The Mad Scientist's Daughter

  “What’s it like out there?” she asked. She walked up beside him, her eyes on the profile of his face. She pressed her hands to the glass, turned her head, looked out. Her heart skipped a beat.

  Spring had frozen. All the flowers, all the delicate green leaves on the trees, all the curling, fragrant vines—everything was encased in ice. The wisteria blossoms outside the window caught the sunlight and glittered. The grass had turned to diamonds.

  Cat’s breath fogged up the glass while the section of window in front of Finn stayed transparent as always.

  Already, the ice that formed along the inside of her apartment had begun to melt. It dripped down the walls and formed glassy pools along the baseboards. Cat hooked her arm into Finn’s and leaned against him.

  Someone knocked on the front door. “Ignore it,” Cat said.

  More thumping. The house’s frozen walls rattled. Cat’s comm slate trilled from the table beside her bed. She picked it up, saw the backlit picture of Richard. “Shit,” she said softly.

  “Should I leave?” Finn was staring at her. The soft silver light brought out the shimmery highlights in his hair.

  “It’s just . . . It’s Richard.”

  Finn turned back to the window. “Oh,” he said. “I see.”

  A twinge of guilt twisted through Cat’s belly. But then Finn glanced at her, and his face was calm and dispassionate. Not jealous at all. She told herself he didn’t mind.

  Finn and Richard had met twice before. The first time Richard sat down beside Finn and asked if Finn would open himself up so Richard could see the mystery of Finn’s clockwork. Finn refused, but three days later, Richard announced his new business venture. Artificial intelligence. He wouldn’t say anything more about it.

  The second time, it was Thanksgiving, at Cat’s father’s house, and Richard stared from across the room as Cat and Finn played Scrabble without him.

  “I don’t think he’s going away.” Cat dropped her comm slate on the bed. “He’s been so weird lately.”

  “I should go back to Dr. Novak’s house,” Finn said. “We have quite a lot of work to do. Your father has a contract with STL. For the lunar base.”

  Cat walked up to him and kissed him one last time. His mouth was cold against hers. It warmed at her touch.

  The knocking stopped, replaced by a scratching noise outside the bedroom walls. Cat took a step away from Finn and then Richard’s face appeared in the defrosting window, his cheeks red from the cold. He knocked on the glass. Waved. His gaze flickered between Cat and Finn.

  “I find him off-putting.” Finn turned to Cat. “I hope you don’t mind me saying that.”

  “I don’t mind.” Cat looked at Richard through the glass. He blew into his hands, stomped his feet on the ground. She never cared when her friends made fun of him. Still, she supposed she loved him, because she couldn’t bear the thought of his anger being directed at her. Also, whenever he was around, she felt normal, like a normal part of the world. His normalcy was contagious. Her mother would approve.

  Cat followed Finn into the living room. She unlocked the door. Cold air blasted across her face, the wind biting and sharp. It nearly knocked the door off its hinges. The outside world smelled like the inside of a freezer. She almost slammed the door shut, but Finn had already stepped out onto the porch. Richard came around the side of the house.

  “Hey, Finn!” he said, his words turning into steam. “What’re you doing round here?”

  Finn regarded Richard with his dark eyes. Cat couldn’t stop shivering but Finn didn’t move.

  “I was visiting,” Finn said.

  “Oh,” said Richard. “Right. Part of the family. I get that.” He held up his hands, palms out, and then shoved them back into his pockets. “Can I come inside? It’s fucking freezing out here.”

  Cat nodded. Richard bounded up the steps to the porch, slid through her apartment door. He stuck his head out. “You’re not coming in?”

  “Let me walk Finn to his car.”

  Richard wrinkled his forehead. Finn was already walking down the sidewalk to the curb where her father’s car was parked. Cat ran after him. Before he could climb inside, she put her hand on his upper arm. She wanted to kiss him but she didn’t.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  Finn stared at her. The cold wind ruffled his hair.

  “You should go back in to Richard.” He nodded. “Good-bye.”

  “Bye,” Cat whispered. She leaned back on the heels of her shoes and watched as Finn started the car. She folded her arms over her chest. The frozen wisteria vines clinked overhead. The entire world sounded as though it were made of glass.

  Finn drove away, and Cat stood for a moment longer, letting the cold seep through the fabric of her clothes, before going back inside.

  “So how’d it go with the Wonder Twins?”

  Cat stopped in the doorway. Richard leaned against her couch.

  “Who?” she said.

  “You know. Felix and Miguel. You were doing . . .” He waved his hand around.

  “The sub party.” The lie felt tasteless on her tongue. She shut the door. “It went well.”

  Richard nodded. He ran his fingers through his hair, and it stood on end. His eyes were bright and glossy, as though he hadn’t slept. He dropped down on the couch and patted the seat beside him. Cat walked across the room and sat down and Richard kissed her, suddenly and more passionately than she expected. After an entire night of kissing Finn it was sloppy, unclean. Overly wet. Whenever Richard pulled her close to him she could feel his heart beating against her chest, and it always disconcerted her, the feeling of another heart beating out of time with her own.

  “This weather is crazy, isn’t it?” Richard kept his hands on Cat’s shoulders. “I was up at the office when it blew in. I swear I thought the glass was going to shatter.”

  “I didn’t hear it,” Cat said. “When I went to sleep, it was still spring.”

  Richard grinned. “Did Finn listen in? You think he even noticed?”

  Cat hesitated, unsure of the best way to answer. But Richard had already distracted himself.

  “This weather is making me crazy,” he said. “It’s making me do crazy things.” The tenor of his voice had changed. It was higher pitched, breathier. “Do you want to know what sort of crazy things it’s making me do?”

  Cat didn’t move. The correct answer was yes. She knew this. She nodded slowly.

  “It’s making me buy shit.”

  “What kind of shit?”

  Richard laughed, a drawn-out, nervous, staccato laugh. She had seen him do this before giving speeches to investors. He ran his hands through his hair again. Looked her straight in the eye.

  “Caterina, I’m going to be honest. I tried to figure out how to make this romantic.”

  Romantic? Cat thought. She heard her blood rushing in her ears.

  “Yeah. But everything I came up with was just so . . . cheesy. Insincere.” He smiled and reached into his pants pocket. He kept his hands folded over whatever it was he pulled out.

  Cat sat very still, as still as a statue.

  “And then last night, I’m up there working, it’s three in the goddamn morning, and there’s this howling all around me and I swear I can almost see the ice forming on the glass. I thought, Caterina would love this shit. It was so, you know, artistic. And I wished so hard that you could have been there with me.” His words came out too fast, a blur. He held out his hands, unfolded them like a flower.

  And then Cat saw the black velvet box resting in the palm of Richard’s hand, and then that was all she saw. Her apartment fell away. Richard fell away. The black velvet box was a black hole, drawing into itself everything that made up Cat’s life. She went numb.

  “Caterina Novak.” She was vaguely aware that he had slipped off the couch, onto one knee. She heard the rustle of his clothes, the thump of bone hitting the floorboards. “Caterina Novak, will you marry me?”

  A black hole, and its center, at i
ts core, was a glittering shard of light.

  SEVEN

  She told him she would have to think about it.

  His cheeks flushed, but he grinned and bobbed his head. “That’s fine,” he said. “I talked to Halfast. She said I should give you time.”

  Cat nodded. Outside the wind howled and crawled across the windows. Richard lifted her hands up from her side, his skin cold to the touch. He dropped the box in her right palm and curled her fingers over it.

  “I don’t expect you to wear it,” he said. “If you don’t want to. I just . . . want you to have it.”

  “Of course.”

  Richard stood up. He shoved his hands in his pockets and bounced in place on the balls of his feet, as though he were trying to warm up. Cat realized he hadn’t looked her in the eye, not once, not since he asked. She tightened her grip on the ring box. It felt normal, now that she held it, now that she knew it was tangible. She wanted to give it back. She wanted to tell him no. She kept thinking about the night before. Finn.

  “I was going to go to the studio,” Cat said.

  Richard nodded. “I should go back up to the office.” He peeked up at her through the fringe of his hair. She met his eyes and he looked away, toward the window. “Call me.” He wagged a finger at her. “And don’t take too long deciding.”

  Cat flinched, but it looked like a smile.

  Cat kissed Richard on the cheek before he left, and she stood on the porch as he shuffled down to his car, her fingers turning numb from the cold. The ring box exuded its own uncomfortable warmth. When she went back inside she locked the door behind her and dropped the box on her kitchen counter.

  When had Richard become interested in marriage? The friends of his she had met at parties always joked that they were married to their jobs. That even the days without sleep, the diet of pizza and overly caffeinated soda—it was healthier than a wife’s constant nagging. This was why you dated someone like Richard Feversham. Because you were assured that he’d never, ever propose.

  Cat left the ring sitting on the counter. She went into her bedroom. The cold air had evaporated all the scent out of the room. Even the cocoon of blankets, glimmering with rows of silver thread and scraps of designer brocade, looked innocent. Cat sighed. She slid back into the bed and curled up on her side. The foundation of the old house creaked, the frigid air slipping inside, mingling with the dry heat rattling the vents in the ceiling.

  She rolled onto her back, trying to force any thoughts of Richard from her mind. The image of him on one knee, that ring glinting in the overhead lights—she clenched her eyes shut. The memory evaporated and was replaced with Finn, Finn standing in her front yard, staring at her as she smoked on the porch, her desire burning her up from the inside. Cat wiggled down into the blankets on her bed. She ran her hands down the sides of her thighs. Finn. Finn.

  A residue coated all her thoughts. That memory of Richard on one knee.

  Cat’s eyes fluttered opened. She sighed. Tilted her head. Something glimmered on one of her pillows, not the one she slept on. A black hair.

  Cat picked it up between her thumb and forefinger and held it up to the light. It must belong to Finn—it was too dark to be her own. Or Richard’s.

  Suddenly, she wanted to drive to the studio and work on the tapestry. She carried the hair into her kitchen and placed it in a sandwich bag, then folded the bag over on itself and tucked it in her pocket.

  Cat drove to the studio slowly, uncertain of how to deal with so much ice on the roads. Occasionally she reached down and touched the sandwich bag, wanting to assure herself that it was still there. Fortunately, no one else was out, and when Cat’s car hydroplaned at a blinking red stoplight, the wheels shooting her out into the intersection, there were no other cars to hit. The studio was empty, too, all the lights turned off, the air as cold inside as it was out. Cat exhaled long white breaths. She switched on the lights, all of them, even the antique string of electric Christmas lights wrapped around the doorframe. She dug a space heater out of the utility room, her fingers already aching from the cold, and set it up next to the loom. She turned it on, watched the coils burn bright red. Then she laid out all of her yarn across one of the drafting tables.

  Cat chose a pale, moon-colored silk yarn first, because that pale grayish white had begun to creep into the edges of her vision, the cold was so pervasive. She dug through some of Lucy’s fiber art supplies until she found a spool of shimmering silver thread, and she twined the two together, trying to approximate the look of ice. She thought she might introduce some green a little later, but the ice, the coldness, would be her base. It took a long time to wind the weft threads back and forth across the loom, because her fingers were stiff from the cold and she had to keep stopping to crouch beside the space heater to warm them up. It wasn’t long before her stomach rumbled and she felt the beginnings of a headache creeping into her temple. She dragged herself away from the loom and called the guy who delivered homemade soup out of the back of an old van. He would be there in an hour—it was a busy, extraordinary day. Winter sunlight in April (no, March), flowers made of ice. She understood.

  Cat worked steadily, losing herself in the rhythm of the loom, no longer a woman but an extension of this ancient machine. She forgot the emptiness in her stomach. She didn’t notice when her back began to ache. Everything dropped away.

  Including Richard’s proposal.

  When her soup was delivered, she almost didn’t hear the door buzzing. She thanked the soup guy and gave him an extra tip because he looked more harried than usual, his hair sticking out from under a knit cap, dark circles under his eyes. She ate standing in front of the loom, staring at the narrow strip of fabric she had just created. The heat of the soup—creamed tomato, flecked with oregano and thyme—went straight into her bloodstream. After she finished, she went back to work. The sun moved higher in the sky, shone through the ice still clinging to the windows. While she worked, Cat thought of nothing. She changed yarn colors by instinct.

  Cat had not worked this hard on anything since she graduated from college. Not for her commissions, those bland corporate-approved tapestries with their subdued blocks of color, and certainly not at the vice stand.

  When she had woven a strip of fabric almost three inches wide, Cat pulled the sandwich bag containing Finn’s hair out of her pocket. She picked up the weft yarn—pale, shimmering white cashmere—and, flexing her fingers against the cold, plucked Finn’s hair out of the bag and wound it around the yarn. Then she wove it into the tapestry.

  That single action didn’t take long, but when she had finished, when Finn’s hair was completely incorporated, she went outside for a smoke. As she exhaled, her breath pale and arabesque from the cigarette and the cold, her mind burned with a feverish intensity, as though she had woken from a dream. The world had begun to melt during her time in the studio, even though to Cat, a child of the South, the damp air was still unusually cold. She listened to the drip of ice from the tips of the blossoming trees and watched the embers of her cigarette flare out in the wind. She thought about the evening before, her legs wrapped around Finn’s waist in the bedroom. Finn going through her empty refrigerator to find something to feed her, because he thought she might be hungry. Did he even know what that meant? To be hungry? It was impossible. She remembered how her father told her once that his kindness was a program. She hadn’t believed it as a child, but she was older now, and she knew how computers worked. He was a computer who acted as if he loved her, and even though she ought to know better, that fact made her heart flutter hopelessly inside her chest.

  She thought about Finn’s touch, but she did not allow herself to think about the deviancy of it. Only damaged people slept with androids. People who couldn’t stand a human embrace. Cat wasn’t like that.

  So she didn’t think about Finn, but she didn’t think about the ring sitting on the counter in her kitchen, either.

  Cat finished her cigarette. She worked until the sun set, until the stars
came out, and then she went home.

  * * * *

  Cat didn’t hear from Richard for three days. The ring stayed in its place in her kitchen, a black velvet speck against the cream-colored tile.

  Then, one night when Cat came home from work, she found a sleek white box propped up against her front door. It was crowned with an enormous silver bow, Wing On running down the center of the ribbons in black brushstrokes. The Hong Kong department store from downtown. Cat stared at the box, the light from the lamp casting long melancholy shadows. The cold air of the freeze had disappeared completely, and so the night was balmy against the bare skin of Cat’s back. She picked up the box and carried it inside. Unwound the silver ribbon. Pulled off the lid.

  It was a dress.

  She peeled aside the sheets of thin, flimsy tissue paper and picked the dress up so it unfolded in front of her, fluttering as it moved. It was made of gray silk, so light against her fingers it felt like gauze, with a narrow belt at the waist and an elaborate, pleated drape across the hips. She laid it across her couch. Her hands shook. It had to be from Richard. No one else would buy her a dress. She pulled out the rest of the tissue paper from the box, looking for a note, but there was nothing but layers and layers of paper. Cat sank down beside the dress, laid out so perfectly against the couch it looked like the woman who had once inhabited it had disappeared, leaving just her clothing behind.

  Cat noticed a tiny triangle of white poking out from the dress’s V-neck collar. She tugged at it. The price tag.

  The dress cost two months’ worth of her rent.

  “Jesus Christ, Richard,” she murmured. Her head spun. She couldn’t accept something like this. Not if she turned him down. But she hadn’t turned him down. Not yet.