The Mad Scientist's Daughter

  When they came to the hospital, and Cat heard the swish of the automatic glass doors and the beeps of the nurse-bots, she remembered her father. She remembered why Finn was here at all.

  Cat and Finn walked side by side, unspeaking, to her father’s room, and Daniel clutched Cat’s hand with a surprising force. She hadn’t brought him to the hospital often, choosing instead to let him talk to his grandfather over the computer, thinking the white hospital, its walls gleaming like the side of a lightbulb, would overwhelm him. She could feel his fingers shaking now, and she drew him close to her. She could feel Finn watching them both. “Here it is,” she said when they came to the room. She eased open the door.

  “Daddy?” He was a mound of white sheets on the bed. When she spoke, the mound shifted, a face appeared, everything white except for the dark sunken hollows of his eyes.

  “Grandpa?” said Daniel shakily. He slid behind Cat’s legs and wrapped his tiny hands around her knees.

  “My favorite grandson,” said Cat’s father. He moved to sit up and Cat rushed across the room, held out her hands to stop him.

  “Daddy,” she said. “Daddy, Finn’s here.”

  Her father’s head lifted an inch off the pillows. Cat heard Finn’s footsteps behind her, thudding against the tile. Her father’s eyes widened.

  “You came back,” he said, and his head dropped.

  Finn stood next to the bed. Cat drew away. She wrapped her arms around Daniel’s shoulders.

  “Dr. Novak,” said Finn. There was a sound in his voice Cat didn’t recognize, a crack of disbelief. He took her father’s hand in his own. “Daniel.”

  “How’s the moon this time of year?”

  “Cold and hot.”

  Her father laughed. Cat pulled Daniel toward the door. She would wait in the lobby. This was not something for her to see.

  As she slipped out the door her father’s eyes shifted toward her and then back to Finn. Finn did not turn around.

  She and Daniel walked to the waiting room. Daniel didn’t say anything when she plopped him down on one of the uncomfortable, sterile-looking chairs, and he didn’t say anything when she asked if he wanted a Coke from the vending machine—just shook his head solemnly.

  “Well, I’m going to get a cup of coffee,” she said. What she really wanted was a cigarette but she didn’t want to take Daniel outside into the hot parking lot. She walked into the concession alcove, swiped her bank card, watched the cardboard cup fill with thin, watery coffee. When she went back into the waiting room, Daniel stared at her.

  “Grandpa’s a ghost,” he said.

  “No, he isn’t.” She sipped her coffee, and it burned the roof of her mouth.

  “He will be soon, though.”

  Cat set the coffee on the arm of her chair and reached over and hugged Daniel closer to her. “Yes,” she said, because she didn’t know what else to say.

  “Can I see him again? Before he becomes a ghost?”

  Cat nodded. “When Finn’s finished talking to him. They haven’t seen each other in . . . in a very long time. Not since before you were born.”

  “Finn’s nice.”

  “Yes,” said Cat. “Yes, I think so, too.”

  Finn stayed in the room with her father for almost two hours. Daniel fell asleep in his chair, curled up, his head resting on the crook of Cat’s arm. She read through the newsfeeds on her slate, forgetting everything five minutes after she read it. The hospital sounds were muted and far away. Daniel’s breath on her arm was warm and moist and comforting.

  Finn appeared in the waiting room. He walked over to Cat.

  “He’s dying,” he said.

  “I know,” said Cat.

  “I knew it intellectually of course, but I hadn’t . . . I hadn’t realized . . .” He ran his hands through his dark and unchanged hair. “It hurts. It hurts to see him.”

  Cat slid her arm out from under Daniel’s head. He didn’t wake up. She stood up and she was closer to Finn than she had been for nearly eight years. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders. She didn’t even think about it.

  He put his hand on her waist and pulled her close and there was that clean electric scent of him and he pressed his face against her hair and they stayed like that, for a minute, for five minutes, and it was familiar and safe even as Cat’s heart broke over and over again.

  “Mama?”

  Daniel’s voice was slurred with sleep. Cat pulled herself out of Finn’s arms and lifted Daniel off the chair. He buried his head in her shoulder. When she turned around, Finn seemed to be smiling.

  “I want to take him to see Dad.”

  “Of course. Shall I wait out here?”

  “You don’t have to.” She dropped Daniel to the floor and led him through the hallway. Finn trailed behind them. She went into her father’s room. A nurse-bot whirred beside the bed.

  “His exhaustion levels are increasing,” said the nurse-bot’s disembodied voice. “Visitation is not recommended at this time.”

  “Ignore it,” her father said. “I’m fine.”

  “We just wanted to come say good-bye.” Cat brought Daniel up to the side of the bed. “Did you have a nice talk with . . . with Finn?” He wasn’t in the room. He must have been waiting in the hallway.

  “Yes.” Her father’s voice faded in and out like an old radio. “It was good to see him. It was good . . .” He closed his eyes. “Don’t let him go back. He doesn’t want to be there.”

  “What? How do you know?”

  Her father smiled weakly at her. “I can tell.”

  “He said he can stay for three weeks.”

  Her father shook his head. “Don’t let him go back at all. There’s nothing for him up there.”

  Cat sighed. She knelt down so she could whisper directly in Daniel’s ear. “Do you have anything you want to say to Grandpa?”

  “Daniel!” Her father held out one of his hands, and Daniel stared at it, fascinated, like it was a dead bug. Cat nudged him forward. “How are the firefly bots?”

  “They’re good.”

  “You should ask Finn to show you how to make some of your own.” Her father coughed, a small quick cough that quickly multiplied until his entire body shook.

  “I miss you, Grandpa,” said Daniel.

  “I miss you, too, Danny. Don’t let your mother make you eat too many vegetables.”

  Daniel frowned. He shuffled away from the bed, back toward Cat. The nurse-bot beeped again.

  “Visitation is not recommended at this time,” it said.

  “We should go,” said Cat.

  “Bah,” said her father. But his eyes looked watery and weak, and his voice was so soft she could barely hear it.

  “I’ll bring Finn back tomorrow.”

  Her father nodded and closed his eyes.

  “We love you,” said Cat. The nurse-bot skittered across the floor. Her father nodded again, wiggled his fingers, and Cat took Daniel out into the hallway, where Finn was waiting.

  * * * *

  Cat led Finn up to his old bedroom. The sheets on his bed were turned down, crumpled from the last sleepless night she’d crept up here to doze in the muggy heat. He didn’t comment on it, just walked to the closet and pulled out a change of clothes.

  He didn’t comment on the tapestry that lay folded in the center of his desk, though Cat saw his eyes swoop over it, a brief mechanical pause as they took it in and his programming determined that he did not recognize it. She didn’t say anything, either.

  “I’ll be downstairs momentarily,” he said, his back to her. She stood for a moment in the doorway, and when he didn’t move to take off his clothes she went out into the stairwell. The door clicked shut behind her.

  It was strange to share a home with him again. He spent more time outside than he used to. She watched through the window in the kitchen as he walked into the woods or wove through the garden. He went out during the hottest part of the day, the sun a pinpoint of white light radiating out of the cloudless sky. I
n the evenings he played computer games with Daniel, and he laughed more than she had ever heard him laugh.

  She drove him to visit her father whenever he asked, which was most days. They went while Daniel was in school, just as she had before he came home. He started working in the laboratory. She didn’t ask what he was doing, and he didn’t tell her.

  The silence between them was heavier than the heat. And then one day the house computer dinged with an incoming call. It was a Saturday. Daniel was at a friend’s house, probably eating homemade ice cream on the porch, reading comic books on his friend’s expensive reading tablet. Finn was outside, down by the river. The computer dinged, and Cat knew immediately that her father was dead.

  “Ms. Novak?” There was no video, just the hospital’s logo. The voice on the other end was female, as crisp as an apple. She had a calm and businesslike way of speaking, the sort of voice you use to train dogs. “Ms. Novak, I am very sorry, but Daniel Novak passed away this afternoon at two thirty-three p.m.”

  Cat sank down on the couch. She had been expecting this for so long that she didn’t even think to cry. She had cried for her father already. She tightened her fingers around the slate and listened to the woman and the computer’s static and she said, “Yes,” and “Of course,” to all the questions about insurance and surviving family members. When it was over she switched off the computer and sat very still, the room full of dust, the fan stirring up the air-conditioned air.

  He’s dead he’s dead oh God he’s dead.

  She walked outside. It was so hot she began to sweat immediately. She wasn’t wearing any shoes but she walked to the woods anyway. Broken sticks and sharp hot rocks stabbed the soles of her feet. The sound of cicadas bored straight into her. The world was burning up. A heaviness waited behind her eyes. She weighed a thousand pounds. It was a struggle to make it to the river to find Finn standing shirtless in the green waist-deep water, the sun reflecting off the tops of his shoulders. She walked down to the river’s edge, and then she stepped into the water. The sudden coldness shocked her; it sent reverberations up and down her spine. Finn turned. She pushed through the lazy, freezing current. Her dress clung to her thighs, wrapped around her legs, binding them together. The slimy rocks slid out from under her feet, but she did not fall.

  “Your timing was impeccable,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s dead.”

  Sunlight bounced off the water and into her eyes. It caught on the tips of her eyelashes, blinding her.

  “He’s dead,” she said again, and then she was crying. She pitched forward in the water, and Finn caught her. Her entire body shook. She was angry. She was crying because she was angry, because it wasn’t fair for him to die so young, while all the fathers of her friends kept on living. It wasn’t fair that both her parents were gone. It wasn’t fair that the cells of his brain, the most brilliant part of him, had betrayed him so irrevocably. She slid down until she was sitting in the water, and Finn held her close and rocked her back and forth and when she looked at him through the web of her tears his face was wracked with sadness.

  “He saved me,” Finn said, his voice disbelieving. “A long time ago.”

  “I know.” Cat cried harder. She leaned her head against Finn’s chest. Water lapped at their bodies. His hands were in her hair. They did not kiss; they did not speak.

  Everything had unraveled.

  * * * *

  There was a wake. Cat filled the house with loud music and liquor and invited everyone in town and all the scientists who used to come to dinner parties when she was a child. Her father’s coffin was set up in the middle of the living room, the monitor set into the wall playing a video of him: the day of his wedding, standing next to a version of her mother even younger than Cat was now, on a beach down along the Gulf Coast. Accepting an award from the woman who had been president when Cat was seven years old. Food and flowers and liquor everywhere. Cat could barely stand any of it. She’d had a few bottles of beer, and her grief was magnified: magnetic, even, drawing all the others toward her to share in their sorrow. She went outside and lit a cigarette in the dark garden, away from the music and the lights and the sound of people laughing—supposedly they were reminiscing but she didn’t believe it. She sat down beneath the citrus tree, and she could smell the faint scent of lemons through the acrid smoke of her cigarette. The worst thing about it was that he had been alone in the moment he died. Maybe a nurse-bot had been there, gliding across the floors, whirring plaintively as the beeping of his heart slowed and slowed and then finally stopped.

  Cat ground her cigarette into the dirt. She lit another one. Out in the unfathomable darkness, the gate creaked open. Cat wished she could curl up and disappear. Probably one of the ladies from town, coming out to check on her, to cluck over her, to make a fuss about her cigarette and her unwashed hair—

  It was Finn. He sat down beside her.

  “I don’t want to go back in there,” Cat said.

  “I won’t make you.”

  “Good.” Cat dragged on her cigarette. Finn didn’t say anything. Out of habit, she reached over and pushed his hair away from his eyes, tucked it behind his ear. He glanced over at her. Frowned.

  “It’s not the way it used to be,” Finn said.

  Cat closed her eyes. She leaned against the trunk of the tree. She was already so sad that this new sadness didn’t even compare.

  “I probably shouldn’t have left,” Finn said. “I understand that now. I should not have left him alone.”

  “Why did you leave?” The question shimmered in the air, a chasm of light between them. Cat wanted to hear him speak his answer.

  In the darkness Finn was all shadows.

  “I was angry.” Then: “I don’t want to talk about this.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not appropriate. Not now.” He stood up.

  “Why did you come out if you didn’t want to talk to me?” For a moment, Finn didn’t move. She felt him staring at her. Someone turned on the porch light, and the light reflected off his eyes so that they became two silver disks regarding her in the darkness.

  “Well?” she said.

  “I don’t want to talk to you about that particular subject. I was . . . concerned . . . for you, however.”

  “Concerned.”

  He nodded.

  “But you don’t actually want to talk to me.”

  “I told you, I don’t want to discuss—”

  “Jesus, did you miss me at all?”

  She hadn’t meant to ask him that, but grief had left her weak. His silence threatened to overwhelm her. Her cigarette had burned down to the filter and the warmth of it singed the tips of her fingers.

  “Yes,” he said.

  Then he strode out of the garden before Cat had a chance to reply.

  * * * *

  At her father’s burial, Cat wore a black dress she had not worn since she lived with Richard in the glass house. It was the only black dress she owned. She held Daniel in her lap despite the heat, and he watched the proceedings with large, curious eyes: the priest reading passages from the Bible in spite of her father’s atheism, the old women with their bouquets of flower-shop flowers, the crackling, dried-out grapevines hanging from the trees in the cemetery. When she began to cry, Daniel kissed her cheek and whispered in her ear, “Don’t worry, Mama, I can still see him.” And he pointed to a spot next to the sprawling old oak tree, and for a moment Cat thought she saw a shimmer in the air, like an oil slick or a heat mirage.

  She was expected to say a few words. That was how Maybelle put it: You’ll need to say a few words. She had not prepared anything, and when the time came, she walked shaking up to the podium. Her high heels sank into the loose soil. She looked out over all those solemn faces. She looked at the coffin covered in white lilies.

  “I loved him,” she said. “He was my father.”

  She stopped. She had no idea what to say. She looked at Finn. His expression was
unreadable.

  “I know he seemed like a mad scientist,” she said. “Locked up in his laboratory all the time. But . . . he was a good father. A good grandfather. And I wish you all could have known him better.”

  Her cheeks were wet. The wind blew dust and dirt over the funeral, and Cat walked back to her seat. Daniel hugged her. Finn glanced at her and they stared at each other for a moment and then he stood up and walked to the podium. His suit was new, she realized. It was not the suit he had worn to her wedding. He put his hands on the podium and looked at a point on the horizon. “I’m sure most of you don’t think I should be here,” he said. “That I am merely a machine.” He paused, and the wind ruffled his hair. Everyone seemed to have stopped breathing. “You are, of course, correct. I am a machine. However. I am . . . alive . . . in a sense, and I’m aware of this fact, unlike, for example, the robots that spray for mosquitoes in the middle of the night. And Dr. Novak—Daniel—realized this about me when he found me many years ago and brought me to live with him and his family.

  “Daniel raised me as a son. He tried to protect me from all the horrors of the world. He failed, of course, but I am grateful for that.” Finn smiled a little. “I have never endeavored to be human, a fact Daniel had difficulty accepting at first. However, he never looked down on me for it. And he made his mistakes. But ultimately he loved me—for who I am, for what I am. He loved me, not some version of me that will never exist. And for that I am grateful. It is a mark of true humanity.”

  When Finn stopped speaking, he dipped his head and stepped down from the podium. No one moved, not even Cat. He walked back to his chair. Eventually someone took his place, one of the engineers or scientists Cat’s father had known before he married. The string of platitudes dissipated on the hot wind. Cat was crying again, a slow, silent sort of crying that was nearly imperceptible save for the moisture on her face. She watched Finn, who did not look at her from across the flower-covered coffin.

  Afterward, when the service had ended, when Cat had walked Daniel to the gravestone so he could lay a single white rose in the grass, she found Finn loitering at the cemetery gates, watching as everyone piled into their cars to drive away. Her father’s coffin was still set up next to the grave, locked into some mechanism that would lower it into the ground once the mourners had left. Daniel crouched down in the grass, watching the grasshoppers leap above the tangled mat of weeds. Cat lit a cigarette.