Ben Winters - Bedbugs

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.