The Mad Scientist's Daughter (16 page)

  "Caterina, I'm going to be honest. I tried to figure out how to make this romantic."

  
Romantic?
Cat thought. She heard her blood rushing in her ears.

  "Yeah. But everything I came up with was just so… cheesy. Insincere." He smiled and reached into his pants pocket. He kept his hands folded over whatever it was he pulled out.

  Cat sat very still, as still as a statue.

  "And then last night, I'm up there working, it's three in the goddamn morning, and there's this howling all around me and I swear I can almost see the ice forming on the glass. I thought,
Caterina would love this shit
. It was so, you know, artistic. And I wished so hard that you could have been there with me." His words came out too fast, a blur. He held out his hands, unfolded them like a flower.

  And then Cat saw the black velvet box resting in the palm of Richard's hand, and then that was all she saw. Her apartment fell away. Richard fell away. The black velvet box was a black hole, drawing into itself everything that made up Cat's life. She went numb.

  "Caterina Novak." She was vaguely aware that he had slipped off the couch, onto one knee. She heard the rustle of his clothes, the thump of bone hitting the floorboards. "Caterina Novak, will you marry me?"

  A black hole, and its center, at its core, was a glittering shard of light.

 
 

 
 
 

She told him she would have to think about it.

  His cheeks flushed, but he grinned and bobbed his head. "That's fine," he said. "I talked to Halfast. She said I should give you time."

  Cat nodded. Outside the wind howled and crawled across the windows. Richard lifted her hands up from her side, his skin cold to the touch. He dropped the box in her right palm and curled her fingers over it.

  "I don't expect you to wear it," he said. "If you don't want to. I just… want you to have it."

  "Of course."

  Richard stood up. He shoved his hands in his pockets and bounced in place on the balls of his feet, as though he were trying to warm up. Cat realized he hadn't looked her in the eye, not once, not since he asked. She tightened her grip on the ring box. It felt normal, now that she held it, now that she knew it was tangible. She wanted to give it back. She wanted to tell him no. She kept thinking about the night before.
Finn.

  "I was going to go to the studio," Cat said.

  Richard nodded. "I should go back up to the office." He peeked up at her through the fringe of his hair. She met his eyes and he looked away, toward the window, toward the green, frozen trees lashing outside.

  "Call me." He wagged a finger at her. "And don't take too long deciding."

  Cat flinched, but it looked like a smile.

  Cat kissed Richard on the cheek before he left, and she stood on the porch as he shuffled down to his car, her fingers turning numb from the cold. The ring box exuded its own uncomfortable warmth. When she went back inside she locked the door behind her and dropped the box on her kitchen counter.

  When had Richard become interested in marriage? The friends of his she had met at parties always joked that they were married to their jobs. That even the days without sleep, the diet of pizza and overly caffeinated soda – it was healthier than a wife's constant nagging. This was why you dated someone like Richard Feversham. Because you were assured that he'd never, ever, propose.

  Cat left the ring sitting on the counter. She went into her bedroom. The cold air had evaporated all the scent out of the room. Even the cocoon of blankets, glimmering with rows of silver thread and scraps of designer brocade, looked innocent. Cat sighed. She slid back into the bed and curled up on her side. The foundation of the old house creaked, the frigid air slipping inside, mingling with the dry heat rattling the vents in the ceiling.

  She rolled onto her back, trying to force any thoughts of Richard from her mind. The image of him on one knee, that ring glinting in the overhead lights – she clenched her eyes shut. The memory evaporated and was replaced with Finn, Finn standing in her front yard, staring at her as she smoked on the porch, her desire burning her up from the inside. Cat wiggled down into the blankets on her bed. She ran her hands down the sides of her thighs. Finn. Finn.

  A residue coated all her thoughts. That memory of Richard on one knee.

  Cat's eyes fluttered opened. She sighed. Tilted her head. Something glimmered on one of her pillows, not the one she slept on. A black hair.

  Cat picked it up between her thumb and forefinger and held it up to the light. It must belong to Finn – it was too dark to be her own. Or Richard's.

  Suddenly, she wanted to drive to the studio and work on the tapestry. She carried the hair into her kitchen and placed it in a sandwich bag, then folded the bag over on itself and tucked it in her pocket.

  Cat drove to the studio slowly, uncertain of how to deal with so much ice on the roads. Occasionally she reached down and touched the sandwich bag, wanting to assure herself that it was still there. Fortunately, no one else was out, and when Cat's car hydroplaned at a blinking red stoplight, the wheels shooting her out into the intersection, there were no other cars to hit. The studio was empty too, all the lights turned off, the air as cold inside as it was out. Cat exhaled long white breaths. She switched on the lights, all of them, even the antique string of electric Christmas lights wrapped around the doorframe. She dug a space heater out of the utility room, her fingers already aching from the cold, and set it up next to the loom. She turned it on, watched the coils burn bright red. Then she laid out all of her yarn across one of the drafting tables.

  Cat chose a pale, moon-colored silk yarn first, because that pale grayish-white had begun to creep into the edges of her vision, the cold was so pervasive. She dug through some of Lucy's fiber art supplies until she found a spool of shimmering silver thread, and she twined the two together, trying to approximate the look of ice. She thought she might introduce some green a little later, but the ice, the coldness, would be her base. It took a long time to wind the waft threads back and forth across the loom, because her fingers were stiff from the cold and she had to keep stopping to crouch beside the space heaters to warm them up. It wasn't long before her stomach rumbled and she felt the beginnings of a headache creeping into her temple. She dragged herself away from the loom and called the guy who delivered homemade soup out of the back of an old van. He would be there in an hour – it was a busy, extraordinary day. Winter sunlight in April (no, March), flowers made of ice. She understood.

  Cat worked steadily, losing herself in the rhythm of the loom, no longer a woman but an extension of this ancient machine. She forgot the emptiness in her stomach. She didn't notice when her back began to ache. Everything dropped away.

  Including Richard's proposal.

  When her soup was delivered, she almost didn't hear the door buzzing. She thanked the soup guy and gave him an extra tip because he looked more harried than usual, his hair sticking out from under a knit cap, dark circles under his eyes. She ate standing in front of the loom, staring at the narrow strip of fabric she had just created. The heat of the soup – creamed tomato, flicked with oregano and thyme – went straight into her bloodstream. After she finished, she went back to work. The sun moved higher in the sky, shone through the ice still clinging to the windows. While she worked, Cat thought of nothing. She changed yarn colors by instinct.

  Cat had not worked this hard on anything since she graduated from college. Not for her commissions, those bland corporate-approved tapestries with their subdued blocks of color, and certainly not at the vice stand.

  When she had woven a strip of fabric almost three inches wide, Cat pulled the sandwich bag containing Finn's hair out of her pocket. She picked up the waft yarn – pale, shimmering white cashmere – and, flexing her fingers against the cold, plucked Finn's hair out of the bag and wound it around the yarn. Then she wove it into the tapestry.

  That single action didn't take long, but when she had finished, when Finn's hair was completely incorporated, she went outside for a smoke. As she exhaled, her breath pale and arabesque from the cigarette and the cold, her mind burned with a feverish intensity, as though she had woken from a dream. The world had begun to melt during her time in the studio, even though to Cat, a child of the South, the damp air was still unusually cold. She listened to the drip of ice from the tips of the blossoming trees and watched the embers of her cigarette flare out in the wind. She thought about the evening before, her legs wrapped around Finn's waist in the bedroom. Finn going through her empty refrigerator to find something to feed her, because he thought she might be hungry. Did he even know what that meant? To be hungry? It was impossible. She remembered how her father told her once that his kindness was a program. She hadn't believed it as a child, but she was older now, and she knew how computers worked. He was a computer who acted as if he loved her, and even though she ought to know better, that fact made her heart flutter hopelessly inside her chest.

  She thought about Finn's touch, but she did not allow herself to think about the deviancy of it. Only damaged people slept with androids. People who couldn't stand human touch. Cat wasn't like that.

  So she didn't think about Finn, but she didn't think about the ring sitting on the counter in her kitchen, either.

  Cat finished her cigarette. She worked until the sun set, until the stars came out, and then she went home.

 

Cat didn't hear from Richard for three days. The ring stayed in its place in her kitchen, a black velvet speck against the cream-colored tile.

  Then, one night when Cat came home from work, she found a sleek white box propped up against her front door. It was crowned with an enormous silver bow, Wing On running down the center of the ribbons in black brushstrokes. The Hong Kong department store from downtown. Cat stared at the box, the light from the lamp casting long melancholy shadows. The cold air of the freeze had disappeared completely, and so the night was balmy against the bare skin of Cat's back. She picked up the box and carried it inside. Unwound the silver ribbon. Pulled off the lid.

  It was a dress.

  She peeled aside the sheets of thin, flimsy tissue paper and picked the dress up so it unfolded in front of her, fluttering as it moved. It was made of gray silk, so light against her fingers it felt like gauze, with a narrow belt at the waist and an elaborate, pleated drape across the hips. She laid it across her couch. Her hands shook. It had to be from Richard. No one else would buy her a dress. She pulled out the rest of the tissue paper from the box, looking for a note, but there was nothing but layers and layers of paper. Cat sank down beside the dress, laid out so perfectly against the couch it looked like the woman who had once inhabited it had disappeared, leaving just her clothing behind.

  Cat noticed a tiny triangle of white poking out from the dress's V-neck collar. She tugged at it. The price tag.

  The dress cost two months' worth of her rent.

  "Jesus Christ, Richard," she murmured. Her head spun. She couldn't accept something like this. Not if she turned him down. But she hadn't turned him down. Not yet.

  Cat rubbed the price tag between her thumb and forefinger but she didn't tear it off. Eventually, she tucked it back down in the collar. Then she carried the dress into her bedroom, dug out an empty hanger from her closet, and hung the dress from the knob of her bathroom door, where it rippled like a ghost in the air generated by her ceiling fan.

  When Cat went to the studio the next day Felix was there, throwing clay and listening to loud, clanging music. For a moment she sat staring at the tapestry stretched out, unfinished, on her loom. She found the dark line of Finn's hair. Ran her fingers over it.

  "Wow, Cat, that's really gorgeous."

  Cat jumped and snatched her hand away from the loom. She looked over her shoulder. Felix was leaning against the support column, his hands shoved in his pockets. "Is it a commission?"

  Cat shook her head. She turned back to the loom. "It's a gift." As soon as she spoke she knew it was true, even though the thought had not occurred to her until then. A gift.
For Finn.

  "Seems pretty involved for a gift," said Felix. "Please, in the name of all that's holy, tell me it isn't for the reg."

  Cat smiled. "It isn't for the reg."

  "Thank Christ." Felix walked up beside her, crossed his hands over his chest. His face had a particular expression it adopted whenever he was examining the work of anyone who helped pay rent on the studio – like he didn't want to look at the piece at all, like he was afraid he might have to say something negative and increase the rent shares. He tilted his head to the side.

  "I think you could sell this easily," he said. "You know. If you change your mind."

  Cat nodded but didn't say anything.

  "How is the reg doing?" Felix asked. "Does he know you spend all your time making presents for other people?"

  Cat tugged at the hem of her skirt. She pulled her metal cigarette case out of her pocket but didn't open it yet. "He bought me a dress."

  "OK," said Felix.

  Cat extracted a long, slim cigarette and slipped it into the side of her mouth. She wanted to tell Felix about Richard's proposal but she couldn't bring herself to do it. If she told him, he would tell everyone. Then she would be forced to think about it. She would be forced to come to a decision.

  She didn't want to marry Richard. But the dress almost made her want to say yes. She had fallen into a pattern of normalcy with Richard, one her mother would have approved of. An entrepreneur working twelve-hour days on the promise of the future. A ring. A dress. So it wasn't what Cat wanted for herself – that didn't matter. Because when Cat thought of what she wanted, of the person she wanted, she knew it was impossible, she knew she was acting like a silly, petulant child.