Bedbugs (6 page)

“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.

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 … ”