The Mad Scientist's Daughter (29 page)

  Cat wove until she came to the end of the warp thread, then rested the shuttle on the loom frame and stretched her aching fingers. Dusty sunlight spilled through the window. Only a few more rows and it would be done. Of course, it was a gift for someone currently residing on the moon, and a gift that cannot be given remains incomplete.

  Cat ran her fingers over the completed portion of the tapestry, smoothing the soft downy fibers, and stood up. No sense in adding new yarn to the shuttle, since she didn't want to add those last few rows today. Cat walked to the window and pressed her face against the warm glass. The woods looked far away. She dropped her hand to her belly, something she did frequently, without thinking.

  The first few weeks back in the house, when her face was still swollen and painful to the touch, she had thrown up constantly. Her father made her take the test. It came out positive. She did not remind herself that it was Richard's baby.

  The doctor had told her she was nearly two months along.

  Cat turned from the window and went downstairs. The house was filled with sunlight. She walked through the kitchen and into the yard, buzzing with cicadas and the scent of pine trees. She pulled the package of peppermint sticks out of her dress pocket and slipped one into the corner of her mouth. For a long time she stood leaning against the banister, sweetness coating her tongue, wishing she could have a cigarette.

  "Cat?"

  Cat turned around. She pulled the peppermint stick from her mouth and dropped it to her side. Her father stood in the doorway, propping the screen door open with one hand, his body thin and bony. The sunlight illuminated the lines in his face.

  "What's up?"

  "I heard you clomping through the kitchen. Thought I'd come out and check on you, see how you're doing." He squinted at her. "You doing OK?"

  "I'm doing fine."

  He looked at her like he didn't believe her. He had good reason.

  "Well, in that case..." Her father eased himself out onto the porch, letting the screen door slam behind him. "Would you mind going into town for me?" He thumped the walls of the house. "Got a lot of work to do, you know, and I'm craving some of Maybelle's key lime pie."

  Maybelle. Cat shuddered at the name. Maybelle owned the little pie shop in town. Her father adored Maybelle's pies – and they were delicious-enough pies, certainly – but every time Cat went into Maybelle's the air crackled with all the unspoken town rumors and gossip about her, about her return home, her divorce from Richard.

  "Sure, I can go into town."

  "You want to take my car?" her father asked. But Cat shook her head. She was already walking toward the shed to pull out her mother's old bicycle. She'd had her own car towed back to the glass house a few days after she came home, afraid of being beholden to Richard. He had called her when it arrived, leaving sorrowful messages on her comm slate. He'd left hundreds of messages during those first few weeks, most of them mournful and incoherent. Eventually he disconnected the comm account, and Cat started a new one, under her name, using money she borrowed from her father. Now she rode her bicycle into town on days when it was not too hot. She liked the feeling of wind pushing her hair back from her face.

  Cat coasted down the hill leading into town, resting one hand on the handlebars of her bike, leaning back a little in the seat. The doctor had told her it was important that she exercise and stay active. A thin sheen of sweat had already formed on her skin, not so much from the air's heat but from the sun beaming down on her as she rode along the asphalt. She felt that usual prickle of electricity, the insistence in the back of her mind that everyone was talking about her.
The mad scientist's daughter
, they were saying, in their lazy honey-drawl voices.
The mad scientist's daughter, back from the dead.

 

At Maybelle's pie shop, Cat sat at the two-person booth by the swinging kitchen doors, waiting for the gray-haired waitress to box up her key lime pie. Maybelle had installed a sleek, modern monitor in the wall above the cash register. It looked out of place in the run-down pie shop. They kept it tuned to one of the twenty-four-hour streaming news sites, and as Cat watched a pair of pundits argue about robot rights, she absentmindedly rubbed her bare ring finger. The blinding engagement ring and the wedding band were both gone, shipped to Richard in a plain manila envelope, with no return address, no letter inside. That was the day Cat contacted the lawyer about her divorce.

  The waitress emerged out of the kitchen, a pie box dangling from one hand, wisps of hair falling out of her updo. She tossed the box aside and glanced up at the monitor. There was a new law pending, one that would grant autonomy to any machine that attained a certain level of sentience. There had been a great deal of support for it; everyone was sure it would pass. Miguel had invited her to an ADL party celebrating its introduction, but Cat had declined.

  Richard's AI houses were not covered under the new law, of course – no doubt Noratech had already bought him out. That particular idea of his must be worth billions. Cat didn't care. But she did wonder about Finn.

  "Things sure do change fast," said the waitress, her eyes on the monitor as she slid the pie expertly into the box. She looked at Cat. "Can't believe it'd ever come to this, you know? They're talking about granting 'em full rights! As people."

  "I know." Cat studied the etches in the tabletop, declarations of teenage love and teenage existence that were already wearing away. When she looked back up, the waitress was watching her.

  "You're the Novak girl, ain't ya?"

  "Yeah."

  The waitress nodded. She folded the box flap on the pie, slipped the box into a bag. Cat stood up and pulled out her bank card.

  "Whatever happened to that robot your daddy had? The one he used to call his assistant?"

  "He's gone."

  The waitress ran her card. The monitor played footage of a sad little protest staged by a fundamentalist organization. Hand-painted signs marched through a gray drizzle. If the law passed, Finn would no longer be the property of anyone. Not her father. Not STL. But she knew he wouldn't come home either way.

  "Still think it's a slippery slope." The waitress handed the pie across the counter. Cat knew better than to respond. She went outside, slung the bag over the handlebars of her bike, and rode back to the house.

 

The next day, Cat slept late, waking up after lunch. She went downstairs and chatted with her father about his work. He asked her if the baby had kicked yet, but she shook her head, still waiting to feel that ripple inside herself. She drank a glass of orange juice. Her father told her the weather had cooled off a little and so she wandered out to the garden. She didn't feel like going up to the loom. Let the tapestry stay incomplete for just a bit longer.

  The black paint had chipped off the garden gate, and the metal had rusted. Cat tugged hard on the gate's handle to force it open. A breeze trickled in from the north and changed the scent of the air, blowing over the pine trees in the woods rather than the Farm-to-Market road. Her citrus tree towered over her despite the garden's neglect. Its branches stretched against the cloudless blue sky.

  
Maybe it's a daughter
, Cat thought.

  Where did that come from? She stopped, wrapped her arms around her chest. Goosebumps prickled up along her calves. She should have grabbed one of her sweaters before coming outside – did she even pack any sweaters? Already, she'd brought down the boxes of clothes she wore in high school, plus some boxes of her mother's clothes, because half the things she'd brought from the glass house – stiff pencil skirts and gauzy blouses and satiny, stylish dresses – had proven to be useless. She didn't have any need for pencil skirts out here. There was no one to see her wearing them.

  
A little girl with dark hair and dark eyes who could tell stories from memory.

  Cat went back inside, leaving the garden gate hanging open. She dug a faded black sweater out of the hall closet. She hadn't been out to her mother's grave since coming home. But right now she needed to pretend she had a mother.

  She rode her bike down the old dirt road, the wind whipping up her hair behind her. She never liked seeing the cemetery in the fall, when it was covered in stalks of yellow grass rather than spring's effulgence of wildflowers and grasshoppers. Golden dust billowed up on the wind. Cat wheeled the bike off the road and leaned it against the twisting oak tree. She shoved her hands in her pockets to warm them and walked to her mother's headstone.

  "Hi, Mom," she said.

  She sat down cross-legged in the dirt. Her hair blew into her eyes, her mouth. She didn't push it away.

  "I'm pregnant."

  Cat knew she was alone in the graveyard. She didn't imagine her mother as a ghost curling around the stalks of grass, watching and listening. But it still felt like a confession. It was easy to confess things to the crackling golden countryside.

  "I'm pregnant," she said. "It's Richard's baby." Cat covered her face with her hands. Autumn crept around her, a chill dusting across the hairs on her arms. "I wish it wasn't. When I first found out, I almost didn't keep it. Because I couldn't stand the thought of a little Richard growing inside of me." She cocked her head to the side. "I'm still not used to the idea. Of having a kid. I don't feel pregnant, you know? But just now, I was in the garden – not much of a garden now, Daddy's been terrible about keeping it up – anyway, I was in the garden, and I started thinking… What would it be like, you know? To have a little kid." She looked up at the sky and watched a wisp of white cloud move over the pale imprint of the moon. Just a sliver right now. "To have a little… me."

  Cat leaned back in the grass. She'd never understood until now why she chose to flush down the toilet, one by one, the pills that would have cast out the baby. When she first found out she was pregnant, when she first came home from the doctor, she thought she should take the pills. But she couldn't. She didn't want to punish the cluster of cells growing inside her for her mistakes and Richard's violence.

  "Richard couldn't make me normal," Cat said to the gravestone. "And really, Finn was a better choice. I mean it." She stood up and dusted the soil off the backs of her legs. "But he's gone now too. Everyone's gone." She sighed. "I hate coming here out of season. I should have brought flowers."

  Still, Cat wandered the perimeter of the cemetery the way she did in the spring. She collected strands of grass and wheat and curls of Spanish moss. An autumn bouquet. A bouquet of falling-apart things. But lovely still.

  When Cat finally rode her bike back to the house, the sun had sunk below the tree line, turning the sky orange. She cut across the yard and looked up at the moon, the way she always did when she came outside in the evenings. In a few days she wouldn't be able to see it at all. She hated those times.

  When she came inside, her father was at the kitchen table eating a bowl of watery soup, broth dribbling off the side of the spoon. He glanced up. "Everything OK?"

  "Why wouldn't it be?"

  He shrugged and turned back to his soup. Cat slid into the chair across from him. The kitchen lights were sallow and thin against the encroaching darkness.

  "You seem…" He paused. "Distant." He looked at her with clear eyes. "I wanted to make sure you haven't had any… problems. You know, with the…" His voice trailed off.

  "The baby's fine, Daddy."

  He smiled, dropped his spoon back into his bowl. Cat looked out the window at the backyard, the ground littered with dead leaves.

  "I wish Finn were here," she said.

  Silence. Cat looked over at her father. He wouldn't meet her eyes but she thought he looked sad. Thinking of Finn made her inexplicably tired, as though her body couldn't withstand the memory of him.

  "He made his decision," her father said. "It's just you and me."

  
Just you and me
, thought Cat.
No, it's me. It's just me.

  But aloud, she said, "I know."

 

The next day, Cat decided she would finish the tapestry.

  She woke up late, after sleeping dreamlessly for nearly twelve hours. The sun flooded the room, and she stretched out beneath her thin, cool bed sheet, feeling her blood pumping out to her extremities. Her fingers tingled. The tapestry was a gift for Finn. In the golden sunlight of her bedroom she allowed herself to believe that, if she finished it, Finn would come back.

  For an hour, she wove the spindle through the warp threads and combed the wafting threads down with her fingers, over and over again, the movement as rhythmic as a heartbeat. Then she came to the end. Cat stopped and wondered if the image of the tapestry in her head would match the thing she'd created.

  She went downstairs and dug a pair of scissors out of the junk drawer in the kitchen. But then she stopped, standing in front of the sink, scissors dangling from the crook of her finger. She never liked cutting warp threads alone. Usually Felix watched her, urging her on, telling her it was OK. But Felix wasn't here.

  She knocked on the door of her father's laboratory.

  "Come in!"

  Cat pushed on the door with her shoulder so the weight of her body swung it open. Her father stood in front of a computer monitor, his fingers moving shakily across the console. He looked up at her expectantly.

  "Hi, Daddy." Cat slipped into the lab. She knew the place had been updated many times over, but it still seemed the exact same as when she was a little girl, all blinking lights and electronic humming. The only difference now was the lack of Finn.

  "What's up?"

  "I need you to do me a favor." Cat looked down at the cement floor. "It's silly, but… it's important, too. If you don't mind."