Chapter 6

I woke up in the night—too much wine, too small a bladder, the drinking woman's lament—and swung my feet over the side of the bed and onto the floor.

Something went crunch.

A lot of something, actually. My sleep-addled mind went to cereal for some reason. It had that sort of fragile crunchiness about it.

Gran Mae will be so mad that I was eating cereal in bed…

Wait,was I eating cereal in bed?

Why is there cereal on my bedroom floor?

Is there cereal on my bedroom floor?

The soles of my feet, which had been waiting politely for my brain to sort through this, delivered the message that something was tickling them, in addition to the crunch problem.

I groped for my phone on the nightstand, got the screen lit up, and held it up for light.

The floor was dark and seemed to be moving.

I still wasn't scared. I should probably have been scared, but I really had to pee and the part of my brain that processes fear had only just figured out that Gran Mae was not alive to yell at me about eating cereal in bed. The relief from that carried me long enough to reach over and turn on the bedroom lamp, whereupon I discovered that the floor was covered in ladybugs.

"Oh Jesus," I said.

There were thousands of them, a writhing scarlet stain. They covered the carpet and were starting to go up the walls. They crawled over and under one another and sometimes they lifted their shells and flew. There were individual ladybugs scattered across the bed, getting lost in the blanket and wandering around the nightstand.

I'm an entomologist. I don't think bugs are gross. But I generally don't sleep with them crawling on me, unless you count my eyebrow mites, which are arachnids, not insects, and anyway have the decency to keep to themselves. And I certainly don't like stepping on them barefoot, which is even less fun for the insect than for me. I pulled my feet up and brushed at them, already smelling the green-pepper-and-mold smell of crushed lady beetle. Live ladybugs and squashed dead ones tumbled to the floor.

(Okay, I admit it, even as a dedicated insect aficionado, this was wavering between alarming and gross.)

Once I was over the initial shock, it was all perfectly understandable. Ladybugs do swarm, like I said. Seven-spotted ladybugs swarmed in Britain in 1976. One of my professors was from Kent and said it was like a Biblical plague. "They covered everything. The ground crunched when you walked on it, and you couldn't not step on them. And they kept crawling into your hair to try and drink your sweat. It was dreadful."

Dreadful. Yes. I could agree with dreadful. I checked my hair involuntarily, and a ladybug climbed onto the back of my hand. As plagues go, this one might be localized to my bedroom instead of the entire southern British coastline, but it was still pretty Biblical. I couldn't even see the floor.

And to think I'd been upset that there was only one in the garden!

I looked carefully at the one on my hand and it was a two-spotter, but the ones on the nightstand were all Asian lady beetles like the one in the garden earlier. Well, presumably whatever conditions drove them indoors affected both varieties equally. A cold snap, maybe? Sudden intense rains?

I could worry about that later. At the moment, I had to get out of bed, preferably crushing as few ladybugs as possible.

I leaned over far enough to reach the doorknob and yanked the bedroom door open. Ladybugs spilled into the hall, but they looked much less concentrated, as far as I could see. I took a deep breath, stretched my right leg out as far as it could possibly go—Oh god, why did I ever give up yoga, I know there were schedule problems but I really should have made time—and stepped onto my toes.

I couldn't hear the crunch, but I could definitely feel it.

I launched myself out of the bedroom, one foot on ladybugs, one on, god willing, carpet, and charged down the hallway. "Mom! Mom!" (Jesus, it really was like being ten years old again.) "Mom! Problem!"

I banged on the door to her bedroom. "Mom, I really, really need a shop vac!"

"Whuh…?" Mom pulled the door open, bleary-eyed. "Sam? What's wrong?"

"Ladybugs have swarmed in my bedroom."

She blinked at me.

"I think they're a mix of Asian lady beetles and two-spotted ladybugs," I added, in case that helped her to process faster.

"You're having a dream," she said.

"No, I'm really not. I need a shop vac, or at least one of those little handheld ones."

She leaned against the doorframe. She was wearing a dark blue bathrobe with frayed hems that hung on her like a sack. "What time is it?"

"Quarter to three."

"Right. Okay." She rubbed her face. "Let's go take a look…"

We went and took a look. Mom woke up very, very quickly after that. "Holy sh… sugar!"

"You see the problem," I said, while thinking, Sugar? Mom has never had a problem saying shit. She says it frequently and with great passion. Or used to, anyway.

"Where did they all come from?"

"That's a great question."

"Do we call the exterminator?"

"No!" The thought horrified me. The last thing I wanted to do was hose the place down with poison. It wasn't the ladybugs' fault that they were trying to get warm or dry or whatever and picked my bedroom. I wanted to sleep there too. "I just need a vacuum. Or at least a piece of cardboard and a garbage bag."

We ended up using both. I pushed the cardboard under swaths of ladybugs, then dumped it into the garbage bag before the majority could fly away. (Mom held the bag.) The carpet slowly began to reappear. After about an hour, I switched to the little vacuum cleaner and went around sucking up stray ladybugs. Some of them were probably injured by it, but the majority would be no worse for wear from their brief trip through the Wind Tunnel of Doom. I kept filling up the little vacuum reservoir and having to dump it into the big garbage bag, though. There were a lot of ladybugs.

"This," said Mom, holding up the gently rustling garbage bag, "is really unsettling."

"We'll go dump them out in the field in a minute," I said, sucking up the stragglers who had climbed into my shoes. "I'm gonna release some in the backyard first, though."

"Then I'm going to need coffee."

"Coffee sounds great."

"Maybe we could go to Waffle House."

"Waffle House sounds amazing."

"We can drop the rest of the ladybugs on the way?"

"Works for me. Just not too far off, I don't want to introduce diseases…" I looked around the bedroom. It was no longer a seething sea of scarlet. I'd probably be chasing stray ladybugs for days, mind you, but this was a definite improvement. "Right. Next stop, Waffle House."

Waffle House at four in the morning is a liminal space occupied by long-haul truckers, bleary-eyed shift workers, and teenagers so high they can smell God's breath. Mom and I took a booth and she apologized for the sixth time.

"I'm so sorry, Sam. I've never had bugs in the house before. Not like that."

"Mom, it's not your fault. Bugs swarm when they swarm. And really, truly, other than both of us having to wake up in the middle of the night, it's not a big deal." I mustered a grin. "Hey, it's me. I was too busy identifying the species to be horrified."

She held out her mug as the waitress came around with refills. "Well, I suppose there's that. God, there were so many of them."

"It was pretty impressive…" I had signal on my phone and tried to scroll around for recent ladybug swarms in the area, but didn't get anything other than the usual run of news articles about ladybugs trying to get in the house, Japanese millipedes trying to get in the house, and of course ants trying to get in the house. Plus a load of ads for exterminators who would like you to believe that the entire insect world wakes up every morning with the sole goal of getting into your house, flying into your face, and eating your cat. I put my phone away in disgust. "Really, though, ladybugs try to get into the house sometimes. It's just a thing that happens. This was a really spectacular example, but it's absolutely not something you did."

"It just feels so dirty," muttered Mom. "Bugs in the house like that. Like I left out food or something."

"Unless you were leaving out bags of aphids, I promise it was nothing you did. I swear it on my honor as an entomologist."

She laughed finally. "Okay. If you swear."

"Cross my heart and hope to die."

Our hashbrowns arrived. (Going to Waffle House for the waffles seems very weird to me. The hashbrowns are where it's at.) I dug in. Mom poked hers with her fork. "How do you think they got in?"

"That I don't know." I had checked the usual spots—vents and windows—and hadn't found any obvious lines of ladybugs. "We'll figure it out, though. A little caulk will fix it right up." (I was not actually quite as confident as all that, but soothing Mom was more important than accuracy right now. Also I've never seen that many arrive that fast.)

"Do you think there will be more when we get back?"

"It's possible," I admitted. "But I don't know where they'd come from. I only saw one in the yard yesterday, and no other insects at all. That's why I called you about spray."

I remembered standing in the garden, staring at the lady beetle and saying, There should be a lot more of you! Be careful what you wish for, I guess. Although even if it meant a late-night ladybug shoveling, I'd rather have insects than not.

We finished up our hashbrowns and left the alternate world of Waffle House. Three teenagers with pupils the size of pancakes slid into our booth before we were even out the door. We drove home, and to Mom's great relief, there was no renewed ladybug incursion. I took a blanket and a pillow down to the couch until we could wash the sheets anyway. Mom fussed a bit, but she was clearly flagging, so it didn't take her long to go to bed. I thought about getting out my laptop to check if there were any recent papers on ladybug swarms, but I was also tired and the coffee didn't seem to be doing much. I stretched out on the couch and closed my eyes to see if sleep would come.

It was probably no surprise, given my talk with Brad, but I dreamed about Gran Mae and the roses again. It wasn't a long dream. Just her hand closing over mine and a whisper in my ear, "Let the roses taste you." Then a flash of pain, except that pain in dreams is always strange, so it felt more like heat being pulled out of my hand into the roses and I struggled and tried to scream but she put her hand over my mouth and on the far side of the roses, something white squirmed and I woke up with a gasp.

I admit, it took me a minute to swing my legs over the side of the couch. But I did it, and nothing grabbed my legs, because monsters aren't real. I staggered into the bathroom. Real or not, monsters don't bother you while you're peeing. (This is one of the lesser-known laws.) I sat there until my heart slowed down, then washed my hands and went back to bed.

Something crunched under my foot. Oh god, had I squished another ladybug? I did the awkward wiggle that not-very-flexible people do when they're trying to see their own feet, looking over my shoulder, and relaxed. Just a leaf. I peeled it off my heel. It looked like a rose leaf, probably something I'd tracked in on my shoes from the garden. I tossed it into the trash can and fell back onto the couch. Now let's not do that again, shall we?

Whether or not my brain listened to me, I couldn't say, but I slept the rest of the morning without even a dream.