The Mad Scientist's Daughter

  All you need to know.

  Cat sighed, stood up, dusted the loose grass off the back of her shorts. She pitched her half-finished snow cone in a nearby trash can, disguised by the city with honeysuckle, got on her bike, and rode back to her apartment. She felt listless, distracted. Bored. Her boredom made her want to have sex. So she called Michael. After all, he was her boyfriend.

  * * * *

  Cat was sprawled across her bed, listening to one of the scratchy, old-fashioned bands Michael always talked about. The current song faded out and before the next began Cat heard her slate chiming faintly in the bottom of her bag. It was her father. The video was turned off on his end—voice only. Strange.

  “Kitty-Cat?” His voice sounded distorted and frail. Like maybe he’d been crying. Cat had never seen her father cry. Her stomach clenched up. Something was wrong.

  “Daddy? Are you okay? Did something happen?”

  “Your mother. It’s . . . she . . .” He took a long breath. It sounded like shuddery, disjointed static over the slate. Cat’s heart pounded. “Oh, Cat, there was an accident . . . She, she, oh God . . . She’s dead.”

  In that moment, the weight of the Earth fell away from Cat. She floated above the dusty apartment floor, and she could no longer hear Michael’s twangy music, only a rushing sound in her head like the ocean. “What?” she whispered.

  Her father started crying again.

  “Daddy,” she said. “Daddy, tell me what happened. I’ll come home right now. I’ll—”

  “Cat?”

  “Finn.” She gasped his name like she’d been holding her breath. “Finn, do you know what happened?”

  “Your father is very upset,” he said. “You should come home immediately.”

  “Do you know what happened?”

  For a long time, he didn’t answer. She gnawed on the crescent of nail hanging off her pinkie finger—she needed to hear the sound of his voice. She was drifting apart, molecule by molecule. The mechanical evenness of his voice would bring her back together. It was the only thought she had. I need to hear your voice.

  “It was a car accident,” he said finally. “This morning. She was turning onto the highway.”

  The rushing in Cat’s ears grew louder. Something curled up tight inside her, so tight it disappeared completely.

  “I’m leaving now,” she said flatly.

  Then she threw the slate across the room.

  FIVE

  Cat drove through the night, out of the city and its glimmering suburbs, down the wide, brightly lit highways surrounded on all sides by forests and gas stations. She didn’t tell anyone where she was going: not Lucinda, not Michael. She simply picked up her bag, walked out to her car, and left.

  She stopped once to use the restroom and buy a cup of bad coffee. The station buzzed with anemic fluorescent light. As Cat washed her hands, she stared at the mirror, trying to recognize herself.

  She had not cried once. She had not even been on the verge of crying.

  When Cat pulled up the drive of her parents’ house, a thin, sickly band of sunlight appeared at the horizon, turning the rest of the sky gray. She stumbled up the front porch stairs and collapsed on the swing. The chains creaked. She could already feel the inevitable heat of the day.

  The front door’s screen slammed against the house’s siding. “I heard your car,” said Finn. Cat glanced over at him. “Your father is sleeping.” He paused. “You should sleep, too.”

  “It’s nearly daylight.”

  “You should still sleep.” He moved closer, his footsteps loud and hollow on the wood of the porch. “Or would you prefer to eat something? People from town have been bringing food.”

  “Of course they have.” Cat rubbed her eyes, itching from lack of sleep. She wasn’t hungry. Finn knelt down beside the swing and put his hand over hers. This sudden touch jarred her. She didn’t want it to end.

  “Come inside,” he said. “I’ll bring your things in.”

  “I didn’t pack anything.”

  They went into the house together. Finn held her hand, awkwardly, his long narrow fingers wrapped around her own. She was glad of it, because she didn’t know if she would have had the strength to walk inside alone, into that dark dusty foyer choked with memories. Cat shuffled past the closet filled with old coats and rain boots, into the cavernous living room, dim from the drawn curtains. Finn led her into the kitchen, where the dawn illuminated the dishes of casseroles and pies and baked dips that had been brought over, Cat supposed, by the church ladies from town. The sight of all that food made her dizzy.

  She wanted to lean against Finn but instead she steadied herself against the doorframe, pressing her forehead against the slick, painted wood. Finn did not drop her hand. She did not drop his.

  “I don’t want any of this,” she said.

  “You need to sleep,” said Finn. This time, she didn’t protest; she let Finn walk her up to her old room, where she curled up on her bed alone and fell asleep.

  * * * *

  She woke up to a sunset, the room turned gold and pink from the liquid light spilling in between the slats in the blinds. Cat felt made of charcoal, like she left streaks of gray in the vividness of her room. She crawled out of her bed and took off her clothes, musty with the scent of travel and sleep, and put on an old sundress she hadn’t worn since high school. She sat down at her vanity and brushed the curl out of her hair. She thought about putting on some mascara but decided not to. She sprayed perfume and watched the atomized droplets of fragrance dissolve in the room’s golden light. It reminded her, sharply, of the night of the prom, her arm linked in Miranda’s, her mother—her mother—snapping pictures of them out in the garden.

  Cat knew nothing about the bureaucratic procedures of dying. She knew nothing about wills and testaments, nothing about funeral arrangements or the collection of life insurance. If it had been someone else’s mother who died, she wouldn’t even have thought to bake a casserole. My mother is dead, she thought, but she didn’t believe it.

  She went downstairs, looking for Finn or her father and finding Finn. He sat at the kitchen table in front of one of the portable computer stations, typing quickly, his eyes jerking back and forth.

  “Dr. Novak asked me to arrange the funeral,” he said. “It’ll be in two days.” He looked up at her. “I hope you’re all right.”

  “I’m fine.” No, you’re not. You still haven’t cried. “I just wanted to get something to eat.”

  Finn smiled. It seemed empty. Had his smile always seemed empty?

  Cat went into the kitchen and filled a plate with scoops from each of the casserole dishes, not caring what any of it was. She microwaved the entire thing and took it out on the back porch to eat. She leaned back in the rickety plastic chair and watched twilight settle over the yard and the woods. The casseroles all tasted like cigarettes.

  The stars came out. She had forgotten what they looked like. Cat went back inside and dropped her plate in the sink. She sat down at the dining room table and watched Finn type.

  After five minutes, he stopped, his hands hovering above the computer. “Do you need anything?” he asked kindly.

  Cat shook her head. She felt hollow. “Just let me watch you,” she said.

  “Watch me?”

  Cat nodded. She wondered if Michael had tried to call her yet, or if he had shown up at her apartment. Lucinda would say, I thought she was with you. Cat was too numb to deal with them at the moment. Her comm slate was buried in her bag in her room, switched to silent. Maybe Michael was calling her right now. She didn’t care. She just wanted to slump down at the table, her eyes heavy and dry, and watch Finn work.

  * * * *

  Cat didn’t speak to her father until the morning of the funeral. She didn’t have anything black in her closet so she put on the dark blue dress she used to wear on the rare occasions she went to Mass. She dug out an old pair of flats, and then, without thinking, breezed into her parents’ bathroom and took out her mother’
s jewelry box. She was fastening the necklace of pearls at the base of her throat when she realized she was stealing her mother’s jewelry as though she were still alive.

  “Cat?”

  Her father materialized in the doorway, wearing a suit and a tie but looking faded and sleep-worn, his eyes sunk low into the contours of his face. The pearl necklace dropped to the counter. “Finn told me you were here. I’m sorry I hadn’t seen you yet—” He stopped. “Her pearls,” he said. “I gave those to her. On our first anniversary. I thought they were lost—she never wore them anymore.” He walked up to where the pearls lay curled on the pale blue tiles, and then he lifted them to the light. “You should wear them.”

  Cat nodded because she didn’t know what else to do. Her father was mourning. She could tell by looking at him. She could see in the lines of his face that he couldn’t quite fathom how all the knowledge he had accrued in his lifetime—the knowledge of circuitry and diodes, the tangled arteries of wires—could not be applied to stop his wife from dying.

  And Cat knew she looked the way she always did. Not distraught. Not half-dismantled. Her eyes weren’t red from weeping. But she took the pearls her father offered her, and she followed him down the stairs to the living room where Finn sat in his ill-fitting suit. He stood up when they walked in, his face as dispassionate as Cat felt.

  Finn drove them to the church in town, Cat sitting alone in the backseat of the car, her forehead pressed against the window. She watched the blur of trees. She watched the town appear building by faded building: the post office, the high school, the rows of clapboard bungalows. When they pulled into the grassy lot next to the church it was already full of cars and old women in dark dresses.

  “Thank you,” said her father, turning to look at Finn. Cat watched them from the backseat, the yellow sunlight casting their profiles in silhouette. “Thank you for taking care of this.”

  “You’re welcome,” said Finn.

  “Everyone’s staring at us,” Cat said.

  “Would you expect anything less?” said her father.

  They stepped out of the car. Cat’s father wrapped his arm around her shoulders as they walked through the grass to the open doors of the church, down the sunlit aisle to the front pew. The coffin was up on the altar, shut tight and covered in flowers. Cat closed her eyes. She could hear her father breathing beside her, and Finn whirring on her opposite side, and beyond that, the rustle of fabric and whispers.

  The service began.

  Cat sat still throughout, her hands folded in her lap, sitting and standing and kneeling by rote. She tuned out the cursory speeches given by some of the church ladies, irritated by the way they dabbed tastefully at the corners of their eyes. When her father went up to speak she felt the roar of blood in her ears, and for a moment she was back in her apartment in the city the day he called her, floating weightless above the floorboards. His cheeks glistened as he spoke. Cat curled her fingers around Finn’s hand.

  Did Finn glance over at her as she sat in the pew, shimmering with disbelief? She couldn’t say. But he didn’t drop her hand from his side, and Cat still felt hollow.

  Afterward, they rode in silence to the cemetery—the cemetery Cat had once taken Finn to see, when she was a child and still convinced he was a ghost. Her mother had always loved it. She used to bring Cat there during the buzzing, indolent two-week spring to pick bouquets for the dining room table. There were no flowers now. It was too late in the season, and the summer sun had already begun to burn all the growth away.

  Even this early in the day it was too hot, and so not as many people came out to the cemetery as they did the church. The few ladies who did brave the sweltering heat sniffled in the background, wiping at their eyes. They wept as they threw carnations down the hole in the ground. Cat threw an entire bouquet, yellow roses and bursts of baby’s breath, but she did not cry. She was as dry as the weeds in the cemetery, as dry as the leaves shriveling up in the trees.

  She still did not believe her mother was dead.

  * * * *

  In the weeks after the funeral, Cat rarely saw her father. He retreated down into his laboratory and emerged at strange hours—four thirty in the morning, two in the afternoon—looking disheveled and sleepy. He carried microwave dinners downstairs by the armful, never bothering to eat the meals Cat prepared and then shoved in the back of the refrigerator to be forgotten.

  There was a deep resounding emptiness in the house, a vacuum where sound should have been, like the interior of a bell. It made Cat’s teeth ache.

  Finally Cat drove back to the city to pick up the clothes she had left behind. She played her music so loud on the way that when she walked up the stairs to her apartment her ears would not stop ringing. She unlocked the door and went in. Michael was there. He and Lucinda were sitting close to each other on the couch, and Lucinda jumped up when Cat walked in.

  “Cat!” she said. “Oh my God, how do you feel? Are you okay?”

  Cat stared at her levelly. People had been asking her this question for weeks, and she still didn’t know the proper answer. I feel empty. I feel fine. I think she’s just on vacation.

  “Sad,” she finally said. She glanced past Lucinda at Michael. Back at Lucinda. Lucinda seemed upset.

  “You’re cheating on me,” she said. She was looking at Lucinda but she saw Michael flinch out of the corner of her eye.

  Lucinda’s eyes widened. She opened her mouth.

  “It’s fine,” Cat said to her. “I’m not angry.” And she wasn’t, although she couldn’t tell if this was because she never cared about Michael or if it was because she was so thoroughly numb. She looked over at Michael. “I can’t deal with a boyfriend right now. So this is convenient.”

  “I always loved your open-mindedness,” Michael said. “I’m so sorry about your mom.” But there was a flatness in his voice, as if Cat, in her grief, had abandoned him, tricked him into a compromising position with her roommate.

  “I wasn’t—we weren’t—sure how long you were going to be gone,” Lucinda said.

  “I’m not staying. I just came to get my things.” Cat looked over at her bedroom, the door hanging open the way she’d left it. “I need to stay with my dad. You know. For the summer. I’ll pay rent or whatever. If you find someone to sublet—” She waved her hand in a circular motion. She didn’t want to think about these things now. She had quit her job at the vice stand the day after the funeral, when she made all the calls to her friends, explaining what happened. She wanted everything to slip away. All her attachments.

  Lucinda nodded again, her expression serious, even though Cat could tell she was pleased to have the apartment to herself for the next few months.

  Cat left the city that day, in the hottest part of the afternoon, her clothes in a pile on the backseat. She threw the apartment key in her glove compartment and forgot about it. She turned the air conditioner on high but still her legs stuck to the car seat.

  The summer wore on. Cat stopped going outside during the day. She downloaded old shows from her childhood and let them play in the background as she swept the hallway and wiped clouds of dust off the ceiling fans. Noise. There always had to be noise in the house. The silence was painful otherwise. When the summer storms started up, earlier than usual and more violent, Cat still hadn’t cried. She and Finn spent a day between storms undertaking the annual ritual of fortifying the house. They locked the storm shutters down tight and checked for loose shingles on the roof. Cat watched Finn as he examined each of the generators, handing him any tool he needed. It was familiar and monotonous—the generators’ dark hum, Finn’s quick, assured movements. Even the desire bubbling up inside her was tedious, almost dull. Every year since she was a little girl she had watched him climb among the generators, a wrench dangling from one hand.

  It felt so normal. That was the danger of monotony. It was so normal she could almost forget she should even be crying at all.

  After the house was stormproofed, Cat’s days fell into a
languid rhythm, like the breath of someone sleeping. She herself slept whenever the hot sun came out, in the glaring afternoons, and stayed wide awake during the wild storms and the silent, silvery witching hours. She swept the floors. She scrubbed out the mold in her father’s bathtub. She wiped away the toothpaste splatters from the bathroom mirrors. The house will be clean when she gets home, Cat thought while mopping the kitchen floor. She’ll be so happy. Every week she emptied the refrigerator of all its leftovers so she could fill it back up again. She made vegetable curry and meat loaf, étouffée and roast chicken. She ate very little of any of it.

  One rainy, humid afternoon Cat decided she should learn how to make pies from scratch. She opened up the kitchen computer and typed in Joy of Cooking and picked the most recent edition, settling on a recipe for lemon meringue. She walked barefoot into the gray drizzle to pick lemons from the tree in the garden, and when she pushed open the creaking, heavy gate something twinged in her chest. A loss of breath. She remembered the day, years ago, that she planted the lemon tree, digging out the dirt while her mother pruned the roses growing across the fence. Her mother had worn thick gloves but still her upper arms had been covered in tiny red scratches from the thorns.

  Cat leaned against the garden gate. The dampness of the air soaked through her shirt, and the memory passed, leaving her clammy and disoriented. She took a deep breath. Then she walked past the spiny roses and the overgrown, unflowering jasmine, and plucked a trio of misshapen lemons, each the size of a fist, off a low-hanging branch of the tree. Her hair clung to the back of her neck, the side of her face. She went back inside.

  She burned the first two crusts she made. The third crust she checked too frequently, paranoid, and it came out patchy and uneven, half-golden and half-beige. She filled the trash can with unwanted piecrusts, until finally she pulled one out of the oven and it was the color of almonds and its sweet, buttery aroma drowned out the acrid scent of burnt flour from her earlier attempts. She set it on the counter to cool and took her lemons and the flat metal grater out onto the screened-in porch so she could listen to the sound of the rain falling through the trees as she grated the peels into zest.