The Mad Scientist's Daughter

  Finn was there, sitting in the chair where she had first seen him as a child, his narrow fingers moving across the screen of his computer tablet. She stopped in the doorway. His head turned toward her.

  “I’m making a pie,” she said.

  “Why?”

  Cat shrugged. She sat down on the porch’s damp floor and scraped the lemon across the grater, stopping now and then to pull the yellow pulp away from the notches in the steel. She dropped the zest into the bowl next to her feet. She could feel Finn watching her, and she wanted to say something to him but she wasn’t sure what. She felt suddenly self-conscious, the way she had when she was younger, in that time after her wild, forest-scented childhood but before she started high school. That awkward in-between place.

  Her cuticles stung from the lemon juice.

  “Can I help?” Finn asked. “Surely I can do that more quickly than you—”

  “I’m fine.” Cat rolled the lemon against her palm. “It’s relaxing, kind of.” She grated for a few moments longer and then set the lemon in the bowl, next to the pile of zest, and stood up. She wanted to look at Finn but she didn’t.

  Her heart was thrumming when she went back into the kitchen, and she set the bowl on the counter and glanced out the window as she washed her hands. His shadow appeared through the porch’s gauzy screen, his fingers the only part of him moving. For a moment, Cat wondered who exactly she was learning to make a pie for.

  “I wish you could eat,” she said to the image in the window.

  Then she mixed up the lemon filling, added the zest and the cream and the butter to a saucepan, and stood next to the stove, stirring idly, waiting for it to bubble and thicken. She poured all of it into that precious piecrust and tossed a towel over it to protect it from gnats and flies while she prepared the meringue.

  “The meringue may not set properly.” It was Finn.

  “What?” Cat turned around and smiled at him, trying to cover up her voice’s weird, nervous breathiness. “How do you know?”

  “The weather,” he said. “The humidity index is near one hundred percent.”

  Cat frowned.

  “Meringue requires a certain amount of dryness in order to set.”

  “Okay, so how do you know that?” said Cat. “Do you seriously have the Joy of Cooking in there?” She tapped at her temple.

  “I’m connected to all the databases in the house.” He paused. “You know that.”

  Cat shrugged.

  For a moment they stood in silence, and the room began to feel too hot and too humid, as though the outside was seeping in through hidden cracks in the windows and doorways. Cat touched her hair: she could not stop touching her hair. It had curled into ringlets from the weather. She needed to distract herself. So she turned to the refrigerator and took out the eggs.

  Finn sat down at the table in the corner. “You’re going to watch?”

  “It’s interesting to me.”

  Cat took a deep breath. She tried to pretend he wasn’t there, tried to pretend his mechanical eyes were not tracing her steps across the kitchen. She followed the meringue recipe in the Joy of Cooking, sifting out the yolk through the sieve of her fingers. She worked steadily, conscious of the egg splatters across the kitchen counter, of the web of sugar glittering on the inside of her wrist. Still, she had trouble getting the eggs to whip, as Finn had warned her, and she asked him to help. He stood over the bowl and whipped the whites into peaks of airy foam like the tips of waves. His arm moved so quickly it became a blur. The sight of it hypnotized her. She felt as though she should be bothered by it, this reminder of his inhumanity, but she didn’t want to stop watching.

  When he finished, she uncovered the pie, smoothed the meringue out to the edges, and then ceremoniously placed the whole thing, wobbling from her shaking hands, in the oven.

  “Can you set a timer?” she asked Finn.

  “I already did. According to the recipe, we’ll need to wait twelve minutes.”

  Cat slid into the chair across from him. He reached over and took her wrist in his hand and dusted off the sugar. It seemed to chime as it fell across the table. Cat shivered. She looked up at him.

  He looked back at her.

  “How’s Daddy?” she said. “He stays downstairs all the time. I’m worried about him.”

  “He and I are working on a contract. He’s worried about you.”

  “Me?”

  Finn nodded.

  “Oh, come on. I’m totally fine.” Liar. “I’m baking pies. So normal.”

  Finn didn’t say anything, and even in the shadows created by the storm clouds coalescing outside Cat could see his irises vibrating. Eventually, he said, “I am . . . concerned for you as well.”

  Cat did not know what to say to this. Her heart beat faster than a human heart should. She laid her head down on the table.

  “Why?” she whispered.

  “You seem to be denying . . . what happened to Mrs. Novak.”

  She isn’t dead. She’ll be home soon. There will be pies and clean ceiling fans waiting for her. “I don’t feel anything,” she said, so softly she wasn’t sure she even said it out loud.

  Finn’s hand enveloped her own. Sheet lightning lit up the kitchen for one white second and then Finn said, “Twelve minutes.” Cat stood up rotely, used a towel to take the pie pan out of the oven. The heat burned through the towel, singeing her skin. The meringue looked a little too brown on top. She carried the pie over to the table and set it in the center, halfway between her and Finn.

  “It needs to cool completely,” he said.

  “I know.” She leaned back in her chair. The rain fell across the yard with a rising chatter. Thunder cracked. Something was welling up inside her, drop by drop. Not grief. Something much more tumultuous. “Finn—”

  There was a crackling in the walls, a low mechanical thump as the electricity failed.

  Finn’s eyes gleamed in the darkness. “Wait here,” he said. “I can repair this.”

  “No.” She threw out her arm in the direction of his eyes, felt the solidness of his arm. “Dad’s generators are all working, right? Just leave it.”

  “You wish to sit in the dark?”

  “Not really, but I don’t want you to leave.”

  The glow in Finn’s eyes brightened enough to cast light on the table, on the lemon meringue, on the place where Cat was clutching Finn’s sleeve.

  “Remember when I kissed you?” she said.

  Silence. Then Finn said, “You’re upset.” He paused. “No, that’s the wrong word. I don’t—”

  “I’m not upset,” said Cat. She wrapped her fingers more tightly around his arm and pulled her chair around so she was sitting close to him. She didn’t want to lose her contact with him, afraid that if she stopped touching him he would disappear as suddenly and inexplicably as the house’s electricity. “I think there’s something wrong with me.”

  “I wouldn’t say—”

  “I don’t feel anything,” she said. “I should, right? I don’t feel sad or angry or guilty or any of the things you’re supposed to feel. I’m just . . . here.” She shook her head. “Why am I telling you all this? It’s not like you’ll understand.”

  Lightning flashed and for half a second she saw his features in the light, his blank face full of sadness.

  Darkness.

  “Can I kiss you again?” she said. “I promise I won’t—”

  “Yes,” he said.

  And so she did, cautiously at first, pressing her fingers lightly against the side of his face. She kept her hands away from the back of his neck. He wound his arms around her shoulders. The smell of him, clean and electric, nearly overwhelmed her. And for the first time since the start of that summer, she felt something: not grief, not mourning, but desire, and it twisted up inside her like a flame until that was all she was, a pillar of lust.

  “Finn,” she whispered, breathless. His mouth was at the side of her throat, his hands at the scoop of her waist. “Finn, how h
uman are you?”

  He pulled away, and her entire body rioted against it. She grabbed ahold of his hands, pressed them to her chest. Never let him stop touching you.

  “I don’t understand,” he said.

  “Sex, Finn. I want to know if you can have sex.”

  There was a long computational pause.

  “I was built to resemble a human being in every way.”

  “Don’t be coy.”

  Another pause. Then: “I’m not sure it would be appropriate.”

  “Appropriate?” Cat leaned in close to him. She heard the trees thrashing outside, the hail pinging against the roof. She was burning up. “Who the fuck cares?”

  “I can do it,” he said slowly. “It’s part of my store of information—”

  “Good,” she said, standing up, pulling him along with her. She kissed him again, and he drew her close, his fingers slipping under the waistband of her skirt.

  “We should go to my room,” he said. “Dr. Novak could come up—”

  “You’re right.” His room was the most private, tucked away in the rafters of the house. Cat curled up against his side, her arm slung around his waist, and they walked through the dark, still hallways, his eyes lighting the way, and Cat never once stumbled on a piece of wayward furniture or the uneven attic stairs. They went into his room and she climbed backward onto his bed, the bed he never slept in because he did not need to sleep, and pulled him on top of her. She took off his shirt, kissed his pale hairless chest. He had no heartbeat but she could hear something spinning inside of him. She was entranced by it. Like white noise, like the recorded sound of stars.

  He cupped her face in his hands. There was a long pause, when they didn’t move. Finn’s body, warm beneath the cool, dry veneer of his skin, pressed against her own. Up here in the attic bedroom the sound of the rain and the hail was louder than in any other part of the house. It sounded as though the sky were falling in fragments all around them. Finn kissed her again. He took off her shirt, slipped her skirt down over her legs. She wrapped one leg around his waist, and his hand moved down between her thighs. The tiny golden hairs there stood on end. Cat gasped.

  When he finally slipped inside her Cat cried out at the unexpected intensity of it: How long had she wanted this, without realizing it? How long had she wanted to feel him pressed against her? To understand the shape of his body? She buried her face in his shoulder and whispered his name as they rocked together. He made no sound, only nuzzled the top of her head as her hand trailed up and down the path of his electronic spine. She could feel a tension building inside her. Before that moment she had slept with a couple of boys, and none of them, not even Michael, made her bloodstream spark and boil like Finn was doing now. And now, and now—she shrieked. The world slid away. She dug her nails into the skin of his back.

  In his arms, she shook and shook and shook.

  * * * *

  Afterward, Cat lay flat on her back, Finn stretched out beside her. The tips of her fingers grazed the back of his wrist. The storm had moved farther on, away from the house, but the electricity was still out.

  “Was that acceptable?” Finn asked.

  “Yes,” said Cat, the word drawn out of her as though on a tapestry needle. Something inside of her—her calcified heart, her numbness—had cracked in two, and she was trembling and she thought, Here, this, this is what it feels like to feel something.

  She began to cry.

  At first she just felt the slickness of moisture in the corners of her eyes, but then that moisture became tears, real tears, tears that rolled down the incline of her cheeks, that pooled in the crevices of her collarbone. She covered her face with her hands and immediately she sensed Finn leaning over her, felt his hands pressing lightly against her arms.

  “I’m okay.” She dropped her hands to her sides and looked up at him. Her tears threaded through her eyelashes. “I mean, it’s not you. You were . . . everything I wanted. Amazing. It’s—” She wept harder, and sat up on the bed, naked, not caring. The light coming in through the windows was the color of amber. She wrapped her arms around him, buried her face in his throat. He held her close.

  “She’s dead,” Cat whispered. “She’s dead.”

  Finn stroked her hair. He didn’t say anything. Cat cried harder as the terrible realization of her mother’s death grew, as all those things she had willed herself to forget came forward: Her mother was not on vacation. She would not come home to a clean house and a full refrigerator. She would not come home at all.

  All summer Cat had been in a fugue. She had been made of mist and moonlight. Now, for the first time, she felt like herself again, like a person, a human, cast out of flesh and blood and muscle and bone. She leaned against Finn’s chest, and her tears dropped onto his skin. All her sorrow gushed out of her. “Thank you,” she told him, her voice scratchy and wet. She twisted around so their noses touched. Put one hand on his face. “Thank you for that.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “I’m so tired.” It was true. As if she hadn’t slept in days. She let her head drop, and Finn scooped her up like a kitten. He was so much stronger than he looked. She wrapped her arms gingerly around his neck and let him carry her down the stairs to her room, where she crawled naked under the cool sheets. Her eyes were wet. Finn sat by the side of her bed, and she stretched out her hand so that their fingers touched, and he said nothing, and she said nothing.

  She cried until her tears turned to salt on her cheeks.

  Finn never left her side.

  PART TWO

  SIX

  Cat drove to her apartment after her shift ended at the vice stand. She’d managed to get her old job again when she moved back to the city after the summer of her mother’s death. Now that she was older, she worked the day shifts, even though she still wore the same clicking high heels and low-cut sheath dresses. The sky above the city was steely, the exact color of the cement on the freeways, the exact color of the narrow roads winding through the old falling-apart neighborhood in which she lived. She parked her car on the street. The gutters were lined with piles of wet brown leaves that pasted themselves to the bottoms of her shoes.

  It was nearly the end of winter. Cat was nearly twenty-eight years old.

  Cat trudged through the damp, cold grass toward her apartment— a duplex converted out of a two-hundred-year-old house. Cat lived on the first floor. Someone was sitting on the front porch, next to the old table lamp Cat kept out there ever since the porch light fizzled out nine months ago in a shower of white sparks. Cat stopped in the middle of the yard and lit one of the cigarettes she’d gotten as a tip, her coat dangling off the crook of her arm. The person on the porch stood up and stuck his head out into the gray sunlight.

  “Hello, Richard,” Cat said. “You’re off work early.”

  “I missed you, baby.” Richard jumped over the porch’s redbrick banister. He shook out his shaggy blond hair and frowned at the swirl of cigarette smoke. Cat walked up to him and turned her head to the right, politely, to exhale. Richard kissed her on the cheek.

  “Seriously,” said Cat. “It’s only—what? Five thirty?”

  “Halfast sent me home. She said I needed to take a break. That I work too much.”

  “You do work too much.”

  “I do what I have to do.” He grinned. “I thought we could go eat somewhere. Mo Mong, maybe?”

  Cat dragged contemplatively on her cigarette. Mo Mong. That name sounded familiar. It was one of those trendy fusion places he’d taken her when they first met. Sleek white robots instead of waiters. Expensive, as she recalled—every place he took her on those first few dates was expensive. “I’ll need to change. Otherwise everyone will think I’m a call girl.”

  Richard laughed. Cat walked up to her front door, the thud of her shoes echoing dully across the hollow wooden porch. She dropped her cigarette into the teacup she used as an ashtray. Her keys jangled against the glass doorknob. She’d never given Richard a copy of her apartme
nt key. He used to hint at it, but she always deferred, changing the subject to a topic less terrifying than the prospect of Richard being able to come into her apartment whenever he wanted. Eventually he quit bringing it up. This did not stop him from periodically waiting for her on the porch, without calling first.

  Cat’s apartment was small and threadbare and filled up easily with dust. The wooden floors gapped in certain places, wide enough that Cat routinely lost rings and tapestry needles into the darkness beneath the house. The panes of thick glass didn’t fit snugly against their window frames, and the doors didn’t always lock. It was the best she could afford on her vice girl’s salary. The commissions from her artwork came too sporadically to justify moving anywhere with a higher rent.

  She tossed her coat over the sagging couch and went into her bedroom to change. Richard trotted behind her, and when her dress dropped around her ankles, he applauded. Cat looked over her shoulder at him, winked, wiggled her hips. Then she pulled a sweater out of her closet, shivering in the draft seeping through the cracks in the windowsill.

  Cat had been dating Richard for almost two years. They met on the day he sold a company he started in college for an unfathomable sum of money. He and his roommate turned business partner stopped at the vice stand on their way out to the bars to celebrate their wealth, only a few hours old at that point. Neither of them even smoked. Cat tottered out on her high heels. The cold wind blowing off the freeway whipped her hair into her eyes.

  “Your most expensive hand-rolled,” said Richard. He wore a gray suit but no tie. The car, Cat remembered, smelled of whiskey. When she took his credit card he winked at her, and that old roommate, who had since moved to Ontario and whose name Cat could never remember, leaned across his lap and shouted, “When do you get off? You’re fucking beautiful.”