The Mad Scientist's Daughter (37 page)

  Time dripped by. Daniel grew into a toddler with huge, serious eyes. He liked to be outside. When Cat worked in the garden he explored the vast planes of their backyard, bringing her gifts of beetles and earthworms. Cat's father made him an army of little robotic toys in the shapes of insects and snakes, and Daniel would chase them through the dried-out grass, their motors grinding and squealing. When he caught one he lay on his back and held it over his head and squinted at it, turning it over in his hands. Cat watched him from the garden gate, one hand on her hip, sweat dripping down her spine. He held a metal centipede as long as his arm. Its little metal legs churned in the air. He flipped it over and let it crawl across his chest and laughed.

  One day during the hot autumn, when Daniel was two years old, someone knocked on the front door. Cat was reading
The Wind in the Willows
aloud to Daniel on the couch. At the sound of the knock his head perked up, and he clambered over her lap and leaned across the couch to get a look at the door.

  "Wait here," Cat told him. She stood up and walked into the foyer. Her heart thumped. They weren't expecting visitors.

  When she opened the door, it was only the man who delivered packages, a slim white box tucked under his arm, nearly hidden by the drape of his sleeve. He scratched at the back of his calf with his foot.

  "Caterina Novak? I have a package for you."

  Cat nodded. She took the package from him and pressed her thumb against his computer tablet. He nodded and thanked her and walked back to the white and blue truck parked in the grass. The front door swung shut. The package was cool and slick against her palm. The return address was that of Richard's lawyers. She closed her eyes, sighed thankfully.

  
The papers
. The final papers, the ones that would make her divorce official. Richard had stalled them for so long after that day he'd come out to the house that Cat had almost forgotten the divorce hadn't yet gone through. Months had gone by since she last thought of Richard in any concrete way, but for the first time in years she felt normal, the way she should feel. She ripped the package open, took out the narrow gray hard drive.

  "Mama?" Daniel leaned over the side of the couch, staring at her with his big dark eyes. She smiled at him. He held out his arms for a hug, and she ran in and swooped him up and held him close to her. She kissed the top of his head.

  "Come on, Daniel. Let's go into the kitchen." She set him on the floor, and he tottered off ahead of her. She pulled out a chair at the breakfast table and sat down and Daniel climbed up beside her, stood in his own chair and watched as she slid the hard drive into the kitchen computer. The papers flashed onscreen.

  It was over. Richard was gone.

  Cat glanced over at Daniel. He was looking at the screen along with her, as if he could read those rows of letters. He looked up at her and smiled, and jumped off the chair.

  Cat scrolled down to the bottom of the document. She pressed her thumb against the screen, and then she went and dug through the junk drawer until she found a writing stylus. She signed the papers for her divorce in the kitchen of her childhood home, her son jumping from tile to tile behind her. The air conditioner rattled the walls of the house. The sun burned up the soil outside.

  It took two seconds for her to sign her name. She thought,
Now I can start over.

 

That night, after Cat had slid the hard drive into a padded envelope and set up the shipping details on the computer, she lifted Daniel onto her shoulders and took him outside. The night air was cooler than she expected – the closest they ever came to a true autumn anymore, a faint chill in the night air like a vein of peppermint in a mug of hot chocolate. Daniel ran into the yard, and she wrapped a shawl around her shoulders and sat on the porch steps.

  "Don't go so close to the woods," Cat said. The moon was out, sliced in half by the shadow of the Earth. Cat pulled out the pack of cigarettes she had slipped into her pocket before coming outside. She didn't smoke as much as she used to, but she still kept a pack tucked away in her vanity drawer, and sometimes, some nights, the back of her jaw would ache and she could taste the tobacco burning her throat. Behind her, the screen door slammed.

  "I thought you gave that nasty habit up."

  Her father stomped across the porch. He lowered himself down on the stairs beside her, carefully laying a canvas bag in the grass at his feet. Cat blew her smoke in the opposite direction.

  "How you feeling?"

  "Great." She squinted at the moon. "I feel great. It's official."

  She dragged on her cigarette. "How are you feeling?" She looked over at him. He was frowning, his brow furrowed, his eyes sad. Looking at her looking at the moon.

  "I feel fine, as I always do."

  "What? I worry about you." She pointed at him with her cigarette. "What's in the bag?"

  "Oh, some more toys for Daniel. Here." He handed the bag to Cat. She set it in her lap. Daniel was still prowling in the shadows, ignoring them. In the moonlight his hair looked dark as ink. Cat reached into the bag and pulled out another robotic creature. This one was smaller than the others, the size of her palm, and made of tarnished metal. It was as smooth as a stone.

  "It's a rock." She leaned back so she could see the contents of the bag in the porch light. "It's a bag of rocks."

  "It's not a rock." Her father laughed. "These are my best ones yet. Let me show you." He took the thing-that-was-nota-rock out of her hand and pressed down on it; immediately, the metal split open to reveal a faint luminescent glow. The robot whirred and lifted up off the palm of his hand and then zipped into the night, heading toward Daniel.

  "Holy shit," said Cat.

  Her father grinned. "I programmed them to recognize Daniel's DNA code. They'll stay close to him."

  The little ball of pale light buzzed up close to Daniel's head. He jumped. Peered at it suspiciously. It darted away from him, then hovered in the air centimeters above him. He jumped up and caught it. The light slipped between his fingers.

  "It's pretty cool, right?" Cat called out. Daniel nodded and walked toward them, his hand still cupped around the robot. He came to the edge of the yard and unfolded his fingers. His face was illuminated. The light caught the sheen of his eyes, and for a moment they almost seemed silver. Cat's heart clenched. It was the last thing she ever expected to see: eyes flashing silver.

  She pulled out another cigarette.

  "Here, buddy," said her father, setting the bag on the grass. He took the robot out of Daniel's hand and showed him how to activate and deactivate it. The robot buzzed into the air. Together they reached into the bag and activated the other robots, one at a time, while Cat smoked and leaned against the porch and tried not to cry.

  Cat lived in a world in which it was no longer necessary to believe in magic, but as she watched her son lighting up one robot firefly after another, his dark hair falling across his eyes, his skin pearly in the moonlight, she wondered.

 

Cat took Daniel into town to register him for the Montessori day school that had opened on the Farm-to-Market road, next to the art galleries. She had considered keeping him to teach herself but decided it would be best for him if he met other children, even if they were the offspring of the teenagers she had known in high school. Her father refused to offer his opinion on the matter.

  "I raised one of you already," he said.

  The day school was in an old farmhouse, surrounded by square herb and vegetable gardens, the pecan trees strung with twinkling homemade wind chimes. Daniel clutched Cat's hand as they walked up the stone pathway, his fist wrapped around her two middle fingers. He looked around the garden with alarm. This was why she had decided to enroll him in school, because he was nearly five and the wider world seemed to terrify him. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders – he was so small, a normal size for his age but so small in relation to Cat and all the people she had known in her life that it seemed Daniel's bones were hollow, like a bird's – and guided him up the porch steps, through the heavy wooden door, into the school's dim, cool corridor. Ms Alvarez, the principal, stuck her head out of one the rooms. She was young and pretty and wore her hair pulled back in a sleek black ponytail. She smiled at Daniel before she smiled at Cat. "We're so glad you could come down today."

  "Daniel," said Cat. He burrowed in her hip. "Daniel, this is Ms Alvarez." She smiled at the principal apologetically. She could feel Daniel's breath through her skirt.

  Ms Alvarez smiled and shook her head. She crouched down so she was at Daniel's level. "I see you have a dinosaur on your shirt."

  Daniel peeked at her with one dark eye.

  "Do you like dinosaurs?"

  
He loves them,
Cat wanted to say, but she kept quiet. Daniel pulled away from her, just slightly. He nodded. He looked so solemn, so impassive.
Just like–

  "Would you like to see some dinosaurs?"

  There were a few seconds of heavy silence. Then Daniel said, "They're extinct."

  Ms Alvarez laughed. "Of course they are! But I have a few holo-models you can play with."

  Daniel nodded, and Ms Alvarez led him across the hallway into a classroom. Cat trailed behind. She had never been that comfortable around children. Daniel was different, but he was her son.

  Ms Alvarez switched on the lights. The classroom was full of color and smelled of plastic and disinfectant. Cat had never stood in a kindergarten classroom before. Or an elementary school room. It was like standing inside a kaleidoscope.

  The principal led Daniel past the cluster of computers to the holographic station tucked discretely in the corner. It looked like a black glass cube. She tapped one of the station's sides, entered in a pass code, scrolled through a menu. Daniel followed the movements of her hands, and Cat felt a surge of love. It happened now and then, when she watched Daniel without his knowing. He needed a haircut – she was bad about keeping track of those.

  A trio of apatosauruses appeared on the top of the holographic station, along with a strange, tropical-looking tree. Daniel gasped, turned and looked at Cat, his smile huge and bright. It was a much better holographic station than the one they had at home. One of the apatosauruses bit at the top of the tree, and tiny green leaves flaked into the air and disappeared.

  Ms Alvarez left Daniel to play with the holo-models. Her demeanor had changed. She was more professional now, more serious. She led Cat out into the hallway.

  "He seems very smart," she said. "Very precocious."

  "He's shy. He's not… he's not used to people."

  Ms Alvarez smiled reassuringly. "That's not as uncommon as you think."

  Cat wiped her hands across her skirt. Her palms were sweating. She was not used to being a mother in public.

  Ms Alvarez glanced back into the room, and Cat did the same. Daniel had brought a T-rex into the scene, and the apatosauruses swung their tails in defense.

  "I think he'll do well here," Ms Alvarez said. "I can show the two of you around, if you'd like."

  Cat nodded. "C'mon, Daniel," she said. Daniel looked up at her, frowning. For a moment she was afraid he would start wailing and thrashing on the floor and Ms Alvarez wouldn't let him into the school, but then he stood up and trotted over to her. Cat pulled him up close to her knees, wound her fingers through his hair.

  Ms Alvarez smiled warmly. "It can be scary sending your child off to school for the first time."

  Cat laughed. She found this oddly reassuring. "I never went to school. Not at his age."

  "Homeschooled?"

  "Basically." She hesitated. "I had a tutor, but… I pretty much just ran wild in the woods."

  Ms Alvarez smiled as she led them out into the hallway plastered with student paintings. "You think that method did well by you?"

  "It did, actually. Got to figure things out for myself." The end of the hallway was flooded with sunlight. Light refracted off the tiles. "I want something similar for Daniel."

  Ms Alvarez nodded. "Well, I think our school will be an excellent choice. You've seen the gardens. Would you like to see the media lab?"

  Cat nodded. She held on tight to Daniel's hand as they moved through the sunny hallway, Ms Alvarez chatting casually about the Montessori method, about a child's instinctual drive to learn. Cat was mesmerized by the school. She imagined Daniel rushing through the hallway with a backpack bouncing on his shoulders. She imagined him prowling in the garden. Eating lunch at the little round tables in the cafeteria. Making friends. Growing up.

  Cat bent down, scooped Daniel up in her arms, and kissed him once on the forehead, because she was so swollen with love.

 

Cat asked Daniel what he thought of the school as they drove home.

  "I liked the dinosaurs."

  Cat laughed.

  She pulled into the driveway and parked behind her father's car. Daniel climbed out of the backseat and ran to the porch and pulled himself up on the swing, the way he always did when they came home. Cat wedged herself behind the screened-in door. Swiped her key in the lock.

  When she pushed her way into the foyer she knew immediately that something was wrong. She recognized the vibrating silence of the house from those months after her mother died.

  "Daddy," she said.

  "Mama, what's wrong?" Daniel pulled on her hand, and she glanced down at his solemn dark eyes. He looked up at her inquiringly. She swooped him to her chest and held him close and then she rushed to one of the intercom panels. Held the button down and called for her father. Nothing. She slid Daniel to the floor.