The Mad Scientist's Daughter (5 page)

  "Is there anything you want to look at, Kitty-Cat?" her father asked as they walked out onto the noisy, sunny street. "Just tell us if you see a store you want to go into."

  Cat didn't see anything that interested her at all until they went down a cool, shady side street. She spotted an enormous fiberglass statue of a Tyrannosaurus rex guarding the door to a shop with the words
Five and Dime
painted across the window. Then, below that:
Pre-Disaster Collectables!

  "Can we go in there?"

  "It's just a bunch of old crap," said her mother.

  "Pretty much the only thing the Disasters didn't destroy," said her father. "People's crap."

  The door chimed when Cat walked in. The air was cool and slightly stale and smelled of cardboard and old fabric. It was an antique store, Cat realized, but not the sort that opened up along the main street in her hometown and only sold musty, ugly old furniture. Here there were swaths of homemade lace and piles of rotting quilts, little glass salt-and-pepper shakers in the shapes of animals, an entire shelf of honest-to-God books with yellowed crumbling pages, piles of tarnished old-fashioned silverware, rusted street signs dotted with starry holes. Then Cat found the looms.

  The looms were lined up in a row on a rickety foldout table, three or four small ones, with strips of striped fabric rippling over the table's edge, blowing back and forth in the breeze from the air conditioner. Cat followed the fabric to the center of the loom, where it split out into several rows of yarn.

  "What'd you find here?" Her father walked up to her, crossed his arms in front of his chest. "Ah, looms. One of humanity's first complex machines, did you know that?"

  Cat twisted around to look at him. "How do they work?"

  He shrugged. The shop girl walked up to them, her hands tucked away in the pockets of her skirt. "I can show you." Her hair was the color of maraschino cherries and curled around her shoulders. Her eyes were lined in black kohl. Cat wondered if she would look like that, when she was older. She hoped so.

  "That'd be great." Cat's father squeezed Cat's shoulder. "She's our little artist."

  The shop girl smiled. "I'm an artist, too," she said. "This is my day job." She dragged one of the looms around in front of her and sat down in a metal chair next to the table. She picked up a spool of yarn and threaded it through the yarn already pulled taut on the loom, then lifted up the wooden middle section and pushed it down to the place where the fabric began.

  "It's easy," the shop girl said. "Here, you try."

  And Cat did, weaving the yarn through carefully, then combing it down.

  "There, leave it hanging," said the shop girl. "Now thread it back the other way. Good."

  As Cat worked, all her agitation from the day, all her residual boredom from the computer repair shop and the department store, melted away. She watched the fabric appear, a blur of green and white like river water. She got lost in the rhythm of lifting and combing.

  "She's a natural," said the shop girl. She leaned in close to Cat and smiled brightly. "You'll be showing down in the Stella in no time."

  Cat turned to her father and made her eyes big and shining. "Can we buy one?"

 

The first thing Cat made on her loom was a scarf for Finn. She set the loom up on the coffee table in the living room and ran upstairs to ask him which colors of yarn he wanted her to use.

  "I don't need a scarf," he said. "It would be unnecessary."

  "Aw, come on!" Cat was used to this sort of thing by now. "Just tell me what colors you want."

  Finn looked at the basket of yarn scraps Cat had convinced her parents to buy, along with the loom and a yellowing book of instructions, from the antique store.

  "What colors do you like?" he asked.

  Cat rolled her eyes. "How about brown and blue? It's more manly."

  "That would be acceptable."

  So Cat wove a brown-and-blue woolen scarf, working on it that evening after dinner while Finn was in the laboratory with her father and her mother watched old movies in the living room. She felt her mother staring at her.

  "What are you making?" she asked.

  "A scarf for Finn."

  There was a long and uncomfortable pause. Then her mother said, "I don't think he needs a scarf, sweetie."

  "I don't care. It's a present."

  Her mother sighed and turned up the volume on the speakers.

  Cat finished the scarf the next evening. She stretched it out along the couch. It was a little wobbly at the end, where she had first started, but for the most part the stitches were neat and even, and the sides didn't waver back and forth. Cat folded the scarf into a neat pile and walked down to the laboratory, taking the stairs two at a time. The door was shut. She knocked. No one answered. She knocked again, and then she tried the doorknob, and the door clicked open. She peeked her head in. Nothing but rows of blinking lights.

  "Finn? Daddy?"

  "Cat!" Her father's voice boomed out from somewhere in the back. "Stay where you are."

  Cat froze, clutching the scarf to her chest. Her father came out through one of the dark doors at the back of the room. Even after the door had clicked shut, he kept his back pressed against it for a second longer before walking toward Cat.

  "Where's Finn?"

  "He's busy right now. Why don't you run back upstairs and watch a movie?"

  "I wanted to give him this." She thrust out the scarf. The weight of it made her palms sweat.

  Her father stared at the scarf with a strange, indiscernible expression. "Oh, Cat," he said slowly.

  Cat pulled the scarf back up to her chest and frowned.

  Her father rubbed his forehead. "Finn is kind to you, isn't he?"

  "He's my friend."

  Her father frowned. He glanced over his shoulder at the dark door. Cat had never seen the room beyond that door – it was part of the lab where she wasn't allowed. Her father turned back to her. "Cat, Finn's kindness, his, ah,
friendship
– it's a program. Like the games on your computer." He wiped his forehead. "He was programmed to respond to certain actions and requests in a certain way. He was programmed to be polite. He doesn't… He doesn't form attachments the way you or I do."

  Cat stared at her father. "I know," she said. "He told me."

  "Did he?"

  Cat shrugged. Finn had never said anything of the sort to her, but she knew her father was lying about Finn's inability to form attachments. She could tell by the way her father didn't meet her eyes as he spoke. He always did that when he didn't want to tell her the real reason she couldn't do something.

  "Tell him to come find me when he's done."

  Her father's shoulders sagged.

  "Promise!"

  "I promise."

  Cat stayed up late that night, reading under the covers. She kept the scarf on her bedside table. She listened for the sound of someone – of Finn – knocking on her door, but it never came, and eventually Cat crawled out of bed and picked up the scarf and slipped out into the dark hallway. She could hear her father snoring in his bedroom. She padded down the hallway and up the narrow attic stairs, keeping one hand pressed against the dusty wall to steady herself. A light burned in Finn's room. She rapped lightly against the door, pressing her ear to the wood.

  "Finn," she said. "It's me."

  "Come in."

  Cat pushed the door open. Finn looked up from his computer.

  "What are you doing?" she asked.

  "Running diagnostics."

  "I finished your scarf."

  "Oh?" Finn folded down the computer and stood up.

  "Did Daddy tell you? I went down to the lab but he said you were busy."

  "Dr Novak told me nothing," he said. "May I see it?"

  Cat frowned. She held out the scarf, and Finn picked it up and let it drop to the floor. It was almost as tall as he was. He examined a section of it, running his fingers over the yarn. "Fascinating." He looked up at her. "I looked at the history of weaving when you told me you planned to weave me a scarf. Would you like to hear it?"

  "Not really." Cat sat down on his bed. "Do you like it? The scarf?"

  Finn looked down at the scarf and then back up at Cat. "Yes," he said. "Thank you." He wrapped it around his neck and smiled at her. Cat laughed. It looked silly on him.

  "It's very late," he said. "You should be asleep."

  "I know." Cat sighed and stood up. She wanted to hug Finn the way she did when she was a little kid. But out of nowhere, she was overwhelmed by a wave of shyness, and she hung back toward the door, her heart hammering.

  "I'll see you in the morning," she said, and crept back down to her bedroom.

 

It was a few months after Cat's thirteenth birthday. She had spent the morning down at the river painting dragonflies with the watercolor set she had saved for and purchased from the tiny art co-op on the outskirts of town. She wasted a lot of time down by the river these days, in her plastic sandals and yellow two-piece bathing suit, painting and drawing and daydreaming. She was interested in light at the moment: light and the way it refracted off the surface of the water, how it glared against the bone-white stones along the shore. When it grew too hot to stay outside any longer, Cat trotted back to the house to drink a glass of limeade in the air-conditioned kitchen.

  "Algebra!" Cat's mother exclaimed just as Cat walked through the door. "She barely knows algebra! What good is a programmable tutor if he can't even teach her
algebra
?"

  Cat's father didn't say anything, only looked at Cat standing in the doorway. Her mother glanced over at her. "I knew algebra when I was ten years old," she said.

  Cat bit on her lower lip to keep from talking back. She carried her still-damp paintings into the living room. Her mother's voice drifted out of the kitchen: "Put on some real clothes before you go up for your lessons!"

  Cat rolled her eyes but didn't respond. She lay her paintings across the coffee table to dry. She kicked off her shoes and collapsed across the couch and tried to ignore the fervent hum of her mother's voice, rising and falling like a radio. She had no intention of changing out of her bathing suit. The weather was too hot, and she liked wearing it. Cat stood up and stretched, felt each notch of her spine snap into place. Then she trotted up the stairs to the spare bedroom. To learn math. Algebra. She even hated the sound of the word.

  Cat sat down at the table set up in the center of the room. Finn looked up from his laptop and smiled at her. "Would you like to change out of your bathing suit?" he asked. Cat shook her head no, drawing her bare stomach tight against her spine.

  The algebra lesson that day was like all the math lessons that had preceded it. Finn presented Cat with a simple equation, an unnatural mixture of letters and numbers. Cat stared at it. She tapped her fingernails, currently covered in peeling green polish, against the table. Her head seemed full of cotton candy. Finn waited for her to respond: he didn't cajole or plead or mock, but sat silently beside her, his hands folded in his lap. The air conditioner kicked on. Eventually Cat began to write out her calculations, her simple, neat rows of arithmetic, but then the equation started to shift and muddle, and the letters transposed themselves over the numbers and vice versa – the 5s became Ss, the Ss became 5s. Cat threw her digital pen across the room and slouched in her seat.

  "I can't do it," she said. "I'm too stupid."

  "You're not stupid."

  "Mom thinks I am."

  "You are not stupid."

  Cat pushed her hair, damp and sticky with river water, away from her face and looked at Finn. He pulled out a spare pen and leaned over her writing tablet. He was close to her. Cat felt light-headed, and she knew it had nothing to with her inability to understand math. She was on the precipice of something. It coiled inside her like a snake and made her fidgety and distracted, especially around Finn and his constant stream of algebraic equations. But the algebraic equations were not the problem.

  Finn wiped away all of her work on the learning tablet. "Watch," he said. Then he wrote out the solution to the equation, slowly and neatly, stopping after each line to look over at her. Her cheeks warmed. She tried to memorize the way the solution looked when it was correct. She tried to forget all her frantic scribbling in the margins. She tried to ignore the distraction of his closeness to her.

  Finn wiped the learning tablet clean again. "Now you try."

  Cat took the pen from him and worked through the equation, glancing over at him occasionally for assurance. When she had finished, he said, in his even way, "That's correct. Very good." He smiled. "You're not stupid."

  "Thanks." Cat meant it. She knew that he never said anything ironically.

  And so it went for the rest of the afternoon, working through one equation after another, Cat struggling to find the common concepts between each individual problem. But they were all fragments of glass, glued back together to make a vase that had shattered a long time ago.

  It was difficult for her to concentrate on algebra for more than an hour. Eventually, she only noticed Finn's fingers, tapering down into points. Or his hair, which tended to fall into his eyes. She made note of the mechanical way he moved. The shape of his spine, his shoulders, his waist. He wasn't an adult, not really, so it was OK for her to see all these things.

  Some nights Cat drew pictures of him under the covers of her bed. She used to use the electronic drawing tablet her father gave her for her birthday, but recently she had switched over to paper from the art co-op, expensive and rough against her skin, her fingers smudging the charcoal as she worked. Her bed sheets were coated in a fine layer of black dust. She sprayed the drawings with hairspray and kept them in a folder in the back of her closet, away from the paintings of flowers and dragonflies she knew to be more innocuous, even though she could not quite give a reason as to why – she suspected it was related to the panicked feeling bubbling up inside her, the appearance of feathery golden hairs along the incline of her thighs, the reason her mother hated her yellow swimsuit.