The Mad Scientist's Daughter (2 page)

 

Over the next few weeks, it became apparent that her mother had lost the fight Cat overheard that first night: Finn stayed. In the mornings he came down from the attic bedroom and sat with the family as they ate breakfast, although he ate nothing, only kept his hands folded on top of the table. Cat always watched him with caution, hoping she could find some clue as to his nighttime activities. One morning he returned her gaze with a weird smile, and she yelped and kicked her heels against the legs of the table so the whole thing wobbled.

  "Cat, stop it," said her mother, reading the news on her comm slate.

  Cat paused for a few seconds. Finn had turned away from her.
He knows I know!
she thought, and immediately kicked the table leg again.

  "Caterina Novak! What did I tell you!"

  Cat drank the last of her orange juice and then slid off the chair so that she pooled on the floor underneath the table. She considered the three pairs of feet: her father's, in his wooly slippers, her mother's, bare, with chipped pink polish on the toes, and Finn's, in heavy black boots. She crawled beside her father's chair.

  "I'm going outside," she told him.

  "Oh?" He smiled down at her. "Why don't you take Finn with you? And show him the garden?"

  Cat's heart began to race. She didn't look over at Finn. She willed herself to stay calm.

  "Do I have to?"

  "Don't be rude," her mother said without looking up.

  "I would like to see the garden," said Finn.

  "See?" said Cat's father. "I think that settles it. Show him your citrus tree."

  Cat stood up and so did Finn, pushing his chair back neatly. He smiled at her again. He seemed exceptionally polite for a ghost, although it was possible that was how ghosts tricked their victims. She clomped over to the door and stepped outside. The light was pale and hazy. "It's this way," she said, leading him around the side of the house. She heard his feet rustling the overgrown grass.

  When the garden came into view, small and neat and boxed in by its black fence, Cat broke into a run, stopping only to unlatch the gate. The garden hadn't yet completely unfurled itself, and most of the blossoms were only tiny fists pushing out of their stalks. The climbing roses had been pruned back a few weeks ago; the hyacinth poked unscented out of a stretch of black soil. Cat ran over to her citrus tree and leaned against it, watching as Finn stepped through the gate, and stopped, and looked around the garden as though he'd never been outside.

  "This is remarkable." Finn pointed at the Texas wisteria. "
Wisteria frutescens
. I have never seen it before."

  "It grows all over the place," Cat said. "It grows in the woods."

  Finn turned toward her citrus tree. "
Citrus limo
," he said. "Lemon tree."

  "Yeah, I guess," said Cat. "It's mine." Her citrus tree was the same height as her and covered with flat waxy leaves, although no lemons yet. She had planted it with her mother last year, digging up the soil with a plastic shovel, watering it dutifully during the summer drought.

  "I understand." Finn walked over to the tree and reached up to rub one of the leaves between his thumb and forefinger. He was close enough to Cat that she could see the fibers in the fabric of his T-shirt, thin and faintly worn. It looked like the T-shirts her mother kept folded up in a drawer to wear when she worked in the garden. It didn't look like the T-shirt of a ghost.

  Cat had a sudden idea. "Hey, do you want to see the cemetery?"

  Finn dropped his hand and turned toward her. "The cemetery?" His voice sounded different, higher pitched, like a child's, like a girl's. When he spoke again, it had returned to normal. "I've never seen a cemetery."

  Cat nearly clapped her hands together in her excitement. Her hypothesis was correct. (Her father had taught her about the importance of hypotheses.) Finn had forgotten that he was dead. He had forgotten the place where he was buried. Maybe he wasn't the bad kind of ghost at all, just the lost kind. Cat ran out of the garden, back toward the house. "Come on!" she shouted. Inside, she plopped down on the kitchen's cold tile and put on her shoes. Finn walked in, looked down at her, then back up at her parents, still sitting at the kitchen table.

  "We are going to the cemetery," he said.

  Cat's father took a long drink from his mug of coffee. "Well, that's wonderful," he said. "I knew you two would get along if you had the chance."

  Cat's mother didn't say anything.

  Cat jumped to her feet and went into the living room to grab her sketch pad. Then she ran back outside, letting the screen door slam behind her. Finn followed. She led him down to the woods, still dark and fragrant with the last vestiges of night.

  "You can take the road," said Cat. "It's quicker. But the cars go really fast. Which I guess wouldn't be a problem for you but it would be for me."

  "I prefer the woods."

  They walked along without saying anything. Broken branches and empty pecan shells snapped beneath their feet. At one point Cat glanced up at Finn and the sunlight filtering through the tree leaves had covered him with dark, shadowy spots, like a leopard. He even had a leopard's bright, fluorescent eyes.

  Eventually, the woods opened up into the clearing that housed the cemetery. Cat climbed over the sagging, rusted metal fence. The lemony sunlight made her eyes water. It was the right time of year and the cemetery was covered with a thick blanket of wildflowers: bluebonnets and coreopsis, black-eyed Susan and phlox. She knew most of the names from picking bouquets here with her mother. That year the wildflowers were so numerous Cat could only make out the very tops of the gravestones, most of which didn't even have names on them, only initials and dates from two centuries ago.

  Cat turned around, half-expecting Finn to be disappearing in a cloud of light or steam. But instead he stood at the edge of the cemetery, wildflowers rustling around his ankles.

  "It is… lovely," he said.

  "That's what my mom always says." Cat frowned. This must not be the right cemetery. Finn took a few steps away from the fence, toward the center of the cemetery where the old oak tree twisted up against the cloudless blue sky. Cat trailed behind him. The sun reflected off his dark hair. He stopped, tilted his head toward the swaying, rippling flowers. Cat froze. Maybe he had found his grave.

  But Finn just scooped something up off the ground. He turned toward Cat. He smiled. Cat decided he had a kind smile, even if he was a ghost. She took a few hesitant steps forward, and Finn uncapped his hands. There, bright against his curved palms, was an enormous black and orange butterfly. It fluttered its wings once. Cat leaned in close and saw the tiny fibers on its black antenna.

  "
Danaus plexippus
," said Finn. "Monarch butterfly."

  "No way," said Cat. "My computer told me those were extinct."

  "They were only thought to be extinct," said Finn. "However, with the stabilization of the North American ecosystem, the species has been able to recover." The butterfly folded up its wings and then, as though it had been waiting for a lull in the conversation, shot back up into the indolent air and disappeared into the branches of the oak tree.

  Cat didn't understand. He turned away from her and continued exploring the overgrown paths of the cemetery. Cat decided she was glad he had not disappeared back into the afterlife: any ghost who could revive extinct species of butterfly, extracting them from the blossoms of graveyard flowers, was the sort of ghost it might be handy to have around.

 

The spring turned into summer turned into fall, the heat heavy and dry as kindling. All the plants died. The grass turned brown. The sunlight caramelized. In the afternoons Cat's world – the woods, the yard, the exterior of the house – looked like some ancient, crumbling, ambertinted photograph.

  After the day at the graveyard, Cat adjusted quickly to the presence of Finn, especially when it became apparent that he spent most of his time in the basement laboratory with her father. Being a ghost, he never got angry or condescending with her the way her parents' friends did, and sometimes he even watched cartoons.

  Cat carried on about her business.

  On one of those gilded, sweltering afternoons, Cat's parents called her down to the dining room table. She had been up in her room playing on her computer because in September, in the middle of the day, it was still too hot to go outside.

  Her parents and Finn all sat at the table. Her parents looked more serious than usual. Finn stared straight ahead.

  "We need to talk about your education," her mother said before Cat had even had a chance to climb into the tall wooden chair. Cat frowned. Education?

  "We've put off sending you to school," her father said. "Just figured we'd let you run around the woods, figure things out for yourself." He leaned back in his chair and smiled. "But you're getting to the age where you need something a little more formalized." He glanced over at Finn and nodded. "Your mother and I have decided…"

  Cat's mother clenched her jaw but said nothing.

  "We've decided that Finn should act as your tutor."

  Cat looked from her father to Finn. Finn blinked and then smiled. As much as she liked his smile, she didn't want him to be her tutor. She didn't want to have a tutor at all.

  "Why can't I go to school?" Not that she wanted that, either.

  "The school in town isn't very good," her mother said. "Your father and I were going to teach you ourselves, but now that Finn is here, well…" She rubbed her temple.

  "He'll be able to devote more time to your studies," said Cat's father. "Won't you, Finn?"

  "Yes, Dr Novak."

  "Finn knows a great deal, Cat. He can tell you more about the plants in the woods than me or your mother ever could. He'll be able to teach you arithmetic. You'll like that, won't you?"

  Cat shook her head. She didn't trust numbers. They never stayed still for her. Her mother sighed again. But her father just leaned conspiratorially over the table and said, "Plus, he has a huge store of stories at his disposal."

  Cat pushed forward. "Really?" Neither of her parents was fond of stories.

  Finn nodded. She wondered why he'd been holding back on her. She thought he only knew the Latin names for plants.

  "What kinds of stories? Could you tell me one now?"

  Cat's father laughed and leaned over to her mother. "See? They'll be fine," he said, as though neither Finn nor Cat were in the room.

  And so, just as the heat finally, mercifully broke, Cat's routine changed completely. She had to get out of bed every morning at 6.30 whether she wanted to or not. She could no longer watch cartoons on the viewing screen her parents had installed in her room. And although Finn still let her run more or less wild through the woods, she could only do so during the time allotted – in the mornings – and all of her adventures were accompanied by not only Finn but his incessant lessons. "
Allium stellatum
," he said when she showed him the wild onions she had braided together to make a wreath. "Pink wild onion." He paused. "It once grew wild across the Northern Hemisphere, although various ecological changes in the last two hundred years have caused it to die out completely in the American Midwest and parts of Canada."

  "You're boring," she told him.

  "I'm sorry," he said. "I don't wish to be."

  But Cat only set the wreath of wild onions on her head and ran off to find the secret fairy trails threading through the underbrush of the forest. She hadn't seen a fairy yet, but she still wasn't convinced they weren't real, and she wanted to draw one in her sketch pad.

  In the afternoons, Cat slumped listlessly at a desk in the spare bedroom that had been set up as her classroom. Here Finn taught her the incomprehensible patterns of arithmetic (which she hated), the systemic complexities of the study of science (which she tolerated), and literature (which she adored). He recited to her the
Odyssey
and the
Metamorphosis
and the violent versions of the fairy tales she had heretofore only experienced as sanitized cartoons, and she followed along on her electronic reading tablet, the words lighting up as he spoke them.
Of bodies changed to various forms, I sing
. She'd never encountered any stories as intricate or compelling as the stories he gave her, nor anything that made her sigh when she read it. She liked best the stories about people becoming other things. Stories where women became swans or echoes. In the evenings, when Finn disappeared into the mysterious recesses of the laboratory, Cat went out to the garden or down to the river and wondered what it would be like to be a stream of water, a cypress tree, a star burning a million miles away.

  Occasionally, Finn told her stories that were also true. "I find history fascinating," he said. "Do you?"

  "I guess," she said. History was certainly more interesting than math, but there were no sea monsters or witches in real life, only wars and diseases and ecological disasters, humanity nearly dying off in places with names that sounded made up. Australia. New York, New York. Tajikistan. Paris. Resuscitated by something Finn called ay-eye – computers, he said, built to replace all those lost people. Cat didn't like hearing about it because it made her depressed, because history never had anything to say about the old brick house in the middle of the forest, with a laboratory in its basement and a garden in its backyard.

  But despite the stretches of languid boredom in the afternoons, Cat grew accustomed to her lessons with Finn, to his stories and the sound of his voice, steady and patient as he explained multiplication and division or the taxonomies of the plants growing in the woods. Sometimes she stopped listening and watched him, in the sleepy room where he taught her lessons, the sunlight shining across the left side of his body. He never snapped at her or asked why she didn't understand fractions yet, the way her mother sometimes did. He always answered her questions with long and elaborate explanations that she sometimes didn't understand – but at least he answered them, unlike her father. She wondered if all kids were lucky enough to have their own personal ghost-tutors. She suspected they were not.