About a week after I saw the first ladybug, I noticed there were five of them in the boys’ bathroom. Two in the sink, one in the bathtub, two crawling around on the mirror. Days after that, I was reading Tyler a story in his bed when one of them dropped onto my cheek. It panicked me, I shrieked. I never knew they could fly. They land clumsily, stupidly, and when it’s time to take off, they push a little secret pair of wings out from under their shells. Within a month I had counted thirty-five ladybugs in the boys’ bathroom alone. Then I started finding them in the bedrooms, our bathroom, the closets. They were flying more and more, and one day one of them was zooming around in crazy circles, and it bit me in the back of the leg. It was an invasion. I started to think they were evil.

But you can’t kill a ladybug. It’s terrible luck to kill a ladybug.

I started spending more and more time out of the house. Once I dropped the boys at school, I stayed out, got a cup of decaf, went food shopping, even went to a matinee a couple of times. Then I would pick up Tyler from nursery school and we’d go out to an early lunch. The house was becoming a mess. Orange peels under the beds, grime in the toilet bowl. Craig tried to be nice about it. He knows how I get when I’m pregnant. It’s hard to describe what happens—it’s as though all the walls in my mind slide down like car windows, and the thoughts just float freely around my brain. I find socks in the freezer, notebooks in the linen closet. I once showed up two days late to the dentist. At least I got the time right. But the ladybugs were threatening to be a real problem. I couldn’t sleep, I didn’t want to be in the house, and I wouldn’t let Craig get an exterminator. One night, we were sitting at the kitchen table after dinner. Craig watched as one of the creatures crawled along the edge of a bowl filled with coagulating breakfast cereal. Then he said, “If you need help with the house, I’ll get you someone. I’ll ask my mother.” I burst into tears. I’m not sure if it was relief or a premonition.