The Mad Scientist's Daughter
“You were brave enough to go see Dr. Condon,” he said. “And she’s insane. I figured you must be brave enough to deal with this.” He spread his hands out in front of him. “I can’t treat you like a child anymore,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” Cat leaned her head against his shoulder. “Don’t be.”
* * * *
For the next few weeks, Cat was on edge around her father. She expected him to collapse into her arms at any second. But he always stayed standing, and he didn’t like when she reminded him to take his medication in the evenings. “You sound like Finn,” he said. “Like a goddamn alarm clock.” She had come down to the laboratory and stood in the doorway, leaning her weight against the frame. Her father waved an arm at her. “Don’t you worry about me. Worry about that baby.”
And eventually, as Cat realized her father was not about to die, as her belly grew heavier, she found herself almost reverting back to the way things had been before. A very faint miasma of dread hung over her actions, like the scent of expensive perfume. But it was so subtle and so slight that she was able to ignore it. Most of the time.
One day Cat was in the garden spraying the thick, fragrant jasmine with rationed water from the hose, watching as the droplets condensed in shimmering rainbows in the hot sunlight, when something wet and warm dripped down her leg. She dropped the hose and cried out and water sprayed across the front of her dress. She knew what she was supposed to do; she had gone over it at dinner with her father, whenever he changed the subject away from his illness. There had been a suitcase packed next to the front door for the last seven days. For an entire week, she kept missing items of clothing. Now it was time.
She stumbled into the house and shouted for her father. She found one of the intercom consoles and pressed the button. “Daddy,” she said. “Daddy, it’s time.”
The house responded with its usual creaks and moans.
She pressed the intercom button again. “Daddy!”
“I’m here.” His voice was just behind her and she turned, steadying herself against the wall. He wiped the back of his hand across his forehead. His chest heaved. “I ran up the stairs,” he said. “Are you having contractions?”
“My water broke.”
He nodded and took her by the hand. Cat barely had time to think. It didn’t hurt yet. She touched her fingers to her belly button. Baby, Baby. She couldn’t imagine the world with her baby anyplace but inside her.
They drove to the hospital two towns over. Fifteen minutes away something ripped Cat in half, a sharp burning pain that made her shriek and kick out her legs and bang her knees against the dashboard. Her father glanced at her. Sweat glistened on his brow.
“Hold on, Kitty-Cat,” he said.
Cat leaned against the car seat. The pain dissipated, leaving behind an imprint, like a ghost. Sweat beaded up out of the pores on her back. Sunlight slanted through the car window, yellow and hot.
And then they were at the hospital, and Cat was flying down a corridor as bright as the inside of a fluorescent lightbulb. Another contraction and she arched her back against the wheelchair and screamed. Then she was in a room, in a bed, covered in papery sheets. The nurse-bot gave her one pill after another. Her father stood beside her in a gown the color of mint gum. When the contractions came she grabbed his hand and screamed. A robot arm whirred across the ceiling of the room, dropped down, slid something cool and metal into the base of her spine. After that the contractions didn’t make her scream, though she could feel them still, she could feel her body stretching out numbly, her legs in two stirrups, the doctor’s white hair bobbing up and down just in her line of vision. She felt the baby moving inside her. She forgot all the ways in which she was supposed to breathe. Even with her father standing beside her she forgot.
She was falling apart. She was the shell of a cicada. The baby was pushing its way out into the world and she was just its husk, the thing that carried it to life—
“I see the head,” said the doctor, and Cat was overwhelmed with euphoria. A head. Like a real person, not a fetus but a person. She heard all the voices of the people in the room. She heard the robot whirring her pain away, its hand cradling the nerves of her spine.
“Almost there,” said her father. “We’re almost there, Kitty-Cat.”
Cat tried to smile but her body was shaking and sweating and the muscles in her mouth refused to move. A starburst of intensity. She looked up at the bright ceiling.
Wailing. Wailing like the chime of bells. It sounded so far away.
“He’s here,” said someone female. One of the nurses. “Would you like to meet your son?”
Cat nodded because she was exhausted. For a moment she felt a rising sense of hysteria. They were bringing a wriggling bundle of blue cloth toward her. What if he looked like Richard? What if she looked into the face of her son and it was Richard’s eyes that looked back at her, Richard’s mouth twisted up in the anguish of being out in the world?
The nurse slid the baby into Cat’s arms. He was heavier than she expected, and warmer. She wiped the red liquid away. His eyes were blue but they were dark, like river water rather than ice. His skin as pale as her own. A generic little baby nose, a generic little baby mouth. Cat wept. Her tears flowed over her cheeks and dropped down on his forehead. She wiped them away with the base of her thumb. The baby stopped crying and watched her.
Her father leaned over the side of the bed, his eyes bright and smiling above his paper mask.
Immediately, Cat knew the name she wanted. She looked down at her son, her beautiful son.
“Hello, Daniel,” she said.
* * * *
They brought Daniel home on a hot, sunny day, the first of many hot, sunny days to come. Her father drove. Cat sat in the backseat of the car, curled up next to the plastic baby seat, watching Daniel’s tiny chest rise and fall. He had fallen asleep as soon as they got on the highway. She was overwhelmed by his smallness. She brushed the pale silk of his hair away from his forehead and he turned toward her, face scrunched up, his eyes a pair of wrinkles in the folds of his skin. Her father hummed tunelessly in the front seat.
Cat closed her eyes. She wanted to sleep.
* * * *
It was difficult for her to get used to her new life with the baby. He woke up crying in the middle of the night and Cat had to trudge across the hallway to his nursery, formerly the room where Finn used to tutor her, to cradle him in her arms or change his diaper or feed him. She spent the next few months, which became quickly enough the next year, in a perpetual sleepless haze. Her mind never quite seemed to belong to her. Some days, during the brightest and hottest part of the afternoon, she felt as though she were dreaming even though she was still awake—voices seeped in and out of the white noise of the trees and plants and the house settling into its foundation. Sometimes she looked at Daniel and didn’t recognize him. Those were the times she took him to her father’s laboratory and left him lying in his inflatable playpen as her father worked on what he promised wasn’t dangerous in the slightest, and she stumbled up to her bed (or sometimes Finn’s bed) and slept.
But other times when she was with Daniel she was so overwhelmed with love that she would have to sit down to steady herself. Once she was bathing him in the kitchen sink, rubbing honey-colored soap into his fine hair—it had darkened since she brought him home, away from Richard’s impossible blond and toward her own auburn—and the sunset spilling in through the window turned the kitchen a warm, luminous pink. Daniel laughed and splashed water across her face and then clapped his hands together. The room spun. Cat plucked him out of the water and held him close to her chest, laughing, feeling the warmth of his tiny fragile body. His fingers curled around the damp ends of her hair, and she understood in that moment why women choose to have children.
Time dripped by. Daniel grew into a toddler with huge, serious eyes. He liked to be outside. When Cat worked in the garden he explored the vast planes of their backyard, bringing he
r gifts of beetles and earthworms. Cat’s father made him an army of little robotic toys in the shapes of insects and snakes, and Daniel would chase them through the dried-out grass, their motors grinding and squealing. When he caught one he lay on his back and held it over his head and squinted at it, turning it over in his hands. Cat watched him from the garden gate, one hand on her hip, sweat dripping down her spine. He held a metal centipede as long as his arm. Its little metal legs churned in the air. He flipped it over and let it crawl across his chest and laughed.
One day during the hot autumn, when Daniel was two years old, someone knocked on the front door. Cat was reading The Wind in the Willows aloud to Daniel on the couch. At the sound of the knock his head perked up, and he clambered over her lap and leaned across the couch to get a look at the door.
“Wait here,” Cat told him. She stood up and walked into the foyer. Her heart thumped. They weren’t expecting visitors.
When she opened the door, it was only the man who delivered packages, a slim white box tucked under his arm, nearly hidden by the drape of his sleeve. He scratched at the back of his calf with his foot.
“Caterina Novak? I have a package for you.”
Cat nodded. She took the package from him and pressed her thumb against his computer tablet. He nodded and thanked her and walked back to the white and blue truck parked in the grass. The front door swung shut. The package was cool and slick against her palm. The return address was that of Richard’s lawyers. She closed her eyes, sighed thankfully.
The papers. The final papers, the ones that would make her divorce official. Richard had stalled them for so long after that day he’d come out to the house that Cat had almost forgotten the divorce hadn’t yet gone through. Months had gone by since she last thought of Richard in any concrete way, but for the first time in years she felt normal, the way she should feel. She ripped the package open, took out the narrow gray hard drive.
“Mama?” Daniel leaned over the side of the couch, staring at her with his big dark eyes. She smiled at him. He held out his arms for a hug, and she ran in and swooped him up and held him close to her. She kissed the top of his head.
“Come on, Daniel. Let’s go into the kitchen.” She set him on the floor, and he tottered off ahead of her. She pulled out a chair at the breakfast table and sat down and Daniel climbed up beside her, stood in his own chair and watched as she slid the hard drive into the kitchen computer. The papers flashed on-screen.
It was over. Richard was gone.
Cat glanced over at Daniel. He was looking at the screen along with her, as if he could read those rows of letters. He looked up at her and smiled and jumped off the chair. Cat scrolled down to the bottom of the document. She pressed her thumb against the screen, and then she went and dug through the junk drawer until she found a writing stylus. She signed the papers for her divorce in the kitchen of her childhood home, her son jumping from tile to tile behind her. The air conditioner rattled the walls of the house. The sun burned up the soil outside.
It took two seconds for her to sign her name. She thought, Now I can start over.
* * * *
That night, after Cat had slid the hard drive into a padded envelope and set up the shipping details on the computer, she lifted Daniel onto her shoulders and took him outside. The night air was cooler than she expected—the closest they ever came to a true autumn anymore, a faint chill in the night air like a vein of peppermint in a mug of hot chocolate. Daniel ran into the yard, and she wrapped a shawl around her shoulders and sat on the porch steps.
“Don’t go so close to the woods,” Cat said. The moon was out, sliced in half by the shadow of the Earth. Cat pulled out the pack of cigarettes she had slipped into her pocket before coming outside. She didn’t smoke as much as she used to, but she still kept a pack tucked away in her vanity drawer, and sometimes, some nights, the back of her jaw would ache and she could taste the tobacco burning her throat. Behind her, the screen door slammed.
“I thought you gave that nasty habit up.”
Her father stomped across the porch. He lowered himself down on the stairs beside her, carefully laying a canvas bag in the grass at his feet. Cat blew her smoke in the opposite direction.
“How you feeling?”
“Great.” She squinted at the moon. “I feel great. It’s official.” She dragged on her cigarette. “How are you feeling?” She looked over at him. He was frowning, his brow furrowed, his eyes sad. Looking at her looking at the moon.
“I feel fine, as I always do.”
“What? I worry about you.” She pointed at him with her cigarette. “What’s in the bag?”
“Oh, some more toys for Daniel. Here.” He handed the bag to Cat. She set it in her lap. Daniel was still prowling in the shadows, ignoring them. In the moonlight his hair looked dark as ink. Cat reached into the bag and pulled out another robotic creature. This one was smaller than the others, the size of her palm, and made of tarnished metal. It was as smooth as a stone.
“It’s a rock.” She leaned back so she could see the contents of the bag in the porch light. “It’s a bag of rocks.”
“It’s not a rock.” Her father laughed. “These are my best ones yet. Let me show you.” He took the thing-that-was-not-a-rock out of her hand and pressed down on it; immediately, the metal split open to reveal a faint luminescent glow. The robot whirred and lifted up off the palm of his hand and then zipped into the night, heading toward Daniel.
“Holy shit,” said Cat.
Her father grinned. “I programmed them to recognize Daniel’s DNA code. They’ll stay close to him.”
The little ball of pale light buzzed up close to Daniel’s head. He jumped. Peered at it suspiciously. It darted away from him, then hovered in the air centimeters above him. He jumped up and caught it. The light slipped between his fingers.
“It’s pretty cool, right?” Cat called out. Daniel nodded and walked toward them, his hand still cupped around the robot. He came to the edge of the yard and unfolded his fingers. His face was illuminated. The light caught the sheen of his eyes, and for a moment they almost seemed silver. Cat’s heart clenched. It was the last thing she ever expected to see: eyes flashing silver.
She pulled out another cigarette.
“Here, buddy,” said her father, setting the bag on the grass. He took the robot out of Daniel’s hand and showed him how to activate and deactivate it. The robot buzzed into the air. Together they reached into the bag and activated the other robots, one at a time, while Cat smoked and leaned against the porch and tried not to cry.
Cat lived in a world in which it was no longer necessary to believe in magic, but as she watched her son lighting up one robot firefly after another, his dark hair falling across his eyes, his skin pearly in the moonlight, she wondered.
* * * *
Cat took Daniel into town to register him for the Montessori day school that had opened on the Farm-to-Market road, next to the art galleries. She had considered keeping him to teach herself but decided it would be best for him if he met other children, even if they were the offspring of the teenagers she had known in high school. Her father refused to offer his opinion on the matter.
“I raised one of you already,” he said.
The day school was in an old farmhouse, surrounded by square herb and vegetable gardens, the pecan trees strung with twinkling homemade wind chimes. Daniel clutched Cat’s hand as they walked up the stone pathway, his fist wrapped around her two middle fingers. He looked around the garden with alarm. This was why she had decided to enroll him in school, because he was nearly five and the wider world seemed to terrify him. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders—he was so small, a normal size for his age but so small in relation to Cat and all the people she had known in her life that it seemed Daniel’s bones were hollow, like a bird’s—and guided him up the porch steps, through the heavy wooden door, into the school’s dim, cool corridor. Ms. Alvarez, the principal, stuck her head out of one of the rooms. She was young and
pretty and wore her hair pulled back in a sleek black ponytail. She smiled at Daniel before she smiled at Cat. “We’re so glad you could come down today.”
“Daniel,” said Cat. He burrowed in her hip. “Daniel, this is Ms. Alvarez.” She smiled at the principal apologetically. She could feel Daniel’s breath through her skirt.
Ms. Alvarez smiled and shook her head. She crouched down so she was at Daniel’s level. “I see you have a dinosaur on your shirt.”
Daniel peeked at her with one dark eye.
“Do you like dinosaurs?”
He loves them, Cat wanted to say, but she kept quiet. Daniel pulled away from her, just slightly. He nodded. He looked so solemn, so impassive. Just like—
“Would you like to see some dinosaurs?”
There were a few seconds of heavy silence. Then Daniel said, “They’re extinct.”
Ms. Alvarez laughed. “Of course they are! But I have a few holo-models you can play with.”
Daniel nodded, and Ms. Alvarez led him across the hallway into a classroom. Cat trailed behind. She had never been that comfortable around children. Daniel was different, but he was her son.
Ms. Alvarez switched on the lights. The classroom was full of color and smelled of plastic and disinfectant. Cat had never stood in a kindergarten classroom before. Or an elementary schoolroom. It was like standing inside a kaleidoscope. The principal led Daniel past the cluster of computers to the holographic station tucked discreetly in the corner. It looked like a black glass cube. She tapped one of the station’s sides, entered in a pass code, scrolled through a menu. Daniel followed the movements of her hands, and Cat felt a surge of love. It happened now and then, when she watched Daniel without his knowing. He needed a haircut—she was bad about keeping track of those.
A trio of apatosauruses appeared on the top of the holographic station, along with a strange, tropical-looking tree. Daniel gasped, turned and looked at Cat, his smile huge and bright. It was a much better holographic station than the one they had at home. One of the apatosauruses bit at the top of the tree, and tiny green leaves flaked into the air and disappeared.