I Stayed

Before we were married, I promised my then-future husband that I would stand by him in sickness, health and hair loss.

“You can count on me,” I told him earnestly while feeding each other bites of Chunky Monkey ice cream from a shared spoon in bed. (We were once adorable). “Except for two scenarios,” I qualified. “If at any point our kids get lice or our house becomes infested with bed bugs, all bets are off. I might leave the state. I cannot guarantee you that I’ll stay.” I stared at him without apology.

“Oh, come on,” he waved me off, half-chuckling.

I gripped his arm for emphasis, halting the dairy consumption. “No, really. I’m not kidding.”

You see, it’s not the bugs themselves, as long as they hunker down in their natural habitats, buzzing over daffodils and dog shit with the same uncivilized partiality. I allow them to roam free in my backyard, dodging chirpy robins and nocturnal bats. I’m even tolerant of the basement invaders, given the fact that when it comes to being underground, chances are that they were there first. To those silverfish and prehistoric centipedes, I say, if the dark corners of my storage unit are your utopia, then have at it. We’ll never be Besties and if I catch you venturing out, you’ll be subject to the “scream and squash”, but I’m not going to abandon suburbia over it.

What I can’t handle with any rational human composure are bugs in my living space, confined, cornered or contained within my toddler-hand-print-smeared walls. When they cross the threshold into my domain and venture upstairs, adhere themselves to my mattress or to my limp hair follicles, then I get crazed.

The night I found several translucent blood-sucking pediculosis capitis crawling along my three-year old’s scalp during bath time, my husband was at work. Conveniently. The same place he was the night our fire alarm started chirping at two a.m. AND the morning I broke my foot in the entryway AND the afternoon a trio of hornets took up residence in our upstairs bathroom. I don’t blame him for the timing. At least not entirely, but emergencies due tend to befall our household during his absences.

For a brief moment after I discovered the lice, I froze in my kneeled position on the floor, staring at the critters as shampoo suds dripped off my wrist, contemplating if I could abandon my two girls in four-inches of lukewarm bath water and sprint out the door until I reached Indiana. They’d eventually towel off on their own and put their pjs on, right? My six-year-old would figure it out. She knew the drill—how to set the toothbrush timer, sing “My Favorite Things” and turn on the twenty-seven nightlights that make our house shine like a beacon in the night.

But, then I beheld their naked little bodies, pink and puckered from a warm soak. My preschooler announced with glee that she had written the number “3” with a bath crayon on the side of the tub—blissful ignorance oozed from her toothy smile, naïve to the gruesome ectoparasites sucking the blood out of her head at that very moment. My emergency maternal instinct kicked in and I dialed Hair Butterflies. 

The name of the only lice-removal hair-salon in our town borders on offensive for how blatantly it attempts to evoke serenity.  No parent is calling at nine p.m. to eradicate monarchs from their offspring. Nevertheless, they offer a 24-hour answering service.

The store owner peppered me with questions, predominately about price. “Did I understand that the after-hours rate in the salon was three times the standard amount?”

“Yes, fine,” I spit out. Did he understand I was fully prepared to drain my checking account in order to eradicate the invader? This was as hostage situation and I was fully prepared to pay ransom.

An hour later, my daughters and I were doused in peppermint oil, combed out strand by strand, and probed for nits. My six-year-old and I were deemed clear, although I would spend the next seventy-two hours clawing at my scalp with the dedication only a hyena devotes to a carcass. My leprous three-year-old sat, happy as a rat at the county fair, with her iPad and a lollipop, oblivious to why her head was covered in a goop and tied down in a shower-cap. When we returned home, I sanitized the bedsheets in scalding water, vacuumed the carpets, and banished an army of stuffed animals and dolls to the freezer. Three days later, I would discover there is nothing creepier than a pair of frost-bitten plastic eyes peeking out through a Ziploc bag behind the Home Run Inn Pizza.

That incident alone should have proven my devotion. I assumed I had paid my dues, until one morning this spring I woke up scratching and discovered bites tracking down my right leg. My breath sputtered out in gasps. I resorted to birthing-class Lamaze. Could it be? NO. Not a chance. I had just returned from Europe, but I was careful. Neurotic even. Pulling back every hotel mattress pad, scouring luggage racks, and quarantining my suitcase in the downstairs laundry room to unpack. I tore apart the bed, the mattress, the box springs. I carried in extra lamps and had my girls stand on chairs with flashlights. Nothing. Not one blood smear, molted exoskeleton, or scrap of bug-sized fecal matter.

I texted my husband at work, convinced that I must have gotten the bites abroad, relieved that our house was still a safe haven, until he began to respond—unaware those reassuring little dots were foreshadowing impending doom.  

I hate to tell you this…I was going to wait until I got home, but I have them too.

I tried to unsee the words as they blurred and clouded my phone’s display, but there was no denying what this meant. The invaders were in our abode.

The kids and I ran a slew of errands to escape the contamination. When my husband came home, we attacked the master bedroom, vacuuming nightstands and ceiling fans and closet corners, bushy with dust bunnies. Sweating and spent, we sat on the striped mattress pad without a single insect in sight until my husband shot up and exclaimed, “It must be the couch!”

After a half-hour of probing through the thick folds of a twenty-year-old microfiber dinosaur, we assessed our haul: two mismatched kid socks, a filthy penny, six popcorn kernels, half of a rock-hard granola bar, a purple beaded necklace, and several plastic Shopkins, likely suffering from dust-induced asthma.

“We need to call in the dogs,” I declared. “I read about these specially trained canines that can sniff out bed bugs.”

“That’s ridiculous,” my husband countered. “How many hundreds of dollars do they want for that racket?”

“$350 and it’s worth every penny. I refuse to be that family. The outcasts, the pariahs, branded with a scarlet ‘A’. Our friends will never want to visit. Our children will be ostracized. Not to mention, I have no idea how I’m going to sleep tonight, all exposed like that goat in Jurassic Park—the one with the rope draped around its neck in the T Rex enclosure, bleating for the predator come out and rip into my succulent calf.”

My husband furrowed his brow. “Are we talking about you or the goat?”

“We’re one and the same!” I bellowed. “I warned you about this before we were married.”

“I thought you were being hyperbolic.” 

And then I exhibited one of my finer moments of adulthood and shouted back, “Do you even know me at all?!”

In the end, we got the dogs and an exterminator because again, ransom payments. Neither found any evidence of bed bugs, but the pest control inspector discovered three spider egg sacs adhered to the underbelly of our ancient couch. After vomiting in my mouth, I merrily wrote the check and exiled the sofa. Within a day, the adulterated couch was tossed and to my husband’s effusive delight, we spent Masters Tournament weekend shopping for replacement furniture.  

All in all, our marriage has withstood and prevailed. We have a new sofa that doesn’t eat people and I didn’t leave. I stayed. I haven’t fed him ice cream since before we said “I do”, but I didn’t move to Indiana. And to me, that’s pretty damn romantic.