“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. Finn 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 an extinct species of butterfly, extracting it 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, amber-tinted 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 I 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 six thirty 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 do so only 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 Metamorphoses and the violent versions of the fairy tales she had heretofore experienced only 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. 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.
* * * *
Cat’s mother was throwing a Christmas party. She had planned it for weeks, fussing over the lights Dr. Novak and Finn installed on the outside of the house, disappearing on day trips into the city and returning with bags of new dishes Cat was not allowed to look at, much less touch. She hung garlands around the banister of the stairs. She coordinated the ornaments on the Christmas tree in the living room with the decorations in the hallway so everything in the house sparkled red, white, and silver, like a frozen candy cane.
Cat hid from all this madness by sneaking down to the laboratory to watch Finn and her father
work. Her daily lessons had been canceled for the time being, as her mother needed to have the spare bedroom set up to receive guests, or possibly to store empty boxes. She wasn’t clear, and Cat wasn’t sure. “You can stay down here,” her father said. “But don’t get in the way.”
“I’ll just sit under the table.”
Her father laughed, and Finn smiled at her. Cat curled up like a snail and peeked at them through the tangled knot of her hair.
Cat didn’t really understand what her father did. He talked about it at dinner sometimes, with her mother, who Cat had come to understand used to do the same sort of thing but didn’t anymore, and with Finn, who despite being dead also seemed well versed in the subject. They used unfamiliar words and elaborate abbreviations that weren’t listed in Cat’s reading tablet. Whenever she asked her father about it, he said, “I work with cybernetics, honey,” but Cat didn’t know what that meant. Finn’s explanation had sounded too much like the dinnertime conversations.
From her vantage point under the table, Cat could see only their feet moving back and forth, shuffling over the cold gray cement. They spoke softly to each other in comfortable and assured tones, and Cat heard the sound of typing, the occasional whir of a machine. At one point something clattered and then began beeping urgently. When she stuck her head out to investigate, her father shooed her back under the table.
“Don’t make me send you upstairs,” he said.
Cat leaned back against a nest of wires. They felt like hands buoying her up off the chilly floor. It was cold that day, colder than normal.
Finn rattled off a string of numbers. “Interpret,” said Cat’s father.
“All systems functioning,” said Finn.
Cat’s father shuffled closer to the table under which Cat was hiding. “Very good, very good,” he muttered, too softly to be directed at Finn. “Glad to know that’s working.” Under the table, Cat frowned.
“Daniel! Have you seen Cat?”
Cat’s mother’s feet clicked into the laboratory. They stopped directly in front of the table, and then Cat’s mother leaned down and held out her hand. “There you are,” she said. “We need to go into town.”
“Why?”
Her mother smiled warmly. “To buy you a dress, sweetheart. For the party.”
“Can I pick it out? Anything I want?” Cat had recently learned that she loved dresses.
“Within reason. Come on, let’s get your coat.”
Cat crawled out from under the table. The lights on the computers on the counter blinked amber and blue. Cat took her mother’s hand and waved good-bye to her father and Finn. Then she clomped up the stairs two at a time in her excitement.
Cat’s mother drove into town with the heater turned on high. The air hit Cat straight in the face and dried out her eyes but her mother wouldn’t turn it down. Cat breathed against the window, traced her initials in the fog of her breath. She drew a face frowning from the cold. She waited for her mother to chide her for smearing the glass but she never said anything.
Outside, everything was gray: the sky, the road into the town, the bark on the trees.
Cat’s mother went straight to the children’s boutique near the town square, the one across the street from the pie-and-coffee shop and the old post office, the one she always said was too expensive. Multicolored lights blinked in the window, illuminating the mannequins wrapped in taffeta and silk. Cat bounced up and down in her seat. She could hardly believe this bizarre expression of kindness. She wondered briefly if there would be a trade-off, like in the stories Finn read to her.
“Yes, I’m sure you’re thrilled,” her mother said. “Think of it as an early Christmas present.”
“Oh, thank you, thank you!” Cat hopped out of the car and ran into the shop. The dresses looked like rows of ice cream.
“Looking for a party dress?” said the woman behind the counter. Cat’s mother sighed and nodded her head, wiping away a few loose strands of hair.
“Darlin’, the whole town’s talking about that party.”
“Don’t remind me. Cat!” Her mother took hold of Cat’s arm, directed her toward the back of the store. “Why don’t you look at the ones that are on sale?” she said. “You might find something you like there.”
Cat didn’t know what it meant for something to be on sale. She went to the back of the store. “Can it be any color I want?” she asked.
“Yes.” Her mother walked back up to the front counter. “I don’t know where she gets it from,” she said to the cashier, loudly enough that Cat could hear her. “I could have cared less about dresses at her age.”
Cat looked through the sales rack, rubbing the fabric of each dress between the palms of her hands. She examined the way the dresses looked in the shop’s bright overhead lights and considered the placement of lace and bows. Her favorite color now was seafoam green, and because the sales dresses were all out of season, seafoam green was plentiful. But nothing struck her.
She moved back up to the front of the store and started looking through the stiff Christmas dresses on display there.
“And I told him, you married a cyberneticist. I didn’t sign up to plan this kind of thing. Honestly, sometimes I think we just went in the wrong direction. Never thought housewifery would come back in style.” Cat’s mother sighed and glanced at her watch. “Have you found anything yet, Cat?”
Cat shook her head and burrowed into the dress rack.
Everything smelled of starch and potpourri.
“Some important people are gonna be there, that’s what I heard,” said the woman at the counter. “There to see that . . . project of his.” The woman dropped her voice low. “Everything is going all right, I hope? I saw on the news—another attack down in the city. Totally dismantled the thing. Fundies, naturally.”
“Oh, don’t even get me started,” said Cat’s mother. “I’ve already had to chase off the preacher from that damned Pentecostal church twice this month.”
“Hope the party won’t get ’em all riled up again. I heard from Angeline that Daniel’s been the focus of a couple of sermons.”
At that moment, Cat found the dress she wanted: dark blue satin, princess cut, with a froth of tulle pushing out the skirt. A pair of tiny white gloves lay draped around the hanger. When she saw that dress, her heart swelled up the way it did when she read Finn’s stories, the way it did whenever the flowers in the garden bloomed.
“It’s beautiful,” she sighed to herself. And then, louder: “Mommy! I found it! The perfect dress!”
* * * *
The day of the party the air in the house was ionized, as though an electrical storm was brewing over the horizon. Cat put her dress on early and ran up and down the stairs, sliding in her socks across the living room’s wooden floors. Her mother was too harried to tell her to stop, and just told her to stay out of the way and out of the kitchen. Cat went to find Finn. The laboratory was empty, so she walked up to his room and knocked on the door. “Come in,” he said, and she did.
He sat at the desk in front of the tiny octagonal window that looked down over the house’s driveway. There was a suit laid out on his bed, a blue tie beside it. Cat picked up the tie and draped it around her neck like a scarf.
“Are you excited about the party?” Cat asked.
“It’s going to snow.” Finn turned around in his chair so that he faced her. Behind him, the computer monitor spun through row after row of plain gray text.
“I’ve never seen snow.” Cat sat down on his bed and kicked the wooden frame. “Daddy told me it doesn’t snow here.”
“I have never seen it, either.”
“Really?”
He shook his head. Then he turned back to the computer. He touched the screen, and the text stopped moving. There was a low, electronic beep.
Cat frowned, wondered briefly if something was the matter with him, and then went back downstairs.
As the sun set and the decorations outside twinkled on, and the house began to smell of
all the food cooking in the kitchen, Cat’s mother scooped her up and carted her into the bathroom, where Cat’s wild hair was smoothed out and curled. Her mother wore a long silvery dress and makeup, and she smelled of rich, syrupy perfume.
“Hold still,” she said. “I’ll never get these knots out.”
Cat watched in the mirror as this beautiful version of her mother curled Cat’s hair into little mahogany-colored ringlets with a curling iron that felt uncomfortably hot next to Cat’s scalp. It took a long time. When she had finished, she told Cat to shut her eyes and then she sprayed a great cloud of something that smelled like the inside of the hair salon in town and left a sticky residue on Cat’s cheeks. Cat shook her head like a dog. Afterward, her mother took her downstairs, set her down on the couch, and strapped Cat’s feet into a pair of synthetic leather Mary Janes.
“Now,” said her mother, “the guests will be arriving soon. I want you to stand in the foyer with Finn and your father and take their coats, all right?” She smiled then, and Cat smiled back. In the light of the Christmas tree and the candles, her mother looked like a movie star. “Show off your pretty new dress.”
The doorbell chimed.
“Oh shit, they’re early. Daniel! Get down here!”
Cat was ushered into the foyer, where she stood next to Finn, who looked strange in his black suit. The guests trickled in: old men with pretty young wives, old women with old husbands. The pretty young wives were especially inclined to coo over Cat, to twirl her around so the skirt of her dress flared out. The old people just handed her their coats and then turned their attentions to Finn. “Remarkable,” said one, an old man, his back stooped.
“Remarkable. Astonishing.”
Another reached out with a shaking hand and pressed his palm against Finn’s cheek. “Look at that skin. Thought they only came in metal.”
Finn just looked at them. Sometimes, when Cat was staggering beneath the weight of too many coats, he excused himself and helped her carry them into the master bedroom, where they threw them in a pile on the bed.