The Mad Scientist's Daughter

  “This is my fault,” he said.

  “I should never have married him.”

  Her father shook his head and kept his gaze focused on a spot on the floor, halfway between them. “I’m not talking about Richard.” He bit his bottom lip. He still did not look at her. “I know why Finn left.”

  Cat’s mouth went dry.

  “I did something to him.” He took a deep breath. “Do you remember when you were a little girl and you made that scarf for him?”

  She nodded.

  “He kept it, you know. All these years. Strange, huh? Do you remember what I told you, when you came looking for him so you could give it to him?”

  “I don’t understand what you’re getting at.”

  “I told you he was just a program. That he couldn’t feel anything.”

  “Yes.” Cat’s heart clenched up.

  “I lied.” He laughed, shook his head. “Sort of. He could feel things. I just think he—it—was different. His ability to feel things was . . . repressed. A protocol that was meant to make him obedient. Like a perfect child. Certain intense emotions were overridden. And so I wanted to . . .” He stopped and closed his eyes. Leaned back in the chair.

  Cat felt cold. A weight settled at the bottom of her stomach.

  “I wrote a program,” her father said, “that erased all that. His programming, his circuitry, it’s all extremely complicated. Baroque, really. I figured out a way to hack past some of it, get a few synapses firing that hadn’t been firing before. So to speak. Anyway, I’d been working on it for a few years, you know, in my spare time, but after your wedding—”

  “My wedding? What does my wedding . . . ?” But she knew.

  Her father looked up at her. “I saw you dancing with him,” he said. “I realized it wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair to you, and it wasn’t fair to him.”

  “I don’t understand.” She clenched her hands around the hem of her skirt, her nails cutting into the skin of her hand.

  “You love him,” said her father.

  Love was a word Cat had heard so many times that it no longer held any meaning. Boyfriends had told her they loved her and she had said it back and it was like any number of words. It was like hello or I’m fine. But here, as she sat on an uncomfortable wooden chair in her father’s dining room, the cold northern wind slapping against the glass in the windows, the word love sounded like a revelation.

  “No,” she said. Liar.

  “Oh, Cat. I saw the way you looked when the two of you danced. It damn near broke my heart, knowing you couldn’t marry him.” He leaned forward in his chair. “It’s okay,” he said, his eyes bright and sincere. “It’s okay to love him.”

  She couldn’t breathe. She thought about Finn staring at her, saying to her, You’re married. His expression had been cold and she hadn’t allowed herself to see it at the time. And when he came to her before he went away to Florida, there had been a change in him, like something inside him had switched on or off. The transformation in how he spoke her name, his sudden sharp movements, the way he wouldn’t look her in the eye. She had refused to acknowledge what she saw. All this time, she had blocked it away, this one simple fact: Richard wasn’t the only man she had used in her life.

  “The program worked,” she said flatly.

  “Yes.” Her father looked away from her. “He was . . . upset. Afterward. He went out to the woods and didn’t come back for a long time. I actually went out to try and find him. I thought . . . I don’t know. I don’t know what I thought. There aren’t a lot of precedents for something like this.”

  “No,” said Cat. “I can’t imagine that there are.” Her entire body was numb. Her father had given Finn a gift, and she had ruined it by treating him like a machine. She had beaten up Erik Martin in the courtyard of her high school for less than what she did herself.

  “Cat,” said her father. She looked at him. He smiled sadly. “I think it was too much for him. To feel everything all at once. He wouldn’t tell me, which is strange, you know, he was always so forthcoming, but . . .” He shook his head. “Nothing we can do. He made his decision.”

  “Can you talk to him?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “At the lunar station. Can you contact him? To, you know, check up on him?” To apologize to him.

  Her father looked at her strangely. “He belongs to STL now.”

  Cat slumped against the couch.

  “I’m so sorry.” His voice shook.

  “It’s not your fault,” she said. “Daddy . . .” She leaned over and wrapped her arms around his neck, laid her head against his shoulder. He wiped at his eyes. “Thank you for trying.”

  “He seemed to give you happiness.”

  Cat sat back in her chair, legs shaking. She nodded. He had given her happiness; he had taken her pain away. But he was not a machine designed to eradicate her sorrow. For the first time, she understood why he ran away.

  For the first time, she didn’t blame him at all.

  * * * *

  That night Cat couldn’t sleep. Her thoughts were too heavy. She lay in her bed with her hands resting on her stomach. After a while, she pulled her comm slate off her bedside table and checked the status on her travel visa to the Midwestern Desert. It hadn’t gone through yet. Now more than ever she wanted to fly to Kansas and see where he came from, even if it was just an abandoned house in the middle of the desert, coated in dust and infested with snakes and scorpions. She couldn’t apologize to him on the moon, but she wanted to find his history, she wanted to learn everything about him.

  She wanted to prove to herself that she could see him completely.

  All the room’s shadows were silver. Her closet door hung open, the tapestry glinting in the moonlight. Eventually, she crawled out of bed and put her jacket on over her pajamas. She slipped the tapestry off the closet shelf and crept into the hallway, in the direction of Finn’s old room.

  Since moving home, she had pretended that the door leading to the attic stairs opened into a linen closet. That the attic room never existed. Sometimes when she walked past she felt a spark in the hairs of her arms, like static electricity.

  But tonight, she wanted to see the room and breathe the stale dusty air. She wanted to set the tapestry on the foot of his bed and pretend he would find it when he came home from his trip to the moon. She had started the tapestry on a whim but now she knew it was a gift of contrition, recompense for not seeing the emotions lying dormant inside him.

  The attic stairs were covered in dust. She left smeared, indistinct footprints as she walked to the bedroom, her shoulder pressed against the wall to guide her in the watery darkness. A strip of moonlight seeped from beneath the door to the room, a silver fan feathering out across the stairwell. She nudged the door open with her shoulder. Put one bare foot on the cold floor and then another. The air in the bedroom was unmoving and warmer than the air in the rest of the house, though Cat still shivered beneath her thin jacket. The curtains on the window were pushed aside, and the moon was visible through the glass, huge and flat-looking, lighting the room. Dust floated everywhere. Cat sat down on the edge of the bed. The room looked abandoned even with the few touches that had marked it as Finn’s: the electric fan Cat had carried up the stairs behind her mother the day Finn came to stay. The unused sheets stretched across the bed in the corner. The computer was missing from the desk. Cat set the folded-up tapestry in its place. Her body burned.

  She stepped away from the desk and opened the door to the closet, where she found his clothes lined up neatly on their hangers, all the plain T-shirts and jeans. A pair of black boots. That scarf she’d made hanging from a hook on the door. She took it off and wound it around her neck. Then she walked back to the desk and sat down. She rested one hand on top of the tapestry, let her fingers sink into the fabric. I know it’s not enough, she thought. But I hope you like it. She squinted through the window at the moon. She saw the man and she saw the rabbit and she wished she could see the lunar statio
n. Even though she’d seen pictures of it on the Internet, she still imagined it to look like an old power plant, a web of amber lights, white steam belching into space. But of course you couldn’t see the lunar station on the surface of the moon from a room in a house here on Earth.

  Cat pulled open the top drawer of Finn’s desk. A nest of wires, a black external hard drive the size of her thumb. She opened the next one down. Empty. The next one. She stopped.

  That third drawer, that last drawer, contained a stack of paper Cat recognized as the sort she used to sketch on, back before she started high school. She pulled it out and laid the first paper down on the desk. A drawing, charcoal, not one she had done. It was a drawing of her, probably from when she was in college: she stood beside the citrus tree in the garden, pulling a lemon off one of the branches. It was technically proficient, but it took Cat’s breath away because she knew Finn had drawn it. She turned to the next sheet of paper. Cat asleep, her hair tousled over one shoulder. The next one. The bathtub in her old apartment, her legs and her arm draped over the side, her eyes peering over the tub’s edge.

  Cat blinked and tears welled up in the corners of her eyes. She gathered up the papers and placed them back in the drawer. Her heart beat painfully in her chest. Her body ached from thinking about the pain she had caused him. Pain. How could she be so stupid, so self-involved, to not see that she had caused him pain during all those years they were together and not-together? He never said anything, but that was no excuse. She should have known better than anyone else on this Earth.

  She took off her jacket and crawled underneath the blankets of his bed. She buried her face in the pillow but it didn’t smell like him. It didn’t smell like anything.

  The baby moved. She dropped her hand down and lay still and felt that tiny motion shimmer back and forth. She turned her head toward the window so she could see the moon, so she could see where he was.

  “Hello, baby,” she whispered. “This used to be your daddy’s room.”

  * * * *

  A month went by. The baby grew, and so did Cat. One day she looked in the mirror as she stepped out of the bathtub and she didn’t recognize herself or the curve of her stomach. She had been going to the Lamaze classes at the sun-filled studio in town, learning the breathing exercises, visiting the doctor, buying tiny cotton onesies and packages of disposable diapers off the Internet, running through lists of names. But the fact that she would give birth was unreal to her until that moment when she saw herself, and she thought, I am going to be a mother.

  The idea that she would be responsible for another life left her unsettled. Her own life remained unsorted. Her divorce with Richard had not yet gone through—he was delaying things, tying up the lawyers. She still could not escape the guilt that seemed to hang over her as she worked on her commission with the accounting company and planned her trip to the Midwest, reading advice for how to travel safely through the desert, looking into hotels and flight times even though she couldn’t book anything yet. She checked her visa status every day.

  She also began teaching herself to read Finn’s schematics. It wasn’t the same as learning about him as a person, but it was the closest she could come.

  She downloaded engineering and robotics manuals to her reading slate and studied them in the evenings, winter curling its dry hands around the loose, rattling windows. She brought up the schematics files on her personal computer and attempted to decipher those diagrams stretching like the lines of yarn across a loom. She started at the tips of his fingers, with the intention of working her way up the corded circuits to the epicenter of his existence. His brain. His heart.

  One night, when her father was working late in the laboratory and the icy wind seeped through the cracks in the house, she carried her computer and reading slate up to Finn’s room. It was the warmest place in the house. She sat at the desk and worked through the schematics of his touch. She had moved on from his fingers to his palm, to the point where everything connected, twining together into his arm. It was here that the code became complicated. She thought of her father’s word—baroque. She worked for a long time, night wrapping around the house like a blanket. She tapped in notes to herself on her reading slate, but she still didn’t understand. Each finger, individually—that she could picture in her mind. But she didn’t understand how his hand became whole.

  It grew late. Even the lamp seemed exhausted. Cat pushed her computer away, knocking it against the window that looked out over the night-drenched yard. She had been reading these manuals for nearly two weeks, but nothing clicked into place for her. She didn’t understand. She couldn’t understand.

  Cat stumbled away from the desk and curled up on Finn’s bed. For the last few hours she’d been reading about him as a machine, because it was the only way she had to be close to him, but now she thought about him not as a system of circuits and code, but as a person. She spun through her memories. She passed over the obvious ones, the ones where she used him—the ones where he touched her, the ones where he kissed her—and then she was thinking of a time in high school, several months after the fight with Erik, long before the night Oscar gave her a poisoned kiss. It was summer, the Fourth of July. They had driven to the parking lot of the old Walmart, one of the last to close down in that time before Cat was born. The sign was still plastered against the side of the building. Nothing had ever moved in to take its place, and the parking lot was a huge scar of black cement, marked with faded gray lines, glittering with broken glass. The rows of darkened streetlamps looked like palm trees. They drove out there, just her and Finn, to watch the fireworks. She must not have told her parents; she vaguely recalled the weight of that omission hanging between the two of them. Even though Finn didn’t approve, he would have done it anyway.

  They lay on the car’s hood as the fireworks exploded overhead. The noise always bothered her, that crackling thud like weapons in war movies. She and Finn didn’t touch; they weren’t at the point of touching yet. The air smelled of gunpowder. The night sky filled with smoke and reflected the light of the fireworks and their colorful, fiery rain. The smell had lingered in her hair even after they came home. A drunk astronomy student had once told her that the surface of the moon smelled of cordite. That the dust that looked matte gray in photographs, like the earth’s soil in black-and-white movies, glittered silver. How could he know that? Cat wondered at the time, but now she thought of Finn drifting unencumbered across the moon’s surface, barefaced, his hair and his clothes unmoving. She wondered if he smelled cordite and remembered the fireworks bursting overhead. She wondered if the silver moon dust reminded him of broken glass in the parking lot of a chain gone bankrupt.

  She wondered if he thought of her, ever, at all. Not because of the complicated design of his machinery, but because she’d hurt him. Because he couldn’t bear to think of her.

  Cat began to cry. She pulled the blanket under her chin. The fabric was old, too thin and worn to keep her warm, but she liked the weight of it against her clothes, her sweater and jeans. She cried until her eyes ached. She cried because it was her fault he didn’t think of her. She cried because she’d finally begun to understand that for all the times she spent with him, stretched out naked across the cheap mattress of the bed in her old apartment, she didn’t understand him in the slightest. She hadn’t allowed herself to, because understanding him would mean giving up the convenient lie that he didn’t care.

  All of Cat’s tears ran out. She stared at the computer on the desk, at the reading slate lying useless beside it. She didn’t want to read about his schematics anymore. She wished she could read about him.

  But it was impossible.

  She signed idly in to her e-mail account, looking for a distraction. She expected it to be empty.

  Instead, there was a single e-mail: Congratulations, it said.

  You have been approved for travel to the Midwestern Desert.

  SIXTEEN

  The airplane was small and, Cat suspected, old. It rat
tled and creaked as they puttered through the cloudless sky. She picked at a long thread unraveling out of the seam of her seat and wound it around her finger. Her belly stuck out enough that it rested across the tops of her thighs. The woman sitting beside her glanced over and smiled.

  “How far along?” she asked.

  Cat jerked up her head. “A little over six months.”

  “I have two of my own,” the woman said. “Are you excited?”

  Cat nodded, but at this particular moment she was more nervous than anything else. A curl of dread rested constantly at the bottom of her stomach—dread and anticipation. She still couldn’t believe she was on this plane, flying to the stretch of desert that had once been Kansas.

  “In fact,” said the woman, “I’m going to visit my oldest. Sarah. She’s in college now. Agricultural engineering. Working an internship this semester.” She turned to the window and the sunlight fell across her face, and her expression softened, became wistful and undefined. “They’ll make you so proud of them.”

  Cat smiled politely and looped her headphones back on. The woman glanced at her and then looked back out the window. Cat leaned against the seat’s headrest. The plane vibrated and dipped down, jerked back up. So few people flew to the Midwest that the airlines chartered tiny private planes rather than send the sleek, modern jets that flew so high up in the atmosphere they were almost spaceships. Cat listened to the steady thumping of her music and wondered if she would find anything out there. What if Judith Condon still lived in her house? Cat wondered what she would say to her if that was the case: The truth, that Cat was in love with Finn? Most likely she would go the easy route and claim she was some interested researcher.

  The e-mail, creased and soft with constant handling, was tucked away in the bottom of her purse, although she’d entered the address into her comm slate as well. She’d made arrangements to rent a car to drive from the airport into the middle of the desert. She had not told her father what she was doing—just, A vacation. I’m going on a vacation before the baby’s born. But she also didn’t cover her tracks.