The Mad Scientist's Daughter (44 page)

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Authors: Cassandra Rose Clarke

BOOK: The Mad Scientist's Daughter
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  Cat stared at the ceiling and reminded herself to breathe. The sun filtered through the leaves of the trees outside the window, and the shadows flashing through the room reminded Cat of static and white noise. She realized she had known what he just told her all along.
  Cat rolled over so that she could kiss Finn, and she kissed him again and again, until it was time for her to go into town to pick Daniel up from school. Even then she didn't want to disentangle her limbs from his. It was painful to stand up alone. She smiled down at Finn and he smiled at her and Cat let herself luxuriate for a few moments in the flickering shadows of the living room before she dragged herself out into the world, an action as harsh on her system as waking up from a dream.
 
Later that evening, Cat cooked a dinner of grilled fish and macaroni salad, and she and Daniel ate it at the dining room table while Finn joined them, his hands folded in his lap, making conversation as they ate. Daniel didn't seem to notice anything different between Cat and Finn: he just ate his food in huge gulping bites before jumping up from the table and announcing that he was going outside to play with his fireflies.
  "Put your dishes in the dishwasher," Cat said automatically.
  "
Mom!
" But Daniel still carted his plate into the kitchen. Cat tilted her head to the side, listening to the clinking of silverware as it was thrown into the dishwasher. The screen door slammed.
  "He's been playing with those fireflies every night since Dad–" Cat stopped. "He made them for him. They're little robots."
  "Yes, I found the schematics in the laboratory."
  "He never made me stuff like that when I was a kid. I'm glad he did it for Daniel." Cat took another bite of her fish, and then set her fork down. She didn't have much of an appetite. Her body was too wound up with love.
  "He would have," said Finn. "Made you toys. He was always drawing up plans. But he got distracted. We were very busy."
  "I know." Cat carried her plate into the kitchen and dropped it in the sink. Finn followed her. Through the window Cat could see the electronic fireflies flashing in the darkness. Every now and then Daniel's laughter trickled inside.
  For a moment Cat allowed herself to be content. Because her son was happy, and Finn was home, and they had all eaten dinner together.
  "I'm going to go outside." She turned away from the window without rinsing off her dish. She opened the door and held it open for Finn, and then she stepped out onto the porch. She could barely make out Daniel's shadow in the yard. The fireflies flitted and bobbed. Cat sat down on the porch steps, and Finn sat beside her. The balmy night air shimmered in the moonlight. Cat lit a cigarette.
  "You shouldn't do that," said Finn.
  Cat laughed, but she didn't put her cigarette out. "I quit when I was pregnant."
  "Yes, I assumed so." He paused, tilted his head as he looked out over the yard. "I hoped so."
  They sat in silence while Daniel chased his firefly bots. There were no real fireflies this time of year.
  "I wanted to thank you," said Finn. "For the tapestry in my room. I presumed that you made it."
  Cat didn't move. She felt his presence beside her. When she finally turned her face to him, he was looking back at her with his silver eyes.
  "You're welcome," she said. "It took me a long time."
  "It's very lovely."
  Cat smiled. Tears formed in the corners of her eyes. She remembered how she wove their hairs into the fibers. She remembered the way her fingers ached after working on it.
  "I wanted to make something for you," she said. She dragged on her cigarette. "It took me so long to finish. You'd already left. I'd already left Richard."
  Finn nodded. Out in the yard, the firefly bots twirled up into a circle.
  "I think that I may not go back to the lunar station," Finn said.
  The cigarette smoke swirled lazily between them, but her blood began racing in and out of her heart. It was too much to hope for. She almost didn't believe he had said it.
  "Are you sure?" She looked over at the silhouette of his face. He nodded.
  "I'd stay here, of course." He turned to her. "Would that be acceptable?"
  "Yes." Cat trembled. The burning ember of her cigarette wobbled in the darkness.
  "Why are you shaking?"
  "Too much nicotine."
  Finn reached over, plucked the cigarette out of her hand, and ground it out against the porch railing.
  "It could be dangerous," he said. "They'll probably challenge my decision. They might find a loophole."
  "We have a lawyer."
  Finn smiled.
  "So you would help me," he said. "If I needed it?"
  "Of course."
  Cat saw the blink of the fireflies in the distance and the movement of Daniel as he trotted through the yard. She placed one hand on Finn's face. Her entire body was fevered: with love, with the possibility for happiness. And in that moment, she thought of her father, lying in a hospital bed, the light white and clean as death.
If anyone could make him come back, it's you.
  A single tear dropped down the side of Cat's face, and she wiped it away just as Daniel called out for her to watch the fireflies dancing in the darkness.
 
A few days later, Cat mailed off a completed tapestry to an energy company in California. It was her third commission since returning to the house in the woods, and she still felt a professional satisfaction in handing the package over to the deliveryman there on her front porch, something she thought she'd lost. As she watched the delivery truck trundle down the driveway, she imagined herself sharing the house with Finn, raising Daniel, earning a living with her artwork. It was a real life. It was
her
life.
  Afterward, she rode her bicycle to the cemetery alone. The air was cool and damp with an imminent rain and there was a silence in the world, the silence that precedes storms. Cat thought she could hear the plants going into hibernation for the winter: the trees scraping off their old leaves, the grasses curling up in the dirt. She propped her bike against the fence and walked over to the plot of land where her parents lay buried.
  It was the first time she had been to the cemetery since the funeral. Loose soil was still piled over her father's grave.
  Cat sat down and tucked her chin onto her knees. She looked at the matching gravestones. She looked at the dates of her parent's deaths and calculated their ages: her mother dead at forty-seven, her father dead at sixty. People lived longer and longer these days. The dates on the gravestones were an anachronism.
  "Finn's going to stay," she said, her voice ringing out over the silent graveyard like a gunshot. "I know! I can hardly believe it myself." She paused. "But you did leave him the money. Surely that had something to do with it."
  But Cat wasn't in the mood to talk to ghosts. She stood up and stretched and walked to the cemetery's edge, where there was just an empty field: no grave markers, just one-foot-tall golden grasses rippling in the breeze. Cat lay down flat on her back and looked up at the gray sky. The ground was hard and cold beneath her. She had always suspected that this part of the cemetery was crowded with unmarked graves, although she could never really say why: it was a feeling she got whenever she cut across the field, that there were people beneath her feet.
  Cat thought about Finn.
  She thought about the picture she had taken of him when she was in high school, the one she found years later in the glass house Richard bought for her. She thought about how she woke up in his bed this morning, right as the sun was sending out rays of pink light between the gray clouds: how his face this morning was the same exact face as the one in the photograph.
  Cat wondered how old she would be when she died. Forty-seven? Sixty? One hundred twenty?
  Finn would never die. He would never leave her as her parents did, but one day, she would leave him.
  She'd not considered it before, mostly because she never thought she could be with Finn.
  But now. Now he had decided not to climb back aboard the cargo shuttle, not to fly through the dark atmosphere to the moon. And Cat imagined herself in fifty years, in a hundred years, an old woman, painful to look at. She imagined the moment when she would die, her soul slipping away like a narrow beam of starlight. And she decided, lying there in the grass, still young, still alive, that she would not allow herself to stay buried in the ground. She would come back as a ghost, a mirage in the shadows of the laboratory. He would sense her, now and then, a shadow of light in a place where he wasn't looking, and believe that one of his circuits had shorted out, that an electron had misfired somewhere, that he was breaking down.
  Or maybe she would live on the old-fashioned way. Maybe Daniel would have a child and that child would have a child and on and on, and every time Finn looked at her progeny, now an enormous sprawling family, the sort that rents hotels for reunions, he would see Cat, mirrored over and over again, in the eyes and mouths and limbs of strangers.
  Cat sat up, suddenly cold from the chill in the air. She looked down at her hands: flesh and blood, still alive. It was pointless to concern herself with unknowable futures. She stood up and dusted the dirt off her dress. The air was heavier. She could smell the rain on the horizon. So she ran back to her bike, blowing a kiss at her parents' graves as she went past, and she flew down the shoulder of the highway toward home.
 
On the morning the shuttle soared back up to the lunar station, carrying crates of freeze-dried food and clean clothing and microchips, Cat woke early. She dressed in the gauzy light, the hardwood floors cold beneath her feet, and then she crept downstairs, ears straining against the thrumming silence of the house, because part of her was afraid he would be gone, that he had changed his mind, that he decided the possibility of repercussion from STL was not worth the trouble.
  Daniel was up already, watching cartoons on the monitor in the living room.
  "Mama?" He squinted his eyes at her, like he didn't recognize her so early in the day.
  She smiled at him and ruffled his hair and kissed his cheek. The cartoons flashed and trilled onscreen. She went into the kitchen and poured a cup of coffee. Her heart pounded but she was trying to pretend that everything was normal, that she trusted Finn not to sneak out in the middle of the night while the rest of the world slept.
  Cat walked onto the porch. Steam curled out of her mug. The air was crisp and clean and smelled of pine and sweetly decaying leaves. She could see her breath. She balanced the coffee on the porch banister and then she lit a cigarette to calm her nerves. The world was utterly still, and she was aware of the movement of the inside of her body: the expansion of her lungs and the fluttery pumps of her heart, pushing blood out into her extremities. Her heart, broken a million times over.
  The screen door slammed. Daniel shot out into the shivering yard. He dropped something in the grass, something sleek and metallic: the mechanical butterfly from her father's lab. He knelt down beside it, leaned over close, and then the butterfly soared into the air. The scales of its wings caught the morning sunlight and glittered.
  The door slammed again, and this time Cat heard heavy footsteps on the wood of the porch. She dropped her cigarette to her side. Finn came and stood beside her.
  "I found that in the laboratory," he said. "It was incomplete. I finished it."
  Cat smiled. "So that's what you were doing down there all this time."
  "Partially."
  Cat shifted her body toward him. He stared out at the yard. There were a million problems with this relationship. Of course Cat knew this. She lay awake at night dreading the call from STL. She considered all the ways she could die before her time.
  But she didn't think about any of these many problems, not in this moment, with the cool autumn air, the pale sunlight gilding the dying grass and the rotting wood of the porch, her son laughing in the yard with a butterfly the size of his torso. Cat put one hand on Finn's arm, promising herself that she would not hurt him again. He turned toward her and smiled.
  Cat stubbed her half-finished cigarette onto the banister and flicked it into the yard. She wound her arm around his.
  And then they stayed like that, Cat and Finn, unmoving, unspeaking, while the world changed around them.
 
 
Acknowledgments
 
   
This book has been a long time coming, its creation spanning three years, two cities, and one small town. Foremost I would like to thank Ross Andrews, for supporting me as I wrote it, revised it, and submitted it — and also for showing me
Bicentennial Man
when I was almost done with the first draft.
  Many others were instrumental in this book's creation as well, and I would like to take the time to thank them individually:
  My parents, for their love and support as I pursued a writing career.
  The book's two beta readers, Amanda Cole and Bobby Mathews, because their comments were instrumental as I prepared to release the book on the world.
  Amanda Rutter, for plucking the book out of Angry Robot's Open Door Months submission pile, and Lee Harris and Marc Gascoigne, for giving me my first book deal.
  My agent, Stacia Decker, whose comments and suggestions for revisions blew my mind and helped elevate the book beyond what I could ever have imagined when I opened that initial Word document in a UT engineering department office four years ago and wrote the first sentence.
 
 
About the Author
 
   
Cassandra Clarke is a speculative fiction writer and occasional teacher living amongst the beige stucco of Houston, Texas. She graduated in 2006 from The University of St Thomas with a bachelor's degree in English, and in 2008 she completed her master's degree in creative writing from the University of Texas at Austin. Both of these degrees have served her surprisingly well.
  During the summer of 2010, she attended the Clarion West Writers Workshop in Seattle, where she enjoyed sixtydegree summer days. Having been born and raised in Texas, this was something of a big deal. She was also a recipient of the 2010 Susan C Petrey Clarion Scholarship Fund.
  Cassandra's debut novel – the YA fantasy
The Assassin's Curse
– has just been published by Strange Chemistry.

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