The Mad Scientist's Daughter (3 page)

 

Cat's mother was throwing a Christmas party. She had planned it for weeks, fussing over the lights Dr Novak and Finn installed on the outside of the house, disappearing on day trips into the city and returning with bags of new dishes Cat was not allowed to look at, much less touch. She hung garlands around the banister of the stairs. She coordinated the ornaments on the Christmas tree in the living room with the decorations in the hallway so everything in the house sparkled red, white, and silver, like a frozen candy cane.

  Cat hid from all this madness by sneaking down to the laboratory to watch Finn and her father work. Her daily lessons had been canceled for the time being, as her mother needed to have the spare bedroom set up to receive guests, or possibly to store empty boxes. She wasn't clear, and Cat wasn't sure.

  "You can stay down here," her father said. "But don't get in the way."

  "I'll just sit under the table."

  Her father laughed, and Finn smiled at her. Cat curled up like a snail and peeked at them through the tangled knot of her hair.

  Cat didn't really understand what her father did. He talked about it at dinner sometimes, with her mother, who Cat had come to understand used to do the same sort of thing but didn't anymore, and with Finn, who despite being dead also seemed well versed in the subject. They used unfamiliar words and elaborate abbreviations that weren't listed in Cat's reading tablet. Whenever she asked her father about it, he said, "I work with cybernetics, honey," but Cat didn't know what that meant. Finn's explanation had sounded too much like the dinnertime conversations.

  From her vantage point under the table, Cat could only see their feet moving back and forth, shuffling over the cold gray cement. They spoke softly to each other in comfortable and assured tones, and Cat heard the sound of typing, the occasional whir of a machine. At one point something clattered and then began beeping urgently. When she stuck her head out to investigate, her father shooed her back under the table.

  "Don't make me send you upstairs," he said.

  Cat leaned back against a nest of wires. They felt like hands buoying her up off the chilly floor. It was cold that day, colder than normal.

  Finn rattled off a string of numbers.

  "Interpret," said Cat's father.

  "All systems functioning," said Finn.

  Cat's father shuffled closer to the table under which Cat was hiding. "Very good, very good," he muttered, too softly to be directed at Finn. "Glad to know that's working."

  Under the table, Cat frowned.

  "Daniel! Have you seen Cat?"

  Cat's mother's feet clicked into the laboratory. They stopped directly in front of the table, and then Cat's mother leaned down and held out her hand. "There you are," she said. "We need to go into town."

  "Why?"

  Her mother smiled warmly. "To buy you a dress, sweetheart. For the party."

  "Can I pick it out? Anything I want?" Cat had recently learned that she loved dresses.

  "Within reason. Come on, let's get your coat."

  Cat crawled out from under the table. The lights on the computers on the counter blinked amber and blue. Cat took her mother's hand and waved goodbye to her father and Finn. Then she clomped up the stairs two at a time in her excitement.

  Cat's mother drove into town with the heater turned on high. The air hit Cat straight in the face and dried out her eyes but her mother wouldn't turn it down. Cat breathed against the window, traced her initials in the fog of her breath. She drew a face frowning from the cold. She waited for her mother to chide her for smearing the glass but she never said anything.

  Outside, everything was gray: the sky, the road into the town, the bark on the trees.

  Cat's mother went straight to the children's boutique near the town square, the one across the street from the pie-and-coffee shop and the old post office, the one she always said was too expensive. Multicolored lights blinked in the window, illuminating the mannequins wrapped in taffeta and silk. Cat bounced up and down in her seat. She could hardly believe this bizarre expression of kindness. She wondered briefly if there would be a tradeoff, like in the stories Finn read to her.

  "Yes, I'm sure you're thrilled," her mother said. "Think of it as an early Christmas present."

  "Oh, thank you thank you!" Cat hopped out of the car and ran into the shop. The dresses looked like rows of ice cream.

  "Looking for a party dress?" said the woman behind the counter. Cat's mother sighed and nodded her head, wiping away a few loose strands of hair.

  "Darlin', the whole town's talking about that party."

  "Don't remind me. Cat!" Her mother took hold of Cat's arm, directed her toward the back of the store. "Why don't you look at the ones that are on sale?" she said. "You might find something you like there."

  Cat didn't know what it meant for something to be on sale. She went to the back of the store. "Can it be any color I want?" she asked.

  "Yes." Her mother walked back up to the front counter. "I don't know where she gets it from," she said to the cashier, loudly enough that Cat could hear her. "I could have cared less about dresses at her age."

  Cat looked through the sales rack, rubbing the fabric of each dress between the palms of her hands. She examined the way the dresses looked in the shop's bright overhead lights and considered the placement of lace and bows. Her favorite color now was sea foam green, and because the sales dresses were all out of season, sea foam green was plentiful. But nothing struck her.

  She moved back up to the front of the store and started looking through the stiff Christmas dresses on display there.

  "And I told him, you married a
cyberneticist
. I didn't sign up to plan this kind of thing. Honestly, sometimes I think we just went in the wrong direction. Never thought housewifery would come back in style." Cat's mother sighed and glanced at her watch. "Have you found anything yet, Cat?"

  Cat shook her head and burrowed into the dress rack. Everything smelled of starch and potpourri.

  "Some important people are gonna be there, that's what I heard," said the woman at the counter. "There to see that… project of his." The woman dropped her voice low. "Everything is going all right, I hope? I saw on the news – another attack down in the city. Totally dismantled the thing. Fundies, naturally."

  "Oh, don't even get me started," said Cat's mother. "I've already had to chase off the preacher from that damned Pentecostal church twice this month."

  "Hope the party won't get 'em all riled up again. I heard from Angeline that Daniel's been the focus of a couple of sermons."

  At that moment, Cat found the dress she wanted: dark blue satin, princess cut, with a froth of tulle pushing out the skirt. A pair of tiny white gloves lay draped around the hanger. When she saw that dress, her heart swelled up the way it did when she read Finn's stories, the way it did whenever the flowers in the garden bloomed.

  "It's beautiful," she sighed to herself. And then, louder: "Mommy! I found it! The perfect dress!"

• • • •

The day of the party the air in the house was ionized, as though an electrical storm was brewing over the horizon. Cat put her dress on early and ran up and down the stairs, sliding in her socks across the living room's wooden floors. Her mother was too harried to tell her to stop, and just told her to stay out of the way and out of the kitchen.

  Cat went to find Finn. The laboratory was empty, so she walked up to his room and knocked on the door.

  "Come in," he said, and she did.

  He sat at the desk in front of the tiny octagonal window that looked down over the house's driveway. There was a suit laid out on his bed, a blue tie beside it. Cat picked up the tie and draped it around her neck like a scarf.

  "Are you excited about the party?" Cat asked.

  "It's going to snow." Finn turned around in his chair so that he faced her. Behind him, the computer monitor spun through row after row of plain gray text.

  "I've never seen snow." Cat sat down on his bed and kicked the wooden frame. "Daddy told me it doesn't snow here."

  "I have never seen it either."

  "Really?"

  He shook his head. Then he turned back to the computer. He touched the screen, and the text stopped moving. There was a low, electronic beep.

  Cat frowned, wondered briefly if something was the matter with him, and then went back downstairs.

  As the sun set and the decorations outside twinkled on, and the house began to smell of all the food cooking in the kitchen, Cat's mother scooped her up and carted her into the bathroom, where Cat's wild hair was smoothed out and curled. Her mother wore a long silvery dress and makeup, and she smelled of rich, syrupy perfume.

  "Hold still," she said. "I'll never get these knots out."

  Cat watched in the mirror as this beautiful version of her mother curled Cat's hair into little mahogany-colored ringlets with a curling iron that felt uncomfortably hot next to Cat's scalp. It took a long time. When she had finished, she told Cat to shut her eyes and then she sprayed a great cloud of something that smelled like the inside of the hair salon in town and left a sticky residue on Cat's cheeks. Cat shook her head like a dog. Afterward, her mother took her downstairs, set her down on the couch, and strapped Cat's feet into a pair of synthetic leather Mary Janes.

  "Now," said her mother, "the guests will be arriving soon. I want you to stand in the foyer with Finn and your father and take their coats, all right?" She smiled then, and Cat smiled back. In the light of the Christmas tree and the candles, her mother looked like a movie star. "Show off your pretty new dress."

  The doorbell chimed.

  "Oh shit, they're early. Daniel! Get down here!"

  Cat was ushered into the foyer, where she stood next to Finn, who looked strange in his black suit. The guests trickled in: old men with pretty young wives, old women with old husbands. The pretty young wives were especially inclined to coo over Cat, to twirl her around so the skirt of her dress flared out. The old people just handed her their coats and then turned their attentions to Finn.

  "Remarkable," said one, an old man, his back stooped. "Remarkable. Astonishing."

  Another reached out with a shaking hand and pressed his palm against Finn's cheek. "Look at that skin. Thought they only came in metal."

  Finn just looked at them. Sometimes, when Cat was staggering beneath the weight of too many coats, he excused himself and helped her carry them into the master bedroom, where they threw them in a pile on the bed.

  "This party sucks," said Cat.

  "It's not how I would prefer to spend my time either," said Finn.

  The adults filled up the living room, laughing and drinking from frosted glass tumblers. The scent of all their different perfumes and colognes and powders stirred together in the dry, overheated air made Cat's head hurt. She tried to crawl under the coffee table, but her father caught her and swept her up in his arms. He seemed more cheerful than usual.

  "Almost dinnertime," he said.

  Cat's mother stepped into the living room and clapped her hands together twice. All the heads in the room turned toward her. "If you all want to come into the dining room," she said, her voice trailing off, like she had only planned the first part of what she wanted to say. Cat's father deposited Cat back on her feet and held her hand as they walked to the dining room table, which had been laid out with a red-and-silver tablecloth and pots of fresh poinsettias, in addition to those expensive new dishes her mother had bought in the city. On each of the plates was a square of folded paper with the name of a guest written on it. Cat was positioned between her father and her mother, with Finn on the other side of the table.

  "Why can't I sit next to Finn?" Cat asked, tugging on her father's sleeve.

  "Because we need to give our guests a chance to talk with him."

  "She seems awfully attached," said one of the older ladies. "How intriguing."

  Cat glowered at her. She didn't like all this interest in Finn. She had no idea scientists were so interested in ghosts.

  "Finn tutors her during the day," her father said, sounding faintly embarrassed.

  Dinner was a strange, multicourse affair, with Cat's mother bringing in little pieces of toast covered in shrimp and cream cheese, and then a spinach salad, and then a pair of roasted turkeys. After each course she leaned against the doorway and sighed as everyone else filled up their plates. Cat poked at her food. She noticed how everyone snuck glances at Finn while they ate, as he sat watching, his hands in his lap, his place setting empty.

  "Does it normally join you for dinner?" asked one of the pretty young wives.

  "Finn joins us for all of our meals," Cat's mother answered primly. Cat could feel her looking at Cat's father over the top of Cat's head. She slunk down low in her chair.

  "So tell me about your memory processors," said one of the old men. He was talking to Finn, his fork poised above his plate, leaning a little over the table.

  Finn recited a string of numbers and abbreviations Cat didn't understand.

  "Goddamn." The old man turned to Cat's father. "You responsible for that, Novak?"

  Cat's father glanced down at his lap. "Partially," he said. "Finn's creator had designed some incredibly elaborate personality programs – beautiful work, really – but I did some upgrades when he got here. He wasn't designed to be a laboratory assistant, for example. I hooked him up to the lab systems so he'd have the necessary programming to help me out."

  "And you added a tutoring program, I'd presume?" It was the older woman from before. She smiled indulgently at Cat, who scowled down at her plate.