Alex was right …

Susan’s restless mind jumped to the universe of small activities, mundane but crucial, that went with setting up a new household: the making of keys, the filling out of address-change forms, the search for good grocery stores. It was to Susan, of course, that most of these tasks would fall.

… since you’re not working right now … since you’re not working right now …

She looked at her husband, his thick torso, his face squashed in his pillow, a thin line of drool connecting his lower lip to the collar of his ancient Pearl Jam T-shirt, and wondered just how angry he really was at her, just below, or not even below, the surface, how much resentment he harbored. Alex had artistic ambitions, too, after all, which he had long ago boxed up and stashed away, just as she had. But now she was taking hers back out again, unpacking the dreams of her youth like antique linens from an old chest, while he was stuck shooting pictures of watches and diamond rings, pretending to take pride in it … supporting her and their child, her and her dilettante ambitions.

Of course he’s resentful, he must be, he …

Susan took a deep breath. Alex had never expressed any such feelings to her, of course — everything he had said on the subject was quite to the contrary (“To tell you the truth, Sue, I think it’s a great idea!”)

But that wasn’t good enough for Susan, lying awake in the Brooklyn dark in the middle of the night, surrounded by a shadowy forest of wardrobe boxes and furniture in an unfamiliar room. Surely Alex thought terrible things of her, surely he seethed every time he looked at her. Why, otherwise, had the question of more children never been raised between them? Somehow the time to bring it up always seemed wrong. Somehow it always felt like if she did bring it up, he would launch into a list of reasons why a bigger family was impossible right now, would slam the door on the question, just as he had slammed the door shut on the artists’ loft with a harbor view in Red Hook …

… oh, hell, Susan, you don’t need that place anymore, you got this place, remember?

This thought, vaguely comforting though it was, led her back along her twisting maze of anxiety, to yet more things that needed to be done: find out when recycling goes out, find a nonfilthy Laundromat — no washer/dryer, remember? — look into preschool programs for Emma for January — she had secured a slot at a well-regarded place in the Flatiron District, but now Susan had wrenched up the family and moved them here, for no reason, for no good reason …

Susan sat up, panting, clutching a hand to her chest. “Shit,” she said to the darkness.

The bedside clock read 2:34. Susan rose, stepped into the bathroom, and took the other half of the Ambien.

Reluctant to return to bed, Susan turned the other way out of the bathroom, slipped past the linen closet, and creaked open the door of Emma’s new room. Looking down at the peaceful, sleeping figure of her daughter, Susan felt almost unbearably in love with her. Emma’s little chest rose and fell, rose and fell. She had her father’s thick dark hair and big brown eyes, but her small frame and sometimes-playful/sometimes-hesitant spirit were all Susan.

“Oh, sweet pea,” she murmured. Gingerly she eased the covers down from where Emma had tugged them up under her chin. She insisted on being tucked in so tightly, even in the late-summer heat.

Then Susan glanced at the window and gasped. “Oh God! Oh my God!” she said, loudly, scaring herself in the quiet dark of the bedroom.

Emma stirred but didn’t wake. Susan stepped closer to the window and gaped, wide-eyed, at where a person, or the shadow of a person, was standing in the backyard, leaning against the rickety back fence and staring up. The man was massive. In his hand was the long barrel of a gun, or some kind of club, or … something … in the darkness, from this distance, it was impossible to say.

“Alex!” Susan shouted, but he didn’t answer. Susan’s heart was knocking at her ribs, and she clutched at the windowsill. “Alex! God damn it, Alex!”

Emma shifted and moaned in her sleep. Susan opened her mouth to scream again — she would have to go in there and shake him awake. But then she looked again, and there was nothing — no one — in the yard.

Whatever Susan had seen, or thought she had seen, it was gone.

4

On Monday morning, exhausted from her nocturnal adventure and the fitful sleep that had followed, Susan sipped her coffee and scrolled through headlines on her iPhone while Emma toyed with her breakfast. When the nanny rang the bell at 8:50, a full twenty minutes late, Susan walked briskly down the hall to let her in, and a moment later Emma hopped down from the kitchen chair and flew into her arms.

“Marni! Marni! We live in this house now!”

“I know, buddy,” said Marni, and swept the little girl up, mouthing “I am so sorry” to Susan over Emma’s shoulder. Susan smiled forgivingly, boiling inside. Marni only worked from 8:30 until 2:30, and Susan counted on those hours, especially during a week like this one, when she had a million and a half things to do.

“The subways totally threw me for a loop,” Marni apologized. “The Internet said it’d take me twenty-three minutes to get here, but it was at least twice that.”

“That stinks,” said Susan evenly, thinking Wow, the Internet was wrong. Never could have been predicted.

“Hey, the new place looks great,” said Marni, and Emma dragged her by the hand to show her around.

Marni was a doctoral student in psychology at Fordham, finished with her coursework but still writing her dissertation, with mornings free and a need for extra cash. She had been working for them only about seven months — and had agreed, to Susan’s mild chagrin, to stay in the job after their move. Marni’s seeming inability to arrive on time was just one of several things that bothered Susan. She was, in general, a bit sloppy, leaving the lunch dishes in the sink and only occasionally bothering to clean the stroller and diaper bag before she left for the day.

There was also a collegiate looseness about Marni, an easy sexiness of tousled hair, multiple-pierced ears, and tight T-shirts that rubbed Susan the wrong way. She knew very little about Marni’s personal life, but the young woman had never mentioned any particular boyfriend, and Susan had at some point decided that this indicated not chasteness but rather the opposite: an active and unsettled romantic and sexual life. Susan frequently imagined (and reprimanded herself for doing so) that Marni was coming to her nannying job directly from her latest one-night stand.

Alex’s days started early, and he was usually gone before Marni arrived and home long after she left. He never paid any particular attention to her, which was just fine by Susan.

“So, Emma-roo,” said Marni, tossing her little H&M jean jacket casually on top of a packing box as they returned from their circuit of the apartment. “Were you aware that Brooklyn has its very own children’s museum?”

“It does? Let’s go there! Let’s go there!” Emma bounced around Marni in a loopy circle. “Mom! Mom! We’re going to a children’s museum!”

“Is that OK?” Marni asked Susan, who obviously couldn’t say no, not now.

Oh, stop being so annoyed, Susan told herself, digging her wallet from her pocketbook to pay for museum admission and lunch. She wondered in passing whether her occasional distaste for Marni came from her own annoyance at herself, mild but ever-present: you’re not going to work, and we’re still shelling out four hundred bucks a week for child care?

She gave Emma a shower of kisses, handed Marni a pair of twenties, and headed out the door.

Susan’s first stop was Trader Joe’s, at the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Smith Street, so she could fill the fridge with milk and yogurt and stock the pantry with applesauce and juice boxes and cooking oil. Alex did most of the cooking, but Susan generally handled the shopping. She moved swiftly through the aisles, bopping her head to “Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch” and lingering briefly in the frozen meat section before adding FIND A BUTCHER to her to-do list and moving on. Next to Trader Joe’s was a spacious wine shop run by twenty-something hipsters, where she picked up two reds and two whites from a “ten-and-under” table. “This Montepulciano is the bomb,” said the girl behind the counter, who sported auburn pigtails, oversized plastic-framed glasses, and an arm sleeved with colorful tattoos. “Oh? Rad,” said Susan, thinking, I love Brooklyn.

Back home, Susan unpacked the cold stuff and then took a half hour to line her drawers and cupboards with wax paper before unpacking the pantry items. She turned on the radio, found WNYC, and spent the rest of the Leonard Lopate Show slicing open boxes marked KITCHEN, rinsing off dishes they had stupidly packed in newsprint, and finding counter space for the KitchenAid, Cuisinart, and hand mixer. Settling down with her laptop at the kitchen table, Susan filled out a numbing series of address-change forms and then composed a mass e-mail with her new address, appending the de rigueur postscript about how “my cell phone number and e-mail will of course remain the same … ”

Susan’s brisk march through her task list was slowed by a headline on her Yahoo! homepage: Anna Mara Phelps, the young mother accused of killing her daughters, had been arraigned and pled not guilty by reason of insanity, as expected. Susan noted, before forcing herself to get back to work, that Phelps was a former actress, had moved to New York from Minneapolis in 2002, and was thirty-four years old, same as Susan.

Upstairs, Susan swept out the closet in the second bedroom and opened a box marked CLOTHES: EMMA. She was smoothing out the miniature party dresses on their pink plastic Cinderella hangers and arranging them carefully when she heard the excited clamor from downstairs, as Marni and Emma stomped inside. Downstairs she heard all about the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, which apparently featured a working greenhouse, a delightfully scary collection of snakes, and a fully functional pretend pizza restaurant.

“And how was the bus ride back, sweets?” Susan asked, crouching to wipe a smudge of yogurt from Emma’s cheek.

“Oh, actually? She was super worn out,” said Marni. “So we took a car home. I hope that’s OK.”

Susan went to find her purse, and forked over another nine bucks.

When Emma was up from her nap, Susan got her dressed and they went out together, with no fewer than three shopping lists: one for the hardware store, one for the drug store, and one marked “misc.” On the front stoop, holding Emma in her arms and balancing the stroller on her back, Susan nearly tripped over Andrea, who was seated on the top step with her legs folded beneath her and the Times spread out on her lap.

“Whoa. God, sorry, Andrea.”

“No, look at me, I couldn’t be more in the way!”

Andrea was wearing oversized old-lady sunglasses, studded along the stems with rhinestones. Susan was always seeing glasses like them in secondhand shops and wishing she had the kitschy nerve to sport a pair. “So? Are we Brooklynites now? Are we finding everything OK?”

“I think so. Wait, no. Butcher?”

“Oh, yes. The place to go is called Staubitz. It’s down Court Street, just past Kane, I think. Or just before. Anyway, it’s down there somewhere. Should I draw you a map?”

“No, no.”

Emma squirmed in her arms. “We’re going, love. We’re going.”

“Some people like Los Paisanos, on Smith, but if you ask me those people are idiots. Staubitz is the place, and tell John I sent you.”

“I will. Are you OK?”

She had noticed that Andrea was holding her hip, shifting her position laboriously from one buttock to the other.

“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 her leg. Susan clutched at herself, howling, and went sprawling onto the sidewalk. Prostrate and writhing, she saw that Andrea Scharfstein was sitting at the top of the stoop, dressed in a wrap of eerily bright vermillion, waving her thin arms wildly, shouting, “Look out! Susan, look out!”

She craned her neck upward just in time to see a gigantic double stroller hurtling out of the sky. She leapt to her feet and stumbled back, and the carriage hit the sidewalk. The stroller exploded and blood burst out of it, as if the thing had been a gigantic sloshing balloon full of blood; erupting in waves of blood, cascades of it, vastly more blood than possibly could have been inside those two poor little girls. Susan was splattered, covered, drenched in blood. She wailed, wiping the blood from her eyes until she could see the small corpses of the girls, their battered pulpy skeletons, strapped into their little seats in the side-by-side double stroller, hands clenched together … she screamed again, woke herself with screaming, woke to find her hands balled into fists and grinding into her eyes.

Susan took a series of ragged breaths until her hands quit trembling. Then she staggered out of bed and into the bathroom and stared at herself in the mirror for a long time, wiping intensely at herself with her palms, as if the blood of the dream was still caked on her cheeks and clinging to her hair. At last she tiptoed back into the bedroom and stared at Alex, who slept peacefully, undisturbed. The glowing red lines of the bedside clock told her it was 5:42. Susan unplugged the baby monitor from the bedside table and took it downstairs, certain she was up for the day.

5

Susan did not meet the “nice gentleman” who acted as Andrea’s unofficial, part-time maintenance man until Wednesday afternoon.

It was a little after one, and Susan was returning from yet another epic morning of errands when she turned off Henry Street onto Cranberry and heard the panicked, terrified wailing of a child. Her heart lurched in her chest—Emma—and she burst into a panicked sprint, the heavy plastic-sheathed bulk of the dry cleaning shifting in the crook of her arm, shopping bags flapping against her legs.

Emma appeared to be unharmed, thank God. But the girl was red-faced and screeching, crying with a ferocity that Susan rarely witnessed, standing at the center of an anxious tableau at the bottom of the stoop, just past the squat black wrought-iron fence that separated the brownstone from Cranberry Street. Andrea was crouching beside the girl, patting her uneasily on the shoulder; Marni hovered over them, wringing her hands and looking around stupidly; a few steps to Marni’s right, standing with one foot up on the bottom step, was an older black man with a bald pate and a massive gut, looking anxious and flustered. The sun glinted off the man’s smooth scalp while trickles of sweat dripped into his eyes.

“Mama!” screeched Emma, holding out her thin little arms.

That’s him, Susan thought as she launched herself into the scene and scooped up her daughter. That’s who I saw in the yard that night. That’s him. She cradled Emma to her chest and murmured, “Oh baby, oh baby, it’s OK my love. It’s OK.” And then, to the rest of them: “What happened?”

“Emma got upset, the dear,” said Andrea, straightening up and nervously readjusting the gold-grey kerchief knotted in her hair.

“I can see that. Why?”

“She was trying to get into the basement.”

“What?”

Andrea gestured to a cramped plywood door under the steps, secured with a heavy padlock. Susan knitted her brow; she had never noticed the door before.

“I was upstairs, but I guess she was at the door to the basement, fussing with the lock, and Louis saw her and he rushed over to stop her.” Susan looked at the stranger, who nodded steadily but said nothing, just pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket and ran it over his brow. “Which, in Louis’s defense, he was absolutely right to do,” Andrea continued. “That basement is no place for kids. Power tools, flammable materials—”

“Wait. Stop. Who is Louis?” Shifting Emma to her other arm, she pivoted toward the man. “Who are you?”

“Well, my name is Louis,” he said slowly, and Susan rolled her eyes. It’s like an old-folks home around here. “Yes. I got that.”

“Louis is the gentleman I mentioned,” Andrea said. “I told you. He handles things for me, repairs, blown fuses, light fixtures.”

“Oh. Right. OK.” To Susan, Louis seemed an extremely unlikely handyman: he was portly, to put it mildly, and looked like someone’s kindly but absentminded great-uncle, emitting none of the quiet confidence Susan associated with mechanical aptitude. Plus, if the guy was any younger than Andrea, it was by five or ten years, tops; he looked like he would struggle to carry a bag of groceries, let alone haul a toolbox up the steep stairs of 56 Cranberry Street.

Emma’s sobbing had subsided into a series of arrhythmic, pained hiccups; Susan squeezed her tighter and smoothed her pale hair.

“Did you tell her not to go down there, or did you raise your voice at her?” she demanded of Louis. “Did you touch her?”

“Oh, Lord, no,” Louis said, shaking his head, aghast. “Absolutely not.”

Andrea shook her head too, insistent, no no no. “Not Louis. He would not have put a hand on the child.”

“Not in a million years,” said Louis, shifting his stance and crossing his heavy arms across his stomach. Susan was not liking this — not one bit. This was the person who would come up to the apartment? To switch a fuse or unclog the toilet? Who would know what you’re supposed to do about gapping floorboards? She turned to Marni. “And where were you during all this?”

“I was right here. I was fighting with the stroller.” Marni fidgeted with the hem of her tight American Apparel T-shirt, looking like a child, ready to burst into tears. “She wandered away for two seconds, and the next thing I knew she was down there, and he was there. He wasn’t yelling. He wasn’t. He just spoke kind of, like, suddenly …” She glanced apologetically at Louis, who looked at the ground. “And I think that’s what did it.”

“You can’t let her wander away.”

“I know.”

“For any seconds.”

“I know. I’m really sorry.”

Susan fought to stay calm, knowing that getting upset would make it harder for Emma to regain her equilibrium. She turned back to Louis and forced a smile.

“Well, it’s not a big deal. I’m sure you didn’t mean it. Anyway, nice to meet you.”

Louis grinned, relieved. “Likewise. Any friend of Andrea’s.”

“Right. But can I ask you one more thing?”

“Of course. Anything you like.”

“Were you standing in the yard last Sunday night? Right after we moved in?” As she was asking the question, Susan realized how strange it sounded — strange, or accusatory. “Like, looking up at the bedroom window? For some reason?”

“No.” Louis shook his big head, and turned to Andrea. “I most certainly was not.”

“OK,” said Andrea, and Susan nodded. “OK.”

Louis retreated to the backyard, and the rest of them tromped in a ragged line to the top of the stoop, Susan hugging Emma to her chest, Marni struggling behind with the pile of dry cleaning and the other bags, the carry-strap of the collapsed strolled looped across her chest.

“Did you find Staubitz the other day?” Andrea called, a few steps behind.

“Yeah,” said Susan, not looking back. “I found it.”

From the top of the stoop, Susan peered over the side at the door that had been the source of the morning’s drama. It had a foreboding, dilapidated appearance, old and half rotted and probably laced with termites. The door 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 again, as if blocked by a hidden hand determined to keep it shut, to let no air into the stale and stagnant room.

“Crapola,” Susan muttered.

First the delightful fragrance of cat urine, now a defective window. Her mind ran to the separating floor boards on the second-floor landing and the spooky Door to Perdition under the front stoop. Anything else we overlooked? she thought bitterly. Railroad tracks running through the kitchen? Faucets spraying fire?

Susan stomped back to the kitchen for a wooden chair. She dragged it back down the long hallway, through the living room, and into the bonus room, feeling damp pockets of sweat open up in her armpits. She pushed the chair into place and climbed up to examine the window frame, not sure exactly what she was looking for. She saw what Andrea had meant about the windows being double-paned against the noise — there was a second pane of glass set in the window, separated by a thin millimeter of space from the frame. But did that explain the …

Oh. Here we go.

There was a thin gash dug into the wood at the top of the window. And buried in the wood, sticking up just enough to keep the window from kissing closed into the frame, was a folded piece of paper.

No, not a piece of paper. It was a photograph.

Susan dug the picture free from the wood and turned it over in her hand. It was a wallet-sized snapshot that had been folded over twice into a fat little square, like a middle-school crush note. She sat down on the chair and unfolded the photograph slowly, carefully tugging it loose from itself; the back, it seemed, had been coated with some sort of adhesive. When she had it open she forgot about getting the window open, forgot even about the foul reek of the room. She sat in the high-backed kitchen chair and gazed at the happy couple in the picture.

They were cuddled together in a red-curtained photo booth, the old-fashioned kind that was set up sometimes in movie theater lobbies or as a fun activity at a wedding reception. The man in the picture was short haired and goateed, sporting a fedora and a pair of those dark, horn-rimmed Elvis Costello — style glasses so favored by hipster dudes. He was planting a fat smooch on the woman’s cheek. She was pretty and pert nosed, wearing a teasing, sexy grin. Her hair was dyed a bold scarlet, with bangs slashed at a fashionable angle across her eyes.

Cute, thought Susan. She turned the picture over, looking for a date, or names, anything jotted on the back. She found instead that the adhesive coating the back of the picture was, in fact, dried blood, tiny bits of which flaked off in her hand. And, at the dead center, was the dark, crusted swirl of a bloody thumbprint.

“Hey, Andrea? Did the people who lived here before us have a cat?”

Andrea’s Scharfstein’s eyes went wide, and she stopped what she was doing, which was spooning sugar out of a powder-blue ceramic bowl into Susan’s mug.

“A cat?” she said at last, with an intensity that made Susan feel a little unsettled. Andrea’s hand trembled slightly as she returned the miniature spoon into the sugar bowl. “Why do you ask?”

Susan had only wanted to ask her question and get back upstairs, but Andrea had been so nakedly delighted at the unexpected visit that she decided a quick cup of tea wouldn’t kill her. Andrea sang lightly to herself as she moved slowly from living room to kitchen and back, preparing a tea service, fruit plate, and cookie tray.

“Can I help you?” Susan had asked, but Andrea had waved her off, relishing the role of hostess. “No, you sit, dear, you sit. I’m quite all right. Fine and dandy like sugar candy.”

Andrea’s apartment was laid out on the same blueprint as the first floor of Alex and Susan’s, with the kitchen at one end and the living room at the other, though it could not have been decorated more differently. Where Susan strove for a clean, modern, and uncluttered aesthetic, Andrea’s rooms were stuffed with oversized wooden furniture, tottering bookshelves, potted plants, and — in one corner of the living room — a glass case displaying a collection of hideous “ethnic” dolls. On the opposite wall, Andrea had hung vertical mirrors on either side of the air shaft; an effort, Susan suspected, to downplay the presence of the unusual, semi-industrial architectural feature. There was nothing, Susan mused, to indicate the influence of a second aesthetic, nothing to suggest that a man had ever lived here; she wondered when it was that the late great Howard had passed away.

Andrea’s eyes looked tired and rheumy as she raised her teacup to her lips, and Susan felt like she could see past the makeup and the bright clothes to Andrea’s real age, the fragility of a woman in her early or mid-seventies — and, chillingly, felt she could see past that, too, to the very old woman that Andrea would soon be: a few lank hairs clinging to an ancient scalp, the skin pulled taut around the skull.

“I’m sorry to say this,” Susan said. “But that small room behind the living room? The one you called the bonus room? It smells really bad. Like cat pee.”

“Cat pee.” Andrea exhaled heavily and placed a hand to her forehead. “It’s worse than that, Susan.”

“What do you mean?”

“I am so sorry about this. I thought we had got that smell out, I really did.”

“Andrea?” It was like one of those old grosser-than-gross riddles from elementary school. What’s grosser than a room soaked in cat urine? Susan sipped from her steaming cup of tea and stared at Andrea, waiting for the answer.

“They were a young couple. The previous tenants, I mean. Jack and Jessica, though she went by Jessie. Sweet names, right? I liked to tease them about it, tell them it oughta be up in lights: Jack and Jessie! Jessie and Jack! In their twenties, I think, and not married. ‘Living in sin,’ we used to call it, not that it was any of my business.”

Susan thought of the photograph of the sweet kids, posing giddily for the camera. The picture was currently lying on her kitchen table, faceup.

“Jessica Spender was her name. His surname, I must say I never knew. She signed the lease and wrote the rent checks, too — again, not that it was any of my business. And they had a cat. It was the sweetest little thing, barely more than a kitten. Catastrophe, they called her. Catastrophe the cat.”

Susan smiled faintly at the name, sipped her tea. Naming a cat Catastrophe, a gesture at once mildly ironic and sweet, the hallmarks of the generation just younger than her own.

“Anyway, Jess and Jack were not to be, apparently. They seemed very loving to me, very happy, but I guess appearances can be deceiving, because one day Jack abruptly departed. As in, one morning he was just, you know, poof. Gone. And I found poor Jess on the stoop outside, crying and crying. I mean — she was — couldn’t even speak. It was really something.”

“Yikes.”

Andrea took a deep, ragged breath, coughed drily, and shook her head. “Well, before you get too sympathetic. Jessie left, too, shortly thereafter, stiffing yours truly for a month’s rent. Only reason I knew she was gone was because the check never showed up. A couple days I don’t mind, of course. Between you and me, I won’t starve. But two weeks, then it’s three weeks, it’s a problem. And you know, as the days go by, I don’t see her, I’m worried. So I knocked one day, then let myself in. And … ”

Andrea stopped, shaking her head with tight, birdlike jerks. A watery pain had entered her voice, and Susan leaned across the table and stroked the older woman’s rough, papery hand — all the while dying of curiosity.

“And …” she prompted.

“And the poor cat was dead in that little room. I guess, in her hurry to get out, Jessica had — had forgotten and closed that door … no food, or no water. And this was July, remember. It would get extremely hot in there with the air off and the window closed. The poor animal … ”

Andrea squeezed her eyes shut against the memory, and Susan found herself a bit choked up as well. Poor Catastrophe! Poor little kitten! How could anybody … God. People are horrible.

Andrea honked loudly in a napkin. “Anyway,” she said firmly, as if to clear the air of the unpleasantness. “Louis and I cleaned the area thoroughly, but I guess not thoroughly enough. I will certainly have him come up and take another pass.”

“That would be great. Whenever he gets a chance.”

“No, not ‘whenever he gets a chance,’ ” said Andrea, and then craned around, raising her voice. “Louis?”

“Just one moment,” came the booming reply. Susan, startled, half rose, looking around. The whole time they’d been sitting there, she’d heard not a sound from anywhere else in the apartment, and Andrea had given no indication they weren’t alone. Now Louis, in thick black boots and a denim work shirt, emerged from the front of the apartment.

“What’s up?”

“That nasty odor is still hanging around the little room upstairs.”

“You’re kidding me. Really?”

Susan nodded. “Sorry.”

“No, no, don’t be sorry. I’m sorry.” Louis stroked his chin. “OK if I come by tomorrow?”

“Sure.”

“What time works?”

“Early is good, just in terms of—”

“Early is fine,” he said. “What time are you up and about?”

“We have a three-and-a-half year old, so, I mean, we’re up at seven. But—”

“No problem. I’ll be there at 7:30. Just gotta put it in the old bean.” Louis chuckled, tapping at his forehead, and then headed back down the hallway, murmuring to himself. “Seven-thirty … seven-thirty …”

“He’s working on the sink in the bathroom, which is clogged like you wouldn’t believe,” Andrea explained and then leaned forward and adopted a confidential, just-us-ladies tone. “Hairballs.”

“Ah,” said Susan. What else could one say to such a thing? Andrea rose with a sigh to clear away the teacups.

Susan thought about poor Catastrophe, and about Jack and Jessica, who had so thoughtlessly left the animal behind. Who, Susan wondered, had stuffed that picture in the window frame, before their abrupt disappearance? Who had clutched that photograph with a bloody thumb?

“Enjoy that gorgeous hair of yours while you can, dear,” said Andrea wistfully from the kitchen, and Susan self-consciously brought a hand up to her dirty-blonde curls. “Because when you get old, it will fall out in clumps. In clumps.”

Susan rose abruptly, thanked Andrea for the tea, and went back upstairs.

7

Susan had forgotten entirely about the faint pinging sound the cable man had brought to her attention on Tuesday morning. But on Thursday night Alex heard it, too. Dinner was over, and the whole family was smooshed on the leather living-room sofa, reading Amelia Bedelia, when he paused midsentence and said, “Do you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“Dada? Read, please.”

“One sec, hon.”

“Hear what, Al?”

“Read the book, dada.”

Then they all heard it, faint but distinct, sounding from somewhere and nowhere. Ping. And then a few seconds later, again: ping. They slid off the couch, all three of them, and started meandering around the house searching for the source of the noise.

“Could it be the smoke alarm?” Susan ventured. “Carbon monoxide?”

“No way,” said Alex, glancing up at the light on the smoke detector, which glowed an unbroken green. “Alarms better be a lot louder than that.”

Ping went the noise again, so soft you almost couldn’t hear it. Emma said, “Ping!” in return and then started bouncing up and down, yelping, “Ping! Ping!”

“Ping!” shouted Alex, and then the noise sounded again, as if in response: ping. “Weird,” he said. “It’s like sonar.”

Ping went the house, and Emma went, “Ping!” and they all giggled.

Their search was fruitless, and the noise stopped, and Alex chased Emma up the stairs for bath. Later, after their daughter was asleep, Susan was about to tell Alex about the cat-pee smell, and the awful story of Jack and Jessica and Catastrophe the cat, and the photograph with the bloody thumbprint on the back. But she checked herself, realizing with a prickly flush of shame that the story would have to begin with an explanation of why today was the first time she had set foot in her “studio” since they moved in.

She stood in silence, leaning on the kitchen counter, watching Alex gather lettuce, cucumber, tomato, and red onion from the fridge to start on a salad, imagining his response:

“Well, honey, I thought the whole point of moving was so that you could have your own space to paint?”

“Well, honey, if you’re not painting and you’re not watching Emma, then what are you doing?”

“Well, honey, what the hell?”

Susan shook her head clear, pulled a knife from the block, and helped him cut vegetables. During dinner she related a funny gossip item she’d read on a fine-arts blog, about one of the big Chelsea gallery owners and his ever-changing lineup of buxom “assistants.” But Alex’s responses were polite and peremptory, and as soon as they were done eating he turned to his computer and the barrage of e-mails he needed to send to prepare for tomorrow. Apparently there had been a screwup that day on the Cartier shoot, when a watch face was scratched by a worthless lighting assistant that Vic had hired for cheap. It was a major setback, and Susan could tell that Alex was deeply worried.

When she went upstairs to sleep, Alex remained in the living room, muttering to himself and tapping away.

Louis arrived to clean the smell from the bonus room at precisely 7:30 the next morning.

“Will wonders never cease,” Susan murmured at the sound of his knock at the door before calling out “just a sec,” pulling her robe close to her chest, and opening the door. Alex had left fifteen minutes earlier, grimly clutching his travel coffee mug, game face on for a trying day. After offering Louis coffee or tea, which he cheerfully declined, Susan got Emma going on breakfast and then stood awkwardly in her bathrobe in the doorway of the bonus room, unable to decide if it made her more uncomfortable to perch there — watching an elderly man on hands and knees, in his jeans and an undershirt, cleaning her floor — or to return to the kitchen and leave him alone in this isolated corner of her home.

“Have you been working for Andrea a long time?” she asked.

“Well, how’s forty years?” Louis looked over his shoulder with a broad, playful grin. “Would you call that a long time?”

“Forty years?”

“I kid you not. Well, now, I guess I’ve only been working for her, officially, since Howard passed away. Helping out with the odd jobs and what-have-you. Do everything I can for her, you know?”

Susan nodded as Louis settled back on his haunches, sponge dripping idly onto the hardwood. The guy was a talker, that was clear.

“I’ve been retired some years now, so I’ve got my days free. Thirty-seven years as the assistant principal at Philippa Schuyler, up on Greene Avenue. And I tell you, after all those years keeping tabs on a couple hundred young people, scrubbing the occasional floor, well, I call that a vacation.” Louis’s laugh was low, gentle, and melodious, a slow-played tympani drum roll: huh-huhm, huh-huhm, huh-huhm. “No, but I loved it, I did. Loved those kids.”

Susan thought with fondness of the assistant principal at her own middle school back in New Jersey. Mr. Crimson. Clemson? Something like that.

“You want to know the truth, I’ve known Howard and Andrea since 1970, if you can believe that. Autumn of 1970. We met right here in Brooklyn, protesting over Kent State, waving our signs in Cadman Plaza. One day I’ll bring up some pictures. As Andrea might say, you will plotz.”

He gave the Yiddish word a thick, comical Andrea-style growl, and Susan smiled. “And when did Howard pass away?”

The pleasant grin slipped from Louis’s face, and he looked down at the floor. “Four years ago. And may God rest his poor unfortunate soul.”

A deep silence welled up, and Louis turned back to scouring the floor. As Susan watched him, she felt a twinge of remorse for the way she had sized him up yesterday: though he was clearly no kind of professional handyman, he was forceful and competent as he went about his business in the small room. He focused his efforts on no specific spot, just blasted away at the whole floor with bleach and Pine-Sol, inch by inch, the shock-and-awe cleaning method.

After a few moments, Emma called out from the kitchen. “Mama?” she said. “All done.”

“OK, baby.” From the kitchen came the scrape of a chair leg and a gentle thud as Emma lowered herself to the floor. Susan smiled: she’s growing up so fast. Louis’s memories, his nostalgic attitude, had put her in a sentimental frame of mind. My little girl.

“Hey. Uh, Susan?” She turned and saw that Louis had shifted up onto his knees and was now hauling himself laboriously to his feet. He crossed his arms over his sizable stomach and stood with evident nervousness, not meeting her eye. “Something I need to say to you.”

“All right.”

“I wasn’t looking in your little girl’s room. That night. I need you to know that.”

“Yes,” she replied, taken aback. “You said.”

There was an adamance in this declaration, a pleading quality, as if Louis was sickened by the idea of anyone thinking even for a moment that he was the kind of person who would peep at a child. Susan believed him.

“But …”

“But?”

“I was standing out there. I like to keep an eye on Andrea. Just between you and me, Susan, I get a little … just a little worried about the old girl, sometimes.”

“Worried?”

Louis looked around, discomfort emanating like sweat, his big hands knotted together. “Yeah. Since Howard died, she hardly sleeps, you know, and that’s not right. She seems … oh, just sad, I guess. Tell you the truth, this house has always had an atmosphere to it. Something. Just a whole lot of sadness in the place since Howard died. So sometimes I peek in on old Andrea. Just keepin’ tabs. Figure I owe it to my friend.”

“Huh.” Susan wasn’t sure what she thought about this information. A brief, painful surge of memory coursed through her, of her mother, her mother’s death, the stupid funeral. They had tried to make her look, right in the casket, but for God’s sake …

“And, if you don’t mind my asking,” Susan said suddenly. “What was it Howard died of, exactly?”

“No, I don’t mind.” Louis heaved a big, body-shifting sigh, juggled the bucket of supplies from one hand to another. Now the room smelled thickly of cleaning fluids, of bleach and ammonia. “He was sick. Real sick. It came on sudden, because before that, I tell you straight up, this was the healthiest person you could ever meet. We played racquetball three times a week, and if I beat him once in forty years, I can’t say when it was.”

“Wow.” Susan was blatantly prying now, but she couldn’t help it. “What did he have?”

“I don’t exactly know. A disease. Something in his blood. He didn’t let it kill him, though. That was not Howard’s style.” Louis tilted his head to one side, his eyes glinting with the memory of his friend. “He shot himself, you see? Did himself in before the disease could do it first. Shot himself right in the head.”

In the front hall, Emma eyed Louis warily, but he crouched down, tugging up the cuffs of his jeans, and grinned at her. “Hey, little sister, can I tell you a secret? I got a granddaughter just your age, and you want to know her name? Her name is Amethyst.”

Emma’s eyes widened, and she nodded, as if, yes, she had known that. “And guess what?” she asked, leaning confidentially toward Louis. “That’s a kind of jewel.”

“No kidding!” He pretended astonishment, and Emma nodded rapidly, beaming. “It is! It’s a jewel. And it’s purple.”

As Louis stood up, a faint but clear ping filled the room.

“Ping!” Emma yelped merrily in reply.

“That’s—” Susan began, but Louis held up one hand, palm up, listening. “Hold on.”

It went again. Ping.

And then, a moment later, came a ghostly, deflating moan, raspy, long and low. It was an ugly, uncanny noise, all the more so for being so indistinct — barely audible, really, and originating, or so it felt, from no particular place. Louis narrowed his eyes, took a halting step in no particular direction, then stopped. Susan reached for Emma and grasped her hand. She held her breath, waiting for the noises to come again, felt her whole body grow thick with tension and unease.

A second passed, then another. Silence.

And then her iPhone rang, ripping through the silence, and Susan screamed.

8

“Marni,” said Susan into the phone. “Crap, you scared me.”

“Why? What?”

“Mama?” said Emma. “What’s crap?”

“Nothing, love. Marni, what’s up?” Susan glanced at the clock on the cable box: 8:17. Marni was supposed to be walking through the door in thirteen minutes. Louis gave a cheerful salute and mouthed “so long.” Susan held up a finger for him to wait—the pinging noise, what about—but it was too late.

“Listen,” Marni said. “I am really sorry about this … ”

Speaking in a voice so exaggeratedly throaty and congested that Susan immediately suspected playacting, Marni explained that she’d felt ill last night, hoped it would fade by this morning, but woken just as bad. Of course she would come in anyway, knowing how much Susan had to do, but the last thing she wanted was for Emma to catch anything from her.

“Sure, sure,” said Susan, only half listening to Marni’s elaborate apologies. “All right, then. Feel better.”

She hung up, took a deep breath, and called out, “Guess what, Emma? Looks like it’s an all-day mama day!”

“Really? Yay!”

Emma bounced up the stairs to her bedroom to get dressed while Susan chastised herself for feeling irritated. After all, it’d been ages since she’d spent a whole day with her spirited, funny little daughter, just the two of them. Come on, she told herself, turning her back on her studio and heading up the stairs. We’ll have a blast.

While Emma rifled through her drawers, loudly considering different possible outfits, Susan waited on the landing between the bedrooms and examined the floorboards.

The gap, that little crack … was it widening? She hadn’t measured, of course, and it was still an infinitesimal separation, but she felt sure it was slightly bigger. The wood was groaning, separating, or whatever it was that wood did. I’ll get Louis back up here, Susan thought. Maybe he can take care of it.

According to 1010 WINS, the morning would be rain streaked but the afternoon clear, so Susan decided she and Emma would start their day at the small branch library in Cadman Plaza before lunch and then head to Pierrepont Playground after nap. On the way to the library, Susan left a message for Alex, letting him know that Marni had bailed, so if there was any way he could get home earlier than usual, she’d appreciate the relief. An hour passed, and then two, as Susan and Emma read picture books and put Dora the Explorer through her paces on the ancient desktop computer in the children’s section. Susan became more and more irritated with Alex’s failure to return her call — she knew he was busy, trying to repair the damage done by the lighting assistant and salvage the crucial Cartier shoot. But he could at least check in, to acknowledge the change in schedule. The morning slipped by, they went home for lunch, and still Alex didn’t call.

He must be really busy, Susan told herself. He must be slammed.

“Mama? You OK, Mama?”

“Yes, love. Eat your sandwich.”

While Emma napped, Susan ate her own lunch, a bagel with cream cheese from a place on Montague Street, and flipped aimlessly through the paper. There was an article in the New York section about a co-op board on the Upper West Side dealing with a bedbug infestation: a couple was protesting an edict they’d received to either undergo a costly extermination or move. Susan skimmed the article before flipping to the crossword. When she went to the junk drawer for a pen, she found the photograph of Jessie Spender and her boyfriend Jack.

Such a shame, she thought, turning the picture over in her hands in the light of the kitchen window. They look so happy.

After nap, at the playground, they ran into Shawn, the sweet-faced kid with the cornrows whom Emma had played tag with on the Promenade, the morning they first came to look at the apartment. While the children played an elaborate game of Cinderella, in which they took turns in the roles of prince, princess, fairy godmother, and coach-bearing horse, Susan chatted with the boy’s mother, Vanessa.

“Oh, hey, have you got Shawn in a preschool?”

“Three days a week. If you need any information on what’s around, just ask. I did so much research it’s ridiculous. I’m way anal about that stuff.”

Susan grinned — Vanessa sounded like a woman after her own heart. “I will totally take you up on that,” she said. The woman agreed to arrange a play-date-slash-information-session sometime soon, and they swapped numbers.

Soon after Vanessa and Shawn’s departure, Susan and Emma’s pleasant afternoon was marred by an ugly incident. A tall, coolest-dad-at-the-playground kind of character, in a tailored sport coat and black jeans, eyes locked on his BlackBerry as he pushed his daughter on the swing, gave the girl a too-hard shove and sent her flying. The kid, a frail, dark-haired girl of five or six, landed headfirst on a jutting edge of rock and came up wailing, gushing blood. The mother ran over from a bench while the father furtively jammed his BlackBerry in his pocket.

“Can I get you something?” Susan called out, lifting Emma from her swing and rushing over. “Does she need a bandage? Should we call an ambulance?”

The mother didn’t respond, focused on the girl, cradling her head and daubing at the cut with a wet paper towel. Mr. BlackBerry, however, turned to Susan with open irritation. “An ambulance?” he said. “No, it’s nothing. She’ll be fine.”

It didn’t look like nothing to Susan, but it was also none of her business.

“Is she OK?” asked Emma, craning around in her stroller seat, as Susan wheeled her out the gates of the playground.

“Yes, doll,” said Susan. “Of course.”

Susan cast her own glance backward at the frightened girl, who was rising unsteadily, reddish streaks caked to her forehead. She thought of the awful dream she’d had the other night: The stroller slamming into the ground and bursting like a bomb, sending fountains of blood spraying into the sky. She thought of the rusty smudge on the back of the photograph; she thought of poor Catastrophe the cat, starving and mad in the bonus room, white spit and pink blood foaming the corners of his mouth.

“Alex? Hey.”

They had just returned home, and Susan answered her iPhone on the first ring. It was 4:45 p.m.

“Hey, babe. How are you?”

“I called this morning. Did you get my message?”

“What? Yeah. Oh — I mean, I think so. This morning?”

Alex’s voice carried an undertone, a subtle tightness, indicating to Susan that he was looking at his computer while they talked. Vic was shouting orders to someone in the background.

“You sound busy.”

“Susan, I’m sorry about this, but I can’t come home tonight.”

“Oh.” Susan felt a queer twisting in her gut. She cradled the phone under her ear while she sat Emma down to tug off her shoes.

“It’s this stupid watch. It took us all morning to find a new face and get it affixed properly. Now we still have to shoot the thing, along with the sport watch, the Rolex, the one that was actually scheduled for today. It’s gonna be hours.”

“How many hours?” Susan struggled to control her voice.

“I really have no idea, babe.”

“Oh.” Susan paused. How understanding was she supposed to be here? “So, you know, Marni didn’t come in today.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah, I told you on the message.”

“Hold on.” He yelled to someone in the room with him, probably Vic: “Two seconds, OK? One second?” Then he was on the phone again. “That sucks. I’m sorry about this. We really have to nail this gig. You know that, right?”

Exactly how bad was Alex’s business these days, Susan wondered. She felt a dark pocket of despair open in her stomach: they’d just blown all this money on the move, increased their rent … what if Alex’s business was about to crumble? Then what? You can always go back to Legal Aid, pick up law-temp work, document review … something.…

“Listen, Sue, I gotta go.”

“Sure, sure.”

She hung up, lowered the phone, and saw her daughter staring at her, her eyes quivering saucers of grief.

“Honey?”

Emma burst into tears. “I wanted to talk to daddy!”

Three and a half hours later, with Emma sleeping soundly, Susan fixed herself an easy dinner of pasta and a glass of shiraz. Then she washed the dishes, cleared the table, and dug the picture of Jessica and Jack out of the junk drawer. She walked straight into the bonus room, set up her easel, and tacked the photograph in the lower-right-hand corner of a fresh canvas. The cat-pee stink was gone, thank God, but Susan left the window open anyway, allowing the mild nighttime chill of early fall to breathe into the room. There were two electrical outlets, and in one Susan plugged the baby monitor so she could hear if Emma cried; in the other she plugged her laptop, so she could turn on iTunes and listen to Bach’s Mass in B Minor, always her favorite music to paint to.

Susan arranged her pleasingly old-fashioned wooden palette, her turpentine, her cleaning rags, her wineglass, and the bottle of Shiraz.

“All right,” Susan said to the photograph of Jessica Spender. “Shall we?”

Slowly at first, she painted. Her eyes darted back and forth between the photograph and her canvas as she scumbled in the thin oval of Jessica Spender’s face, the high angles of her cheekbones, two dark recesses for the eyes, the confident angle of the hairline. Soon Susan was working faster, shedding her initial hesitance, losing herself in the work, drawing in details with the tip of a brush. She sang along with the music, moving her brush confidently, slashing and darting, feeling a kind of vigorous animal power flowing through her as she attacked the canvas.

Occasionally, Susan danced backward to survey her work, grunted approvingly, took a gulp of her wine, and dove back in. I’m good at this, she thought, jabbing her brush at the portrait and then yelping aloud. “I’m fucking great!”

Burning hot, sweating buckets, Susan stripped down to her bra and underwear, kept painting, faster and faster, her eyes locked on Jessica’s eyes, hypnotized by the woman she was bringing to life on canvas. She disappeared into the work, edging in the dark shapes, thickening her layers, massaging the colors, feeling the power of each small act of creation. The Mass crescendoed, the Credo, and Susan moaned with exultation, lost to the world.

When she heard the knock at the door, her hands froze. She looked around wildly, heaving breath, scared and guilty like an animal caught feasting on something forbidden. Susan shut off the music, unplugged the baby monitor from the wall, and slipped out of the bonus room, carefully pulling the door shut behind her.

Alex was at the front door. “I’m so sorry. I forgot my keys,” he said, then paused. “Honey? Are you OK?”

“Why?” she asked. “What?”

“What do you mean, what? You’re naked. You’re covered in paint. That is paint, right?”

Susan looked down. She was streaked and splattered, bright jagged lines of reds and blacks crisscrossing her chest and torso.

“Also, it’s two in the morning.”

“What?”

Two? That couldn’t be right. She hadn’t been in that little room for five hours, had she? “I was just doing some painting, is all. I got really into it.” Susan’s own voice sounded distant and unnatural. She felt exhausted; her muscles ached and her head swam. “Really? It’s two o’clock in the morning?”

“Yeah. I’m really sorry I’m so late,” Alex said. “After the shoot was finally over, I ran into Anton on the way to the subway, and I bought him a beer. He and Blondie are on the outs again, apparently.”

Susan nodded, blinked. How had it gotten to be two o’clock?

She was so tired she could barely make it up the stairs. But once she had brushed her teeth and peed and collapsed into bed, Susan couldn’t sleep. Alex, of course, passed out easily and immediately, and she lay watching him for half an hour before slipping out from under the sheets. She considered taking an Ambien but decided it was too close to morning, and she was already pretty drunk on the wine. She went to the bathroom, peed again, and then washed her face and hands, watching as flecks of paint spiraled down the drain. On her way back to bed, she lifted Alex’s jeans from where he’d shed them onto the bedroom floor and was halfway to the laundry hamper when she noticed a curious square bulge in the pocket. Susan hooked two fingers into the pocket and came out with a matchbook from the Mandarin Oriental Hotel.

Two in the morning, Susan thought immediately, and looked over at him in his easy slumber. Hotel matches?

It took her about five seconds to remember that the girl they called Blondie, the on-again-off-again girlfriend of Alex’s college friend Anton, worked at the Mandarin Oriental as a concierge. She’d occasionally gotten them theater tickets, before they had Emma and could still occasionally leave the house at night. A warm wash of relief flooded Susan — Alex had used Anton’s matches, and Anton had gotten them from Blondie, who worked at the Mandarin. Hotel matches, indeed. Moping around like the wife in a country-western song …

She slipped back under the covers, laughing uneasily at her own paranoia. Jesus H. Christ, she thought distantly, as sleepiness began to settle over her, what is this place doing to you?

It was very early in the morning on Saturday, September 18. Susan, Alex, and Emma Wendt had been living in Brooklyn Heights for six days.

9

Five hours later, Susan opened her eyes and saw a single tiny spot of blood on her pillow.

Except it wasn’t blood. Except maybe it was. The room was dark, she was half asleep, and Susan couldn’t really tell. It looked like blood. She rolled over, blinked at the glowing red lines of the clock radio, and moaned softly: 6:36 a.m. A good twenty minutes before Emma’s usual wake-up time, and there was no reason for Susan to have woken.

The spot on the pillowcase was a few inches from where her face had been, just below the line of her mouth; it might even have been a puddle of drool, but it was too small and too contained. A dark crescent-shaped speck, ragged at the edges, the size and rough shape of a chewed-off fingernail. Alex slept on, snoring and open-mouthed. Susan propped herself on one elbow, listening to her breath, and peered at her pillow. Now the speck looked a deep muddy gray against the lemon yellow pillowcase; now, as dead orange glimmers of day crept under the shades, it resolved itself into a dull brownish red.

Oh, she thought. It’s paint. Duh.

Susan flicked at the speck with the nail of her pointer finger, expecting it to come right off. But the speck stayed where it was, bled into the cloth of the pillowcase. Susan pressed at it gently with the pad of a fingertip, and the firm pillow gave way slightly under the weight of her push.

It’s nothing. Just — it’s nothing.

Susan let her head drop back to the pillow and closed her eyes to the dot. She willed herself back to sleep, knowing it was futile. At last, at 7:12, Emma began to fuss over the monitor, and Susan smiled, as always, at the sound of her daughter’s sweet morning noises. The rustle of the sheets, the give of the springs as Emma shifted her weight on her thin IKEA mattress, the first purring, hushed, “Mama?”

Susan opened her eyes, thinking maybe the tiny spot would be gone, faded like a fragment of a dream. But it was still there.

Five minutes later, Susan was crouched beside the toilet while Emma peed. She heard Alex roll out of bed, followed by a series of rustling noises and whomps as he made the bed and tossed the throw pillows in place. Then the noises stopped.

“Hey, Sue?” he called. “Did you see this?”

Crap. If Alex had noticed the spot, even in the morning-dark of the room, even while making the bed in his inimitably hurried, that’ll-do-just-fine style, then it must be larger and more distinct — more real — than she had hoped.

“Go ahead and flush, and wash your hands, Em.”

In the bedroom, Alex had flicked on Susan’s bedside reading light and angled its gooseneck over the pillow, haloing the lamp’s sixty watts around the crescent-shaped stain.

“Is it paint?”

“Maybe. I have no idea.”

Susan, for some reason, didn’t let on that she had seen it before, that she had already eliminated the possibility of dried paint. Alex made a little “hmmm” and pushed his curly hair out of his eyes. “What about blood? I think it’s blood.”

Susan winced. All right folks, she thought. Let’s not get carried away.

“Did something bite you?”

“No.” Susan raised a hand to her neck, ran her palm searchingly along her cheek. “I don’t think so.”

“But it is blood? I’m right, right?”

“No. I mean, I don’t know.”

“What could have bitten you?”

“I seriously have no idea.”

But the answer skittered across in the back of her throat, nasty and furtive: Bedbugs, bedbugs, bedbugs. She thought of the article about the co-op board. The news, in fact, had been overrun by bedbugs lately, stories of renters suing their landlords, shops emptied of customers, hotels shut down on busy weekends so teams of exterminators could flush out the infestations.

“I’m sure it’s nothing,” Susan said. “Maybe it is paint. It probably is, actually.”

Alex crossed his arms and sighed. Emma had come in and was sitting at the foot of their bed, cross-legged in her nightgown with the owls and stars, tossing Mr. Boodle gently up and letting him fall into her lap like a parachutist.

“Is it even red?” Susan asked, squinting at the spot. “Look.”

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—

But of course she had decided there were no bedbugs — hadn’t she? — and she could hardly complain to the landlady about a spot of dirt on her pillowcase. “Oh, right, I know. There’s been this kind of noise. Like a …” She gestured vaguely with her hands. “Like a ping, kind of.”

“A ping?” Andrea narrowed her eyes. She was now standing with one foot on the bottom step, and Susan noticed that she had come outside wearing a pair of thin-soled lime green slippers. “Where is it coming from?”

“Well, that’s what’s weird,” Susan said, a little embarrassed even to have brought it up. “I’m not exactly sure. We’ve just sort of heard it, generally. Mostly in the living room area, I guess. It’s extremely faint, and it never lasts for very long. Not a big deal, really.”

“Don’t worry,” said Andrea. “I’ll take care of it myself.”

Somewhere out over the East River the sun drifted behind a bank of gray clouds, and 56 Cranberry Street was momentarily cast in shadow, silhouetted like a black crepe cutout hung on the backdrop of sky. It was almost noon, time for Susan to be at Theresa’s with her man and child, eating a tuna sandwich and hearing funny stories about ballet class. As if sensing her impatience, Andrea abruptly began to hike up the stoop.

“Anyway, Suze,” she said. “We’ll speak another time.” As Susan watched, Andrea pulled the big red door closed behind her.

The rest of the weekend unspooled in a series of happy, easy hours. After lunch on Montague Street, Susan, Alex, and Emma strolled the tree-lined streets, exploring their new neighborhood as a family. They stopped at the drugstore, at the bank, and at Area Toys to buy Emma a jigsaw puzzle. At the farmer’s market on Cadman Plaza they bought a bag of ripe Honeycrisp apples, a thing of frozen sausage, and three bundles of asparagus. After nap, Susan and Emma did the jigsaw puzzle, Susan marveling as her precocious genius-child patiently sorted through the twenty-four oversized pieces to assemble the barnyard scene.

“I take it all back,” Alex said that night as he fried the asparagus with olive oil and salt. “This kitchen is actually terrific.” He winked at Susan and she winked back. When Emma was asleep they polished off a bottle of Prosecco and made love on the living room floor — their first time since moving to Brooklyn.

Sunday morning Susan walked over to the Laundromat with a load of whites, leafed through the Times magazine until the buzzer buzzed, and then switched the stuff over to the dryer. When she caught up with Alex and Emma at the playground, she smiled to see that they’d met up once again with Shawn, and that Shawn had a seven-year-old sister named Tarika, with a pair of braided pigtails and a gap-toothed smile. The two families ended up having lunch at the Park Diner, and by dessert Emma was head over heels for Tarika, trailing the girl faithfully to the cookie case and hanging on her every word like revelation.

“Oh, shoot,” Susan said suddenly, hours later, as Alex and Susan lay in bed reading.

“Shoot what, gorgeous?”

“I gotta go back to the Laundromat. Our stuff is still sitting in the dryer.”

“No way, dude.” Alex tossed his New Yorker on the ground. “I’ll grab it.”

“You sure?”

“Am I sure?” He grinned and hopped out of bed. Susan smiled, feeling safe and sleepy. “What are husbands for?”

Alex tugged on his blue track pants, planted a loud kiss on her forehead, and was gone. For once, Susan drifted off easily and was still sleeping soundly twenty minutes later, when Alex came home, folded the laundry, and put it all away — including the pillowcase that had borne the small and curious stain.

10

On Monday morning at 9:13, Susan stepped into the bonus room, cried out, and dropped her coffee cup. The ceramic mug smashed to pieces on the hardwood, splashing Susan’s legs with scalding liquid where they peeked out from her pajama bottoms. She screamed again, in pain and surprise, stumbled backward and clutched the doorframe, but her eyes remained locked on the portrait. Though still half complete, it was nevertheless an excellent rendering, a vivid and precise re-creation of the girl in the photograph that she’d stuck on the lower-right-hand corner of the easel. Sweet, funny Jessica Spender with her slash of scarlet bangs, her wicked and amused expression, her high cheekbones and red lipstick.

Except there, along the left cheekbone, Susan had given the girl a row of nasty welts, three of them in a line, running at a slight angle from the far corner of the left eye down to the nostril. Three marks, three round, raised, red circles, each with a pinprick of white at its dead center. The marks were carefully executed, and Susan did not remember painting them at all.

Marks?

No. Bites.

She had given Jessica Spender a row of bites.

Bedbug bites, her mind hissed. They’re bedbug bites, they’re totally—

Susan slammed the door and retreated into the living room, her hand pressed to her chest. She bit her lip and pressed the heel of her palm into her eyes, trying to summon memories of Friday night, her intense hours of painting, her … binge? Trance? Whatever state of hyperfocused semiconsciousness she had entered into. The rest of the painting was carefully realistic, taken directly from the photograph. Except she had decided, some part of her had decided, to add the marks. The bites.

Could she have done that kind of work, that kind of careful work, without remembering it? And why would she?

Susan thought of the blood on her pillow—paint, paint, I thought we decided it was paint? Or dirt, a smudge of dirt? What did we say? — and a wrenching shudder traveled down her spine.

“Hey, Sue?”

Marni was hollering from the kitchen, where she’d been busily gathering snacks and plastic utensils, getting Emma ready for departure. “We’re taking off, if that’s OK?” The nanny was being extra solicitous, trying to make up for her supposed illness on Friday, which had miraculously resolved itself in time for a concert Saturday night at Hammerstein Ballroom.

“Wait,” said Susan, and hurried down the hall. “One second.”

“Hi, Mama.” Emma was ready to go: she had on her shoes, her little jean jacket, her oversized Dora the Explorer backpack. Marni stood with the diaper bag slung over one shoulder, the strap running snugly between her breasts.

“Emma, honey,” Susan said, “Mommy needs to ask you something.”

In the bonus room she guided Emma carefully around the broken shards of the coffee cup and stood her before the easel. Susan gave her daughter’s hand a reassuring squeeze; at nearly four years old, she could sense when her mother was upset about something, and to worry that she was the source.

“Emma, do you see these little dots on the woman’s face?” she asked gently. Emma raised herself up on her tiptoes and nodded gravely. “Honey, did you make those dots?”

Emma shook her head vigorously, her bangs flopping on her forehead.

“Are you sure? Maybe on Saturday, before dinner? When Mama and Dada were in the kitchen? You were playing by yourself in the living room, did you maybe …?”

But Emma kept shaking her head, her tiny brow creased with adamance. “No, Mama. I didn’t.”

Susan felt a presence and glanced up. Marni was hovering in the doorway, head tilted to one side, scrutinizing the portrait of Jessica Spender. Susan cast her an irritated look, and she backed away.

“Mommy’s not mad, honey. I just need you to tell me the truth. Did you touch my painting?”

Suddenly, urgently, Emma threw her arms around her and buried her face in Susan’s neck, breathing hotly into her throat.

“Can we leave, Mama? I don’t like this room.”

“Sure, Em, just—”

“I don’t like it!”

Susan cleaned the spilled coffee and the broken mug, gathering up the shards into a paper bag and mopping the floor on hands and knees with a wad of paper towels. Down here on her knees, she could still smell it, even under the rich bitter smell of the coffee: that abandoned cat, its dying reek of piss and rot. The painting stood on its easel above her, still and silent. The truth was, Emma couldn’t have messed with it, even if she’d gotten it in her head to do so. She would have had to drag in the stepstool, drag it back when she was finished, not to mention mix the colors and clean the brushes and.…

I did it. I painted that picture that way, and I don’t know why.

Susan felt a darkness welling in her veins. She rose from her cleaning crouch and stepped to the painting, ran her hands over the three dots marring Jessica Spender’s beautiful cheeks.

I’m sorry, Jessica, she thought, as if she’d vandalized not the painting but the girl herself. I’m sorry.

Twenty minutes later, Susan was out the door and on her way to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. She would, she had decided, sit with her sketchpad and charcoal pencils, watch the stream of joggers and the middle-aged Caribbean nannies pushing their strollers; she would set her artist’s gaze on the Manhattan horizon and sketch the magical skyline. She hustled down Cranberry Street, feeling the September sun on her cheeks. Turning right onto the Promenade, she dug her iPhone out of her coat pocket and called Alex.

“Hey, hon,” he said tersely. “What’s up?”

She could picture him, staring like an X-ray technician at his computer screen, running the pixelated magnifying glass over an enlarged JPEG of a diamond, searching out its flaws.

“Nothing, just a random question for you. Did you by any chance do something to my painting?”

“Did I what?” She heard his fingers rattling over the keys.

“My painting, Al, the painting I’m working on in the bonus room.”

“I’m sorry, Susan, could you hold on for just one sec?”

“Sure.”

She was halfway down the Promenade now, and she tossed her bag onto a bench and sat beside it, looking out at the Statue of Liberty and Governor’s Island. A few feet away, a knot of tourists was posing at the railing, framed by the view, leaning on one another and laughingly hoisting an Italian flag.

“OK. Sorry, babe. What is it again?”

“I—careful!” One of the tourists was bobbling a toddler up on his shoulders, and Susan had a lurching sensation of the boy tumbling over the railing, down into the rushing traffic of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway below.

“Susan?”

The boy was fine. His father had his legs gripped tightly, one in each hand. Susan closed her eyes and opened them again, resumed breathing.

“When you got home on Friday night, I was working on a painting. In my … in that little room, behind the living room. Did you, by any chance, do something to it? Over the weekend?”

“Did I do something to it? Yes, dear. I baked it in a pie.”

“Alex.”

“I have not stepped foot in that room since we moved to Brooklyn.” She heard rapid tapping: he was sending e-mails while they talked. “I seriously don’t even know what the room looks like.”

“Huh. It’s the weirdest thing … ”

“Susan? I am so busy today. Can we—”

“Yes. Of course. Get back to work.”

Susan held her sketchbook in her lap for half an hour, staring out across the river.

When Alex came home that night, it was as if the easygoing, eager-to-please doofus with whom she and Emma had spent their weekend had been kidnapped and replaced with his sullen, irritable twin. He barely said hi, barely acknowledged the painted pinecone Emma had spent all afternoon making for him.

“You don’t seem up for dinner,” Susan said, trying to get a read on him. “Should I do grilled cheese?”

“Sure. Fine.”

While Susan dug around to find the cheese for their sandwiches, he reached over her head and helped himself to a beer.

“Want to hear some great news? There was some old dude hanging out on our stoop just now, perched on the front step, smoking a cigar. I said, ‘Excuse me?’ as in, ‘Can I help you?’ but he didn’t say anything. He just shifted over and gave me this big, extra-polite grin. Like he was doing me some big favor, you know, letting me into my own house.”

Alex stalked over to the front window, pulling on his beer, and glared outside.

“If he’s still out there in ten minutes, I’m calling the cops.”

Susan was slicing cheese on the cutting board. “That’s just Louis,” she said.

“Louis? Who the hell is Louis?”

Alex’s voice was too loud. Susan stopped slicing. Emma, at the kitchen table, looked up from her coloring book and back down again quickly.

“Remember, when Andrea told us she had a guy who did stuff around the place for her, like unclog the toilets and stuff? That’s him.”

Alex rolled his eyes, let out a derisive snort. “You have got to be fucking kidding me.” Susan gave him a look—language—but he ignored her. “What is he, a thousand years old?”

Susan shrugged, heard herself parroting Andrea. “He doesn’t look like much, but he gets the job done. Seriously.” Alex sipped his beer and grunted. “So what’s going on? How’s work?”

“You don’t want to know.”

But he told her anyway. From all appearances, their hard work the previous week on the Cartier shoot had been for naught. Richard Hastie, the potential rep, was using the watch-face snafu as an excuse to pass them over on the Cartier contract in favor of a large Diamond District outfit called Stone Work.

“It’s just classic. They’ve got more experience, he says, so Cartier feels more comfortable with them, but of course we can’t get more experience without a big-time client. So we’re stuck with the penny-ante stuff, and I’m spending half my time writing invoices and payment reminders, instead of taking pictures.” He snorted. “At least when I’m taking a particularly stylish picture of a ring, I can tell myself I’m a real photographer.”

“I’m sorry, honey.”

Susan made the right sympathetic noises, but beneath the surface her anxiety blossomed to bright and busy life. She could hear every word that Alex was thinking but not saying: This is all your fault, Susan. All your fault. He was struggling, handcuffed to a sinking business, stripped of his artistic identity, and she got to stay home and make art?

Or sit uselessly on the Promenade and people watch, not making art at all?

“Come on, Susan, don’t use the santoku knife to cut tomatoes.”

“What?”

“We have a cheap tomato knife. Use that. I’ve told you, save the good knives for when you really need a good knife.”

Emma went to bed early that night, and Alex and Susan watched Hell’s Kitchen in silence. If Alex remembered her odd phone call, questioning him about her painting in the bonus room, he didn’t mention it. Given his mood, Susan saw little point in reminding him.

11

The next day, Susan made no effort to paint. Once Alex had left for work and Marni had arrived and taken Emma to a 9:30 story time, she walked, with her umbrella open against a damp and drizzly autumn morning, to a Court Street coffee shop called Cafe Pedlar. She ordered a cappuccino and a pretzel roll, settled at a table in a back corner, and contemplated the recent unsettling events.

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 hyperactive elementary school student doing a report: “Bedbugs are parasites, which means they live off the blood of a host — that’s you!” “Every bedbug begins life as a ‘stage one’ and molts its exoskeleton five times before achieving full maturity as a ‘stage five’!” “Bedbugs can live for more than a year between feedings!”

“Great,” Susan muttered. A couple more clicks, and she was engrossed in a fierce debate, ranging over many posts, about whether bedbugs bore a detectable odor: some people were saying no; others were saying that a colony smelled faintly of lemon or lemon-scented candles. One person argued passionately that bedbugs smelled of raspberries and cilantro, a smell that “gets much stronger before/during blood meals!”

Susan went back to the previous page, found the link that boasted “Pictures! Pictures! Pictures!” and clicked on it. She began to scroll down and immediately stopped — the first picture, posted by someone identifying themselves only as “0-684-84328-5@gmail.com,” featured a row of three bites, each one red and raised, with a white dot in the center.

“Oh, crap,” said Susan. “Oh, crap.” She reached up and scratched idly at the top of her left cheekbone, just below her eye. Then she clicked the tab for Google on her bookmarks bar and did a search for “Jessica Spender.”

It was, at it turned out, a fairly common name. There was a Jessica Spender in Joliet, Illinois, who owned a pastry shop, but the picture showed a heavy middle-aged lady in a ruffled apron. Another Jessica Spender was in Detroit, quoted three times in a Free Press article about the ongoing struggle to rebeautify that city’s beleaguered downtown. This Jessica Spender was twenty-seven years old, which sounded like the right age, but she was a lifelong resident of Detroit, not to mention black. There was a seventeen-year-old Jessica Spender in a high school in South Bend, a newborn Jessica Spender in a Babble article about jaundice, and on and on and on.

Susan tapped her chin and then tried “Jessie Spender” instead. This time, the first result was a Facebook page for someone named Jess Spender — and this lead, at last, seemed promising. It listed no age or occupation, and the profile picture wasn’t a picture of a person at all — it was an odd-angle photograph of the Williamsburg Clock Tower, with a big handlebar mustache Photoshopped over it. A very cutesie-clever, very Brooklyn kind of profile picture.

This is her, Susan thought.

They had no Facebook friends in common, but Jess Spender’s account was set to allow incoming messages from anyone. Even, Susan thought with an uneasy snort of laughter, people living in your old house, who have created a likeness of you and then covered it with some kind of biblical plague.

She clicked the button that said “Send Jess a message” and typed quickly in all lowercase letters: “hi. if this is the jessica spender that used to live on cranberry street in brooklyn, i have a”

Susan paused, cracked her knuckles. She was going to write “a quick question for you,” but she didn’t exactly know what her question was.

What about “how’s your face?” That’s a pretty quick question, right?

Susan deleted “i have a” and instead wrote “there’s a piece of mail here for you and it looks important. landlady does not have forwarding address.” She signed with her name, her e-mail address, and then, after a brief hesitation, added her cell number as well.

12

“Sue, I have been the worst friend in the world! Do you want to have lunch today? Can you come to the city?”

It was Friday morning when Susan’s friend Jenna called with the last-minute invitation, and Susan accepted it eagerly. The week had passed in a blur: Each morning Alex grunted some muffled facsimile of “good morning” and left, messenger bag slung over his arm, travel mug of coffee in a one-handed death grip. Marni came and whisked Emma away, leaving Susan alone in the house, melancholy and uneasy, too freaked out by the bonus room to do any painting, or much of anything else.

“Can we go somewhere with wine?”

“You bet your sweet ass we can!”

Jenna was an actress, the rare kind who actually made a living, performing frequently Off Broadway, occasionally on Broadway, and the rest of the time doing TV commercials and voice-overs. She was nice to a fault, a habitual self-deprecator, constantly pooh-poohing her substantial accomplishments and professing astonishment at Susan’s life — at her perfect child, at her gorgeous husband.

Susan spent the morning in a better mood than she’d felt in days, enjoying a brisk walk to the Gristedes on Henry Street to get flowers for the kitchen table and then taking her time in her closet, selecting the right outfit for lunch. She looked forward to hearing about Jenna’s latest adventures and to sharing with a sympathetic old friend both her excitement and her misgivings about the house on Cranberry Street. Jenna, she knew, would make her see how silly she was being, how lucky she was with her amazing family and their incredible new apartment.

Susan left the house at 12:30 to meet Jenna at Les Halles at 1:15. The closest A/C station, on High Street, was out of service, so she doubled back toward the stop on Jay Street. This detour took Susan down Livingston, where she walked quickly past the improvised shrine to the Phelps twins: the small forest of white and pink roses, the clutch of woeful wide-eyed teddy bears.

“Oh my God, how is everyone? How’s Emma?”

“She’s great, she’s really great. Here … ”

Susan found the latest pictures on her iPhone, and Jenna leaned across the table to clutch her arm, gasping loudly at each shot. “No! Too cute! Too cute! God, Sue, what an incredible creature she is! I’m serious, I am so in awe of you.”

“Of me? Come on. What about you? Fran sent me the article from Variety, by the way. About the Lillian Hellman festival.”

Jenna waved her hands to dismiss any talk of herself and her own accomplishments. “How’s Alex?

“Oh …” Susan exhaled, took a sip of her Merlot. “He’s fine. Busy.”

“Good, good. Busy is good, right?”

“Yeah.”

There was a long pause. Susan bit her lip, ran a hand through her hair, and looked at her friend; Jenna returned the gaze with wide, empathetic eyes. “God,” Susan said, laughing quietly. “I must look like hell.”

“You look beautiful, Susan.” Jenna reached across the table and took her hands. Susan and Jenna had been friends for about twelve years, since both dated a guy named William Vasouvian. They’d run into each other at DBA one night, after both were through with him, and bonded over draft beers and stories of what a moron William Vasouvian had turned out to be.

“What’s going on, Suzaroo?”

Susan opened her mouth, then shut it again, smiled, shrugged. It was all so ridiculous. Gee willikers! I think my paintbrush is possessed, Jenna! What do I do?

“Not a big deal,” Susan said instead. “Nothing. I think we might have bedbugs.”

Jenna let go of her hands.

“You have to move.” Jenna stared at Susan with an intense, unflinching expression. “I’m serious.”

A prickly shiver ran through Susan, from the base of her neck to the small of her back; the way Jenna was reacting, it was as if she had said her house was haunted, or confessed that she was painting dark visions from the Other Side. She forced herself to laugh lightly and raised an arch eyebrow in reply. “Jenna, take it easy. I said we might have them. We probably don’t. Besides—”

“So why did you say that?”

“Because I … oh, I don’t know. There was this spot on my pillow, and I thought …” She had a powerful memory, of walking through the living room in the silence and darkness, of being watched. She almost said it, almost said, “I felt them watching me,” but then didn’t.

“Thought what?” Jenna said. “Have you been bitten?”

“No, Jenna. No.”

But Jenna was shaking her head emphatically. “You have got to move. Get out of there. I’ll help you pack.”

“Jenna. Stop. You’re freaking me out.”

“Well, I’m sorry, but you should be freaked out.”

The waiter set down two green salads with grilled chicken and a basket of bread. “Enjoy, ladies.”

Jenna kept her eyes locked on Susan. “I mean, you’ve seen the news, right? These things are everywhere. I don’t know what it’s like in Brooklyn, but I have heard so many horror stories. People end up throwing away all their stuff, sleeping on the ground, moving a million times.”

“Jenna.”

“I knew this girl, Katie Wilkes, she was in The Weir with me, she was engaged to this guy, and then they got bedbugs, from a secondhand futon, she thinks. Anyway, it caused this huge strain between them. Whole thing fell apart.” Jenna shook her head gravely and stabbed at her salad. Her BlackBerry vibrated on the table; she glanced at it but didn’t answer. Susan wondered fleetingly who was calling Jenna and felt a stab of nostalgia for work, for assignments and deadlines and pay stubs and things to do.

“OK, Jenna. Thank you. But seriously, like I said, I don’t think it’s bedbugs.”

Jenna took a bite of her salad. “What does Alex say?”

Susan took a bite of hers. “He doesn’t think so, either.”

Jenna sighed, picked up her BlackBerry, and began to scroll through it. “I’m going to give you this number. For this woman named Dana Kaufmann. She’s an exterminator. Pest control, whatever they call it.”

“Jenna.”

“My friend Ron, who works at Actor’s Equity, he made everyone put this number in their phones after they found bedbugs backstage at the ATA. Apparently this lady is, like, the exterminator to the stars. She sprayed Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard’s house, in Park Slope.”

“OK.”

“Will you call her?”

“If I need to.”

Jenna let the subject drop, and they passed the rest of the meal more pleasantly, catching up on mutual friends and books each had recently read. Jenna said she would come out for a visit soon, and Susan promised to see the show she’d just started rehearsing, a new musical by Tom Kitt, one of the guys who wrote Next to Normal. Jenna said what she always said, which was, “Oh, you don’t have to do that. You’re so busy …”

When they were hugging goodbye, Jenna clutched her tighter than usual and then drew back and looked her in the eyes.

“Oh, and perfect little Emma,” she said, her voice an urgent whisper. “I’m serious, Sue. If it is bedbugs, you have got to move!”

Susan took the 2 train back, so she could avoid the creepy shrine on Livingston Street. When she got home it was 1:45 in the afternoon; Emma would be upstairs, already napping, and Marni would be inside, sprawled on the sofa, reading or taking a nap of her own. Susan stood outside the house with her hands on her hips, staring up at the dark shape of the house against the sky, in just the posture she had discovered Andrea in the other day. When she was about to climb the steps to go inside, the red front door swung open, and Louis emerged at the top of the stoop, whistling lightly and carrying a hammer in one hand. When he saw her, he stopped and squinted, as if taking a moment to remember who she was, before calling out a greeting.

“Well, hello there, Susan. How ya doin’?”

As he trotted down the stoop toward her, Susan stayed put, glancing at the little door beneath the steps.

“Louis, can I ask you a question?”

The old man stopped at the bottom of the steps and smiled. “Sure thing.”

“Has Andrea ever had bedbugs?”

Louis came down the last step, and they were both on the sidewalk now, at the foot of the stoop. He leaned his bulk against the short wrought-iron fence and scratched his big bald head.

“No. No, I don’t believe she has,” he said slowly. “Not that I know of, anyway And if anyone would know, it’s me.”

“And what about the previous tenants. Jessica Spender, and whatever his name.”

“Jack. That fella’s name was Jack Barnum. I remember it, because it’s like the circus, you know. Barnum. My kids always loved the circus. When they were little we used to take ’em to the Midtown Tunnel in the middle of the night, to watch ’em bring the elephants across. You ever do that?”

“No. But, Louis — Jessica and Jack, did they have bedbugs?”

“Nope. Boy, those kids didn’t need ’em, though. They had plenty of other problems.” Louis shifted his weight, bobbled the hammer in his palm. “Why you asking all this? You think you might have a problem?”

“No. No, I’m just — you know, it’s in the news and all.”

“Sure.”

They stood in silence for a minute, and then Louis nodded and stood up. “All right. You take care now.”

He began to amble down the street, but Susan wasn’t ready to go inside.

“Louis?”

He stopped on the sidewalk and turned back toward her; cheerful still, happy to help, but puzzled, maybe just the slightest bit put out. A man ready to proceed with his day.

“Yes?”

I should ask him to fix the broken floorboard, Susan thought. And the faucet, and the light-switch cover. When she gave Andrea her inventory of complaints last weekend, the landlady hadn’t written any of it down, and Susan suddenly felt sure she’d never actually mentioned it to Louis.

Instead she found herself asking, “What’s in the basement, Louis?”

Louis’s gaze hardened. “Look, now. I already apologized for scaring your girl.”

“I know. I’m just curious.”

“Curious, huh?” He stared at her, taking her measure, and Susan thought he might just walk away. But then he shrugged and walked back over to where she was standing, spoke in a low, careful voice. “This is between you and me, understand?”

She nodded.

“Strictly between you and me. Now, like I said, Howard killed himself before his blood could kill him first. What I didn’t tell you, what I didn’t want to tell you, but since you’re asking.… ”

He leaned in, and Susan did, too; their foreheads were nearly touching. “He did it here in the house. Right down in the basement, real late one night.”

“Jesus.”

Louis straightened up and glanced over his shoulder at Andrea’s dark first-floor window, before continuing in an urgent whisper. “This is all part of … part of why I’m a little concerned about Andrea, see. After it was over, you know, she never … never let anyone go down there and, you know, tidy up. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a gunshot wound to the head, what happens to the wall, the floor … ”

Susan grimaced. She was feeling warm and tired, the wine from lunch catching up with her.

“Most I could do, after they came and took his body away, before she shooed me off, was put the damn hunting rifle back in its trunk. Figured at least get the thing out of sight, so it wasn’t hanging around taunting her whenever she went down there for a roll of paper towels. Rest of the basement’s just as it was on the day, so far as I know. Goddamn horror show, pardon my language.”

“What do you mean, so far as you know? You never—”

Louis shook his head. “She won’t let me down there. Because she knows if I do go down there, I’m gonna get down on my hands and knees and clean up what poor Howard did to himself. It just isn’t right, leaving a scene like that. Like it’s some kind of death museum.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah. Now, look, Susan. We’re keeping this between you and me? Understand?”

“Sure. Of course.”

Louis was smiling again, but there was coldness behind his smile, and force. It was not a request.

13

The thundercloud that had hung low and heavy all week over Susan and Alex’s marriage erupted with ferocity on Sunday night, just after Alex came down from putting Emma to sleep. Though he’d already had two beers with dinner, Alex went straight to the fridge, opened a third, and drank half of it in one long swallow. Susan, at the kitchen table finishing her dinner of salad and sliced roast beef, looked up and said — simply, casually—“Thirsty?” It was the kind of little bantering tease that would normally earn a comical assent (“As a matter of fact I am!”) or, at worst, a dismissive and weary, “Ha, ha.” But Alex, sullen and discontented as he’d been for days, stared back at her, bottleneck gripped tightly in his fist, and said, “What? What’s the problem?”

Susan pushed her chair away from the table. He was spoiling for a fight, and Susan, in her own dark and unsettled frame of mind, found herself itching to give him one.

“What’s my problem? Come on, Al. Something’s making you all pissy, but guess what? You share your life with another person. Two people, in fact.”

He made a sour face. “You don’t have to tell me that.”

Susan’s steak knife trembled slightly in her grip. “What the hell does that mean?”

“Nothing.” He exhaled, turned his face away from her and gazed down into the sink. “I’m just anxious about money. I have to write the rent check, and it’s going to be a tough one.”

“Oh.”

As soon as he softened, Susan relaxed, too. This was all she wanted, for Alex to open up, to share what was eating him, instead of moping around like a human black cloud. Now she could do what spouses did, say all the right things about how it was going to be OK, how they were a team, how they could figure it out together.

But just as she said “Alex …,” he turned back around and said the magic words: “Especially since you’re not working right now.… ”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Susan said sharply, tossing the steak knife onto her plate with a clatter. Over the baby monitor, Emma made a discontented moan in her sleep.

“What?” said Alex, with obnoxiously exaggerated innocence.

“I am just so sick of hearing you say that.”

“Why? You were the one who decided to stop working.”

“It wasn’t unilateral. We talked about it a thousand times.”

“Exactly. You talked me into submission.”

Susan’s jaw dropped. She felt like she’d been punched in the stomach. “And, by the way,” Alex continued, jabbing his finger at her, his nostrils flaring, “You were the one who decided that we needed to spend several thousand dollars to move. To move to a more expensive apartment … ”

“OK, well, once again, I didn’t decide anything by myself.”

“Oh, come on.”

“You agreed with me!”

“I went along with you.”

Susan snorted. “Please.”

Alex shook his head angrily. She could see him building steam, convincing himself of the accuracy of his own memory. She felt aware of how much bigger he was than her, of his thick torso and big arms. “No, I did, I went along with you. I knew it was a stupid idea, but I gave in. That’s different from agreeing.”

“That’s not fair, Alex. It’s not fair and you know it.”

All the while an accusing voice was chattering in the back of Susan’s mind, an insistent and taunting whisper: he’s right, he’s right, of course he’s right. It was Susan who had dragged them from their cozy nest off Union Square, it was Susan who saddled them with this new burden, with this new apartment—which, by the way, she thought crazily, is very possibly haunted and/or infested with—

She shook her head violently, wrestled her mind back under her control.

“So your business is tanking?” His eyes widened, and she liked it; she liked to see that she’d wounded him. “So I’ll get a job! I’ll go to a firm. I’ll be making three times as much as you by next week.”

“Great. And then you’ll be wandering around here whining, every night, how miserable you are … how hard things are for you …”

“Oh, like you’ve been doing for the last two weeks?”

The fight carried on for hours, the kind of interminable and miserable argument that would peter out into brutalized silence, then flare suddenly back to life, worse than before — another round of recriminations and accusations, snorts of derision, unrelated grievances dragged out to be aired and re-aired. When they fought this way, Susan imagined them as two mad and vicious dogs, tearing at each other’s throats, charged with pure animal hatred. Later, lying awake, her heart pounding and her chest trembling from the exertion, Susan thought that without question it was the worst fight in the history of their marriage, the worst since they had known each other.

Beside her, Alex lay sleeping peacefully, his flesh gently glowing in the moonlight, a line of spit running down his fleshy cheek. Like a child. Like nothing had happened. Susan stared at the cracks in the ceiling. She resisted the urge to shake him awake, scream in his face, go for another round. His easy slumber was just one more attack on her, one more way of making her feel bad.

Christ.

Every night, it seemed like there were more cracks in the goddamn ceiling.

The dream came again.

It began, this time, at the shrine on Livingston Street. She was sorting through the wilting pink roses and dirty teddy bears, trying to find a good one to take home for Emma. These bears had been out on this grimy street for so long, surely the fleas and maggots had had their way with them? But oh, Emma wanted one so, so Susan lifted the dilapidated toys one by one, looking into their dead black plastic eyes, running her hands through their matted fur. Until a throaty voice called watch out, and she looked up, up along the dizzying height of the building, and saw the massive double stroller tumbling down, faster and faster, spinning in the air, the twin girls screaming and screaming in their seats. The stroller slammed against the pole of the awning and hurled outward in a long final arc, sailing over Susan’s head and bursting on the sidewalk beside her. Blood gushed out in all directions, great horrid fonts of blood, pouring down over her, running into her eyes and filling her mouth as she screamed and screamed—

— and woke, panting, with Alex shaking her. “Honey? Honey,” he said, “It’s all right.” His eyes glowed with love and tenderness, and she collapsed into his bare chest, ran her hands desperately through his hair. He shushed her, cooed into her cheeks. “Your pillow is soaked,” he said, and went to the linen closet to fetch a fresh pillowcase.

“No,” she whispered, tried to whisper, but found the word lodged in her throat like a marble, round and hard. NO. He unfolded the pillowcase and flapped it once, neatly, and bugs went flying, like sand shakes out of a beach towel, thousands and thousands of bugs, their antennae twitching in the darkness, bugs coating the sheets and the floor. She could feel them, rushing in every direction, disappearing into every crack and corner of the room.

We’ll never get them out — never get them out now.…

Her eyes shot open and she was awake this time, really awake. Quiet darkness. The ceiling. The cracks. It was 3:32 a.m.

The pillowcase, Susan thought. The pillowcase!

She slipped out of bed, her heart thudding wham wham wham in her chest, stepped out onto the landing, and opened the linen closet. The pillowcase, her pillowcase from last weekend, was still where Alex had tossed it indifferently atop the otherwise neat pile. She lifted the thin folded fabric under her arm and took it to the bathroom, where she shook it out and held it up to the vanity lights above the mirror. They had convinced themselves it wasn’t blood, but it was. It was a small ragged circle of deep, rich red against the lemon yellow of the pillowcase.

It was blood.

Susan, in a sort of daze, carefully folded the pillowcase back up and laid it atop the pile. Then she stumbled back into the bedroom, collapsed into bed, and fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

14

The next morning Susan woke with three small bites on her arm.

She stared at them, unsurprised. Three bites.

Susan flicked on the bedside light. Her bites were arranged in a neat row, just above the wrist. Each bite was raised and hard, the circumference of a dime, dotted with a white pinprick at dead center. For thirty long seconds, Susan looked at her bites.

Just like Jessica’s, she thought, and then told herself to be quiet.

It was 6:42 a.m. on Monday, September 27. Susan and her family had been living in Brooklyn for fifteen days.

Emma was still sleeping, and she heard the water of Alex’s shower through the wall. Susan flipped her pillow and ran her fingers over the case, holding the fabric closely to her eyes, but found no spots. Then she got out of bed, pulled down the comforter, examined the top sheet; she stripped it off and ran her hands along the length of the fitted sheet, from the top of the bed to the foot. Susan had a sense that this was what she had been waiting for; the floating unease she’d had in her gut for days now had been realized somehow, like a prophecy fulfilled.

The bites didn’t hurt. She pushed at them with her fingertip, scratched gently at them, traced their outlines with one ragged fingernail. The water lurched off, and there was a pause, and then another stream, quieter; Alex was filling the sink to shave. Susan felt traces of anxiety and anger in her bloodstream, chemical traces of their horrid fight and her subsequent dream running in her blood like a hangover.

She walked to the door and flicked on the overhead, flooding the room with light, and carefully repeated her search. She ran her open palms first over her side of the bed, then his side. She remembered a desperate morning from a million years ago, her sophomore year of college, when she had woken beside a stranger, whom she had fucked — for some idiotic, unknowable, drunken reason — in her roommate’s bed. After shooing the guy out, she had performed this same diligent, shame-tinged exercise, dreading the discovery, the flash of crimson, the incriminating stain.

The top sheet and comforter were piled in a heap on the floor, and Susan was on her hands and knees at the center of the bed, squinting at the fitted sheet like a bloodhound, when the bedroom door creaked open and Alex entered, wrapped in a towel.

“Susan?” he began. He was speaking softly, eyes on the floor, ready to do a postmortem on their fight. “So, look.”

Susan shrieked. Above the thick nest of Alex’s black chest hair was a trail of blood, bright red and dripping from his neck.

“Shaving,” he said, raising his hand to the wound. “Must be worse than I thought.”

Emma started to fuss over the monitor. “Mama?” she called out, half whispering, half singing. “Maaama?”

“Susan?” Alex crossed the room to stand beside the bed. “What …?”

She shifted to a seated position and held her hands up to him, wrists extended, as if submitting to handcuffs. Alex saw the bites and let out a long, low whistle.

“Whoa. Looks like we need to call an exterminator.”

You’re in luck,” said Dana Kaufmann, exterminator to the stars. “Ten o’clock today is available. Can you do ten o’clock today?”

Susan agreed readily, and Kaufmann arrived right on time, a butch, unsmiling woman in gray denim coveralls and baseball cap that read: GREATER BROOKLYN PEST CONTROL. She wore sturdy brown boots and carried a black duffel bag and a heavy flashlight, holstered in a loop of her coveralls. Susan felt better the moment that Kaufmann stepped into the apartment.

“Hi, good morning. Thank you so much for coming.” Susan motioned to the kitchen. “Can I get you a glass of water or something?”

“No, thank you.”

As they stepped into the sunlight of the kitchen, Kaufmann produced a thin spiral notebook from a pocket of her coveralls, cleared her throat, and clicked open a pen.

“Tell me about your bedbugs. What physical evidence have you had?”

“Just, uh … here.” She pushed up her sleeve and showed Kaufmann the row of bites, feeling a quick tingle of embarrassment, like she was at the doctor, wriggling out of her underpants.

Kaufmann narrowed her eyes and muttered, “All right,” as she appraised the marks. “And what about bugs? Have you observed any active bedbugs?”

“You mean—”

“By ‘active,’ I mean alive.”

“No.”

Kaufmann scrawled in her pad. “Inactive?”

Susan shivered. “No.”

“Have you found any cast skins?”

“What would those look like?”

Kaufmann spoke rapidly, reciting a familiar passage. “Bedbugs molt five times between birth and maturity. Each time they shed their exoskeletons. Cast skins look like bugs, but empty and still and slightly transparent, measuring between a twelfth and a sixth of an inch.”

“Oh.”

Kaufmann paused for a moment, and then said: “So? Have you seen any?”

“Uh, no. Sorry. I haven’t.”

“Have you observed any bedbug larvae?

“What would—”

“Like little maggots. Or clear jelly beans.”

Susan felt a wave of nausea, and she shook her head rapidly. “No, no. Nothing like that.”

Kaufmann frowned and flipped to a fresh page in her notebook. “So what would you characterize as your main reason for requesting the services of a pest-management professional today?”

“Um …” Well, you see, I’m having these nightmares, and there’s this creepy painting, you see, Ms. Kaufmann, and …

“It’s the bites. Just the bites.”

Dana Kaufmann began her search in the bedroom. She strode across Alex and Susan’s ovular, modernist throw rug in her heavy boots and stripped the comforter and sheets from the bed in a quick, rough motion; Susan felt silly for having taken the time to make the bed after her feverish bug hunt that morning. Then, with a soft grunt, Kaufmann lifted the mattress and lay it at a steep angle against the wall. Like a security guard frisking a suspected terrorist, she ran her hands all around and across the mattress with deft efficiency, pushing in the surface with her palms, curling her fingers to run them along the edges. She produced a kind of long flat stick, like a nail file with pointed ends, and used it to probe the seams. Then, with another grunt, Kaufmann flipped up the box spring against another wall to perform the same thorough search, dancing her fingertips along the wood frame and gauzy stretched fabric.

Susan stood in the doorway, mesmerized.

At last Kaufmann cracked her knuckles, produced a small electric drill from an inner pocket of her coveralls, and inclined her head toward the black oaken headboard.

“You mind?”

“Um …”

“Don’t worry, ma’am. I’ll put it back.”

The drill emitted a steady high-pitched whine as Kaufmann disassembled the headboard, slats, and legs of the bed, until Susan’s precious low-slung Design Within Reach beauty was a neat stack of dark wood piled in the corner of the room. Kaufmann crouched by the pile and lifted up the various sections of the bed one at a time, turning each handsome piece of wood over in her hands. When she had satisfied herself with each constituent element she set it down on her other side. Susan wondered idly what kind of bed Maggie Gyllenhaal and Pete Sarsgaard had.

“You keep a lot of stuff under your bed,” said Kaufmann, without turning her head.

“What? Oh, yeah. I guess.” Susan looked at what had been revealed when Kaufmann took apart the bed: the neat line of shoeboxes and crates from Bed Bath & Beyond, shopping bags full of other bags, a couple rolls of wrapping paper, the case containing Alex’s long-unplayed mandolin. “Is that a lot?”

“Bedbugs live in hidden spaces. They feed for ten or fifteen minutes and then, when they’re sated from their blood meal, return to a dark safe space, close to the bed.” Kaufmann jerked her thumb over her shoulder. “Shoeboxes? Clutter? Right under the bed? This is perfect, if you’re a bedbug.”

Susan nodded rapidly. “Right.” She picked up a shoebox and took it toward the closet.

“Tell you the truth,” said Kaufmann, still not looking up. “The closet’s worse.”

Dana Kaufmann put Susan’s bed back together as promised, aligning the slats and drilling them back into the legs, reattaching the headboard with practiced ease. She slumped the box spring and mattress back in place but didn’t go so far as to remake the bed. Kaufmann then slid the flashlight free of the loop where it rested and worked her way through the spacious bedroom closet, sweeping the powerful beam across in methodical rows, training it on the top and bottom corners one by one. To Susan’s mind, the closet was neat and uncluttered; they had moved in only two weeks ago, so even Alex’s deep-seated natural disorder had yet to take root. But Kaufmann exhaled disapprovingly over and over at each potential bedbug hideout she uncovered with the flashlight’s beam: Alex’s tangled forest of dress shirts; Susan’s small fabric crate overspilling with tights and pantyhose; the high shelves above the clothes, stacked with sweaters in uneven piles.

Susan stood behind Kaufmann, arms folded across her chest, anxious sweat beading on her forehead. She kept waiting for the exterminator to beckon her over, to focus the beam beneath a sweater or inside a shoebox, to say, “There? See? There are your bugs.”

But the minutes ticked by in silence, until Kaufmann at last turned off the light, gave her knuckles another crack, and said, “Let’s move on.”

Across the landing in Emma’s room, Kaufmann disassembled and examined Emma’s bed as swiftly and thoroughly as she had Susan and Alex’s and then put it back together just as conscientiously. Kaufmann pawed through Emma’s trunks and bags of playthings with her large hands, entirely uncharmed by the girl’s helter-skelter universe of pink puppies and cockeyed dollies. She chased her fingers through the short fur of the stuffed animals like a monkey picking for nits; she opened the pages of picture books and shined her flashlight through the thin cotton of Emma’s pajamas.

Kaufmann was down on her haunches in the kitchen, searching the cupboard beneath the sink, when a light rap sounded at the door.

“Suze?”

“Oh, hey, Andrea. Good morning.”

“Oh, Susan, I am so sorry to bother you, but I was having this very odd problem with my computer, something about the, the network connection? I think? And I always see you going about with that laptop case, I wonder if … oh, dear — what’s … what’s this?”

Andrea’s voice got high and flutey with anxiety. In her green house shoes and flowing silk pajamas that seemed from another century, she leaned through the front door, peering at Kaufmann. “Do we have some sort of infestation? Please say no.”

“I’m not sure. We’re looking. She’s looking. We’ll see.”

“Well, I wish you had told me. I would’ve arranged for someone to come.”

As Susan led Andrea into the kitchen, Kaufmann looked up and gave her a quick clinical glance, as if making sure she wasn’t an enormous talking bug. “Of course, you’ll take the cost of the exterminator off your rent. You haven’t paid the rent yet, have you? No, I don’t think you have.”

“Thanks, Andrea.”

Susan didn’t offer coffee, but Andrea hung around anyway, hovering at Susan’s arm in the kitchen doorway, watching as Kaufmann closed the cupboard and turned to the pantry.

“My sister, Nan, who lives in Portland — Portland, Oregon, not Portland, Maine — anyway, Nan once told me a foolproof system,” Andrea said. “You’re meant to sprinkle drops of liquor all over the house. I can’t remember now what kind, of course. But I could call her. Shall I call her? According to Nan, sprinkling this, whatever it was, kills the bugs straightaway.”

“Oh,” said Susan. “Huh.”

Kaufmann straightened up, clicked off her flashlight, and addressed Susan.

“If an apartment is infested with bedbugs, we employ a three-pronged solution. First a contact-kill solution; second, a liquid residual such as Permacide Concentrate; and third, a growth regulator such as Gentrol. If those solutions prove ineffective, there are various means of escalation available.”

“Rum!” said Andrea, snapping her fingers. “If you sprinkle drops of rum in all the corners—”

“No.” Kaufmann interrupted, scowling. “Do not do that.”

Andrea left shortly thereafter, and Kaufmann requested a glass of water, which she drank in a single, long draft. “OK,” she said when she was done. “Are there any areas of the apartment I haven’t seen yet?”

As soon as they stepped into the bonus room, Kaufmann stopped.

The portrait of Jessica Spender was now covered in hundreds of bites; they lined the cheeks and chin and covered the forehead like stucco. Worse, Jessica’s eyes had lost the teasing, insouciant expression they bore in the photo, and that Susan knew she had given them in her portrait: the eyes of the girl in the painting looked terrified, helpless, and pleading. A light gouache of tears had been laid over the pale blue of her irises.

Susan clapped a hand over her mouth and fought the urge be sick.

“That’s really something,” said Kaufmann, and turned to Susan with wondering eyes, a flicker of childlike awe peeking from behind her rock wall of professionalism.

“Yeah. I’m a — I’m a painter,” Susan said inanely. She felt clammy; a row of sweat broke out across her brow; the room was spinning before her. Kaufmann continued staring at the painting, and Susan stared at it, too, against her will — she wanted to run desperately from that room, from the house, to take off down the street, find Emma, gather her up, and go go go.

“Well,” said Kaufmann finally, and cleared her throat. “Not a lot of clutter in here. I’ll be quick.” She dropped to her hands and knees and began to crawl around the perimeter of the room, running her fingers along the baseboards. Susan stepped toward the painting, intending to take it down, roll it up, maybe even run it down the hallway and toss it into the kitchen garbage or, better yet, the stove.

Why did I do that to her? Susan demanded of herself. Her feet stayed frozen to the floorboards, her hands stuck at her sides. Why?

“Excuse me? Ma’am?” Kaufmann was talking. “Ms. Wendt?”

“Yes. I’m sorry. Yes?”

“What was in here?”

Susan pushed away a stray curl that had drifted in front of her eyes. “What?”

Kaufmann had paused in her perimeter crawl around the room, between the door and the left-hand wall. “These scratches just above the baseboards. Here. They’re painted over, but you can feel ’em. Have you felt these scratches?”

“Uh, no. Actually, I hadn’t.” Susan didn’t move. She didn’t want to feel the scratches. What was the cat’s name again? Oh, right. Catastrophe.

“There was a cat. It, uh, it died in here. Really sad.”

“A cat, huh?”

“Yes.” Susan felt the painting watching her, felt Jessica Spender’s pleading, pitiful eyes. “Why?”

“Nothing. Forget it,” said Kaufmann, straightening up. “Not my specialty. Anyway, I’m done. Let’s talk in the kitchen.”

As it turned out, there were no bedbugs in Susan and Alex’s apartment.

Kaufmann had performed an exhaustive search, “from bow to stern,” as she put it, and turned up no evidence of Cimex lectularius, or Leptocimex boueti, which — according to Kaufmann — would be even worse.

“Fortunately,” she concluded, flipping closed her notebook. “You have neither.”

“But …” Susan gestured vaguely to the notebook. “What about all those things you were saying. Contract kill, and, and residual—”

“Contact kill, ma’am.”

“Please stop calling me ma’am. OK?” Susan was flustered. How could there be no bedbugs? It made no sense. “Call me Susan.”

“That’s fine, Susan. But listen, this is good news. Contact killers, residuals, control agents. These things are poisons, and you do not want your home treated with poison unless such a treatment is called for.”

“But …”

“I found zero bugs, living or dead. I found no cast skins, no fecal matter, no larvae. I wouldn’t say it’s impossible that you have bedbugs, ma’am …” A smile flickered across Kaufmann’s face. “Susan. But it’s impossible that you have bedbugs.”

“Wow.” Susan forced herself to smile while her stomach twisted itself into greasy knots. “Well, I mean, that’s great.”

“Yes. It is.”

“Wait, wait. What about my wrist?” She raised her hand, turned it wrist up, resisting the urge to hold it under Kaufmann’s nose. “What about the bites?”

As she said it, the bites began to itch, as if she had reminded them of a neglected duty. She lowered her arm and tried to scratch nonchalantly while Kaufmann answered.

“Could be a lot of things. Scabies. Mosquitoes. Could be fleas, though I don’t see any evidence of fleas. Do a Google search on spider beetles. Half the time, when someone’s got bedbug bites but no bedbugs, what they’ve really got is spider beetles. I’m not a doctor, but I think you put some hydrocortisone cream on there, give it a week, and you’ll be fine.”

“OK. Thanks. Thanks so much.”

“You’re welcome.” Kaufmann tucked her notebook back into her coveralls while Susan opened the door.

“It’s two hundred for the visit. Tax free, if you’ve got cash.”

“Oh, fantastic!” Alex enthused. “That’s the best news I’ve heard all week.”

“Yeah. I know.”

Susan shifted the phone, jammed it under her chin, freeing her right hand to keep scratching at the welts on her wrist. The bites had continued to itch, and the scratching was barely helping.

“Listen, baby doll,” Alex said. “I’m sorry I was such a jackass last night. Let’s start over, OK? Remember that thing you read that time? How moving is, like, the most stressful thing that couples go through?”

“Right.”

“Well, so, we moved. We’re done. We’ve got a great new apartment, and there ain’t no bugs in it. OK?”

“Yeah. Of course. Bye, babe.”

“I love you, Susan.”

She hung up and looked at her wrist. With all her scratching, the bites had opened into bleeding sores.

15

Alex transferred money out of their “rainy-day” savings account to cover the rent. On Thursday night, September 30, he trotted downstairs, rapped on Andrea’s door, and handed over the check. Susan stood on their landing, listening to the two of them chat.

“I stopped by the other morning,” Andrea was saying in her gravelly undertone. “When the exterminator was here. Or does one say exterminatrix?”

Alex’s big fake laugh bounced up the stairwell; Susan’s husband was always a good one for laughing at other people’s stupid jokes.

“Susan seemed quite upset, but I gather there’s no infestation after all. That must be a relief to her.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Alex. “For me, too.”

“Well, that makes three of us!”

Alex’s laughter mingled with Andrea’s throaty bray. Susan stood, listening, scratching at her bites. She had waited for them to fade, but they’d only gotten worse: the more she scratched, the more they bled and itched, and the more she scratched. She had taken to wearing thick bracelets every day, but when she was alone she slipped off the bracelets and attacked her wounds, moaning with relief. When she wasn’t scratching she bit at her fingernails, digging her teeth into the flesh at the base of each nail. She had gotten used to the miniature teardrops of blood that would well up at the corners, and the tender swelling and mild pain that came after.

She had Googled spider beetles, per Dana Kaufmann’s suggestion, and discovered in the all-knowing Wikipedia that they were beetles of the family Anobiidae, with “round bodies and long, slender legs.” But the pictures of spider-beetle bites she found came in clusters of a dozen or more, not neat lines of three, and they were larger and redder than her bites had been. That’s what Susan remembered, anyway; at this point, she had been scratching her wrist so relentlessly that the original bites were barely visible amid the subsequent self-inflicted damage. Meanwhile, Kaufmann’s prediction was borne out: no new bites appeared, no new spots of blood appeared on the pillowcases, or anywhere else.

Alex’s work, meanwhile, was turning around. Early October brought a raft of new clients for GemFlex, all of them small, but together enough to blunt the disappointment of having the potential rep slip through their fingers — what Alex now cheerfully called “The Hastie Incident.”

Each morning, Susan carried her sketchbook to somewhere in Brooklyn. She went to the clock tower, she went to the Carousel in Prospect Park, she went to Fort Greene and sat in the shadow of the Martyrs’ Monument. She did not return to the bonus room, explaining to Alex that she was finding oil painting unsatisfying and for now was experimenting with line drawing instead. He readily accepted this bland explanation, so Susan never had to reveal how terrified she was to go back into the little studio, to see in what state she would find her aborted portrait of Jessica Spender.

“Mama?” said Emma one afternoon, after waking up from nap. “I miss Shawn.”

It took Susan a moment to remember who she was talking about. “Oh, sure, baby. Should I call Shawn’s mama for a play date?”

Emma popped out of bed, grinning. “Yay,” she said. “Shawn’s coming over! Maybe Tarika will come, too! Do you think Tarika will come, too?” Susan laughed and squeezed Emma’s leg—sweet girl. “I don’t know. Let me call them first, hon.”

She found Vanessa’s number in her phone and then listened with a sinking heart while the other woman spoke in a cool, even tone. “Susan, this is really awkward, but are you guys having an insect problem?”

“What?”

“Shawn’s coming over!” Emma was crowing, spinning in giddy circles around her room. “Tarika’s coming over!”

“Emma, please,” said Susan. “Sorry, Vanessa, what were you … ”

“I’m really sorry. The kids and I were walking past your house the other day. We saw the exterminator coming down your stoop.”

“Oh, God, Vanessa. No, no. We don’t have bedbugs.”

There was a pause. “Bedbugs?”

“We don’t have anything.”

Susan rubbed her forehead with her palm. She felt like she was going to cry.

“I’m sorry, Susan. I just can’t risk coming over — the kids—”

“Of course.”

She hung up and stared into space, the phone dangling in her hand while Emma spun around her, clapping. “Shawn’s coming over! Shawn and Tarika are coming over!”

On Tuesday, October 17, Susan dialed the number for Greater Brooklyn Pest Management, not exactly sure what she intended to say. It’s not like they had a spare two hundred bucks lying around for Kaufmann to come take a second look, even if she’d be willing to do so. When the exterminatrix answered with a gruff “Kaufmann,” Susan panicked and hung up, like a kid making a prank call.

Instead, she called Jenna, and reached her at the Acorn, on Theatre Row, where she was in technical rehearsal for the Tom Kitt musical, which was titled Dignity and scheduled to open the following Tuesday.

“Susan, hey! I only have a second. How are you?”

“I’m fine. I’m OK. I wanted to let you know I called the exterminator you suggested. Kaufmann? The woman that your friend from Actors’ Equity—”

“Oh, my God, so you do have bedbugs! Susan!”

“No. Actually, she came out, and she said we’re clear.”

“Well, that’s good news. I’m sorry if I freaked you out.”

“Yeah. Except—”

“Hold on.” Susan could hear orchestra instruments in the background on Jenna’s end: the muted bleat of trumpets, someone sawing at a double bass. “Sorry.”

“That’s OK. How’s the show, Jenna?”

“It’s wonderful. It’s really great.”

The last week in October, the New York Times ran a three-day series on the city’s ongoing bedbug epidemic: one article on the lengths being taken by hotels to reassure worried customers; one on the devastation being wrought upon secondhand furniture and vintage clothing markets; one on the vogue for “bedbug-sniffing dogs,” which were likely a scam, preying on the paranoid and anxious. Susan tried to ignore the articles, but Alex read the headlines aloud each morning: “There but for the grace of God, huh, gorgeous?”

The last days of late summer were gone now, and Susan was glad for the arrival of long-sleeve weather, the better to hide her gouged and inflamed wrist. Each night, after Alex went to bed, she swallowed an Ambien and stood at the foot of the bed for a long time, staring at the rough triangle of exposed sheet where she had pulled down the corner of the comforter. She would listen to Alex’s soft, even breathing, then force herself to get in.