The Mad Scientist's Daughter (11 page)

  "Are you going to buy something or not?" she asked.

  "I don't know if I can afford to buy cigarettes right now. Really just came to see you." He grinned.

  "I'm not giving you anything for free." As she spoke, Cat was suddenly overwhelmed by a dizzying rush of sadness. She took a step backward, held out a hand to steady herself. She missed Finn. She missed him with a strength and a ferocity she had not thought possible. Where had that come from? Michael looked too much like him. He looked too much like him even though he didn't act like him at all. And the Martian landing had her thinking about him more. Cat wrapped her arms around her torso. Out on the freeway the cars zoomed by, kicking up a froth of dirty rainwater. Occasionally, someone honked, flashed their headlights. She heard the neon sizzling in the sign overhead.

  "You OK?"

  "Yeah." Cat smiled. Her eyes did not light up. "Just damp."

  "Yeah, I can imagine." Michael ducked back into the darkness of the car and reemerged brandishing a flask. "Gentleman Jack. Drink up."

  Cat took a sip. It scalded the back of her throat. But she did feel a momentary warmth in her core. She handed the flask back to Michael.

  When Cat came home from work later that night, Michael was sitting on the couch in the living room of her shabby apartment, watching videos on her laptop. Lucinda had let him in. Cat stood in the entryway, shaking the water droplets from her hair. He closed the laptop and gazed at her, leaning his head back against the wall. He didn't look like Finn anymore. Cat slipped off her shoes and sat down beside him and immediately he began to kiss her, slowly at first and then more urgently. "Lucinda went to bed," he told her, kissing along her neck. Cat closed her eyes. She had not stopped thinking about Finn all evening: the kiss in her bedroom, the moment right before she accidentally found the switch on the back of his neck. She had thought about that moment so often during the past few years it had dried out. It was stale, like old, odorless potpourri. But she still went back to it, because it was the only one.

  What she wanted, what she really wanted more than anything, was for Finn to kiss her, and not the other way around.

  Michael pushed her down so she was lying on her back. She slipped her hands up inside his sweater. He jumped.

  "Your hands are cold," he whispered. Cat didn't say anything in return.

  Michael kissed her more and more urgently. He peeled off the layers of her clothes. Cat felt a distracting twinge of guilt, as though she were caught in an act of betrayal. Only she was not certain whom she was betraying. If it was Michael, or if it was Finn.

 

After that first out-of-season storm, the usual May heat crept back around the college campus, making the bougainvillea and jasmine that hung off the old, broken-down telephone poles wilt and wither. The college was in a part of the city that hadn't been destroyed during the Disasters, and so it hadn't been reconstructed either, like the neighborhoods Cat had visited as a child.

  The air buzzed, the way it always did in the summer.

  On one especially sunny afternoon Cat decided to ride her bike to the little clapboard snow-cone stand on the corner. It was just hot enough to be a crazy idea, but Cat was in a crazy mood: nostalgic and wild. The sort of mood where you eat snow cones and pretend you're ten years old again.

  As she rode down the sidewalk, the hot wind blustering across her face, she wove around the detritus of the past: the crumbling concrete, the abandoned houses overgrown with wild grass and dandelions. Only half a mile away all the buildings gleamed with reinforced metal and hurricaneproof glass, their sleek lines cutting silver gashes across the canvas of the sky. Only half a mile away the entire world was brand new.

  There was no line at the stand, and after Cat received her snow cone from the automated machine, she wheeled her bike to the little city park across the street. She let her bike drop down in the silky bluegrass, and then she sat on a cement bench overlooking a tangle of wild morning glories wilting in the heat. She nibbled on her snow cone, the condensed milk eating away holes in the sugary, blackberry-flavored ice. It was all turning back into syrup faster than she would have liked. Sweat dripped down the back of her neck.

  As she ate, Cat heard giggling coming from behind a row of hibiscus bushes. A rustling. Then the bushes ripped open in a flurry of leaves and bright pink and orange flowers, and a little girl burst out, her face and hands streaked with mud. The little girl giggled again. She turned back around to face the bushes, which still rustled and shook and vibrated.

  An android stepped out.

  Cat nearly dropped her snow cone on her knees. The android clapped his gleaming metal hands together. He laughed. The newsfeed had been talking about this all year, how androids built from the updated schematics of the old post-Disaster automatons were becoming more affordable, how middle-class families snatched them up as nannies. But Cat had never seen one before today.

  The android looked old-fashioned. He had narrow, lithesome limbs, but he still moved with a strange jerky motion, one Cat noticed in the mass-produced androids she had seen in history videos. When he laughed, though, a light seemed to switch on beneath the thin metal of his face. This made the little girl jump up and down and screech with delight.

  The android was like Finn, and he was not like Finn.

  
Finn
. Cat sighed. She used her spoon to crunch the snow cone's melting ice up with the condensed milk, but when she took a bite she could hardly taste it. She was too distracted by the android and the little girl, wishing she could watch them but not wanting to seem rude. So she listened instead. The android kept laughing. Finn had never laughed that much when she was a child – when she was that little girl's age. Still, she had considered him her best friend.

  There was butterfly flurry of yellow fabric as the little girl blazed past Cat's park bench, the android trundling along behind her. Cat looked up from her snow cone. The android paused, looked at her, and tilted an invisible hat in her direction.

  "Ma'am," he said. His voice had a metallic twang to it, like a steel guitar.

  Cat smiled, lifted up her snow cone cup in response.

  When the android turned away from her to follow after the little girl, Cat saw a string of numbers emblazoned across his back. A manufacturer's label. 7829H-23. The twenty-third android out of a set of a hundred. Or was it a thousand? It was standard, but Cat could never remember the base amount.

  Finn didn't have a manufacturer's label.

  Cat had looked for it once. When she was maybe thirteen, fourteen. She had convinced Finn to go swimming with her in the river, the water cold and green-black-gray and tipped occasionally with white froth from the rocks jutting up out of the bed. Finn had removed his shirt. When he waded out into the water, Cat hung behind, looking at the ridge of his spine. It looked just like her own spine, only paler. No numbers.

  "Finn," Cat had called out. He turned around. Cat put one foot in the water, jumped back at the surprising coldness of it.

  "Yes?"

  "You don't have a number across your back," Cat said. "Like the Disaster automatons."

  Finn blinked at her. For a moment Cat thought a shadow had gone across his face, like a cloud sliding across the sun. But then she decided she had just imagined it.

  "No," he said. "I don't."

  Cat carefully put another foot in the cold water. She inched forward. "I thought most robots had a manufacturer's ID?"

  "I don't have one," Finn answered. "I believe I'm one of a kind."

  Cat closed her eyes and splashed forward in the water, wanting to get all the cold over with. She shrieked as her skin prickled into goosebumps. Finn stood motionless, his own skin still smooth.

  "So you don't know who ma… where you're from?" She was glad he didn't have a manufacturer's ID – she didn't like to think of him as being
made
, even then. Still, sometimes she asked her father for details. He never supplied them.

  "I'm from Kansas." The stock response.

  
I'm from Kansas
. The last words she remembered from that day before the cold shocked her system out of order. Back in a city park in the middle of a very hot afternoon, Cat closed her eyes and thought of all the times she had asked her father about Finn's background.
It's of no concern to little girls
. Or, when her parents had started acting weird about her friendship with Finn, right before they sent her off to that high school in the town:
He was made by a colleague of mine. That's all you need to know.

  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 OK? 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.

 
 

 
 
 

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.