The Mad Scientist's Daughter (12 page)

  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 – 4.30 in the morning, 2.00 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 too loud on the way so 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 OK?"

  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 meatloaf, etouffee 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 burned 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.

  Finn was there, sitting in the chair where she had first seen him as a child, his narrow fingers moving across the screen of his computer tablet. She stopped in the doorway. His head turned toward her.

  "I'm making a pie," she said.

  "Why?"

  Cat shrugged. She sat down on the porch's damp floor and scraped the lemon across the grater, stopping now and then to pull the yellow pulp away from the notches in the steel. She dropped the zest into the bowl next to her feet. She could feel Finn watching her, and she wanted to say something to him but she wasn't sure what. She felt suddenly self-conscious, the way she had when she was younger, in that time after her wild, forest-scented childhood but before she started high school. That awkward in-between place.

  Her cuticles stung from the lemon juice.

  "Can I help?" Finn asked. "Surely I can do that more quickly than you–"

  "I'm fine." Cat rolled the lemon against her palm. "It's relaxing, kind of." She grated for a few moments longer and then set the lemon in the bowl, next to the pile of zest, and stood up. She wanted to look at Finn but she didn't.