Ben Winters - Bedbugs

“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.

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: