The Time Traveler's Wife

by Audrey Niffenegger

  "Mmm," says Helen. "I'd like some of that."

  "Which one?" Ruth asks.

  "The guy on the diving board."

  "Ooh."

  "Look at Ron," says Laura.

  "That's Ron?" Ruth giggles.

  "Wow. Well, I guess anyone would look better without the Metallica T-shirt and the skanky leather vest," Helen says. "Hey, Clare, you're awfully quiet."

  "Um? Yeah, I guess," I say weakly.

  "Look at you," says Helen. "You are, like, cross-eyed with lust. I am ashamed of you. How could you let yourself get into such a state?" She laughs. "Seriously, Clare, why don't you just get it over with?"

  "I can't," I say miserably.

  "Sure you can. Just walk downstairs and yell 'Fuck me!' and about fifty guys would be yelling 'Me! Me!'"

  "You don't understand. I don't want--it's not that--"

  "She wants somebody in particular," Ruth says, without taking her eyes off the pool.

  "Who?" Helen asks.

  I shrug my shoulders.

  "Come on, Clare, spit it out."

  "Leave her alone," Laura says. "If Clare doesn't want to say, she doesn't have to." I am sitting next to Laura, and I lean my head on her shoulder.

  Helen bounces up. "I'll be right back."

  "Where you going?"

  "I brought some champagne and pear juice to make Bellinis, but I left it in the car." She dashes out the door. A tall guy with shoulder-length hair does a backwards somersault off the diving board.

  "Ooh la la," say Ruth and Laura in unison.

  HENRY: A long time has passed, maybe an hour or so. I eat half the potato chips and drink the warm Coke Clare has brought along. I nap a bit. She's gone for so long that I'm starting to consider going for a walk. Also I need to take a leak.

  I hear heels tapping toward me. I look out the window, but it's not Clare, it's this bombshell blond girl in a tight red dress. I blink, and realize that this is Clare's friend Helen Powell. Uh oh.

  She clicks over to my side of the car, leans over and peers at me. I can see right down her dress to Tokyo. I feel slightly woozy,

  "Hi, Clare's boyfriend. I'm Helen."

  "Wrong number, Helen. But pleased to meet you." Her breath is highly alcoholic.

  "Aren't you going to get out of the car and be properly introduced?"

  "Oh, I'm pretty comfortable where I am, thanks."

  "Well, I'll just join you in there, then." She moves uncertainly around the front of the car, opens the door, and plops herself into the driver's seat.

  "I've been wanting to meet you for the longest time," Helen confides.

  "You have? Why?" I desperately wish Clare would come and rescue me, but then that would give the game away, wouldn't it?

  Helen leans toward me and says, sotto voce, "I deduced your existence. My vast powers of observation have led me to the conclusion that whatever remains when you have eliminated the impossible, is the truth, no matter how impossible. Hence," Helen pauses to burp. "How unladylike. Excuse me. Hence, I have concluded that Clare must have a boyfriend, because otherwise, she would not be refusing to fuck all these very nice boys who are very much distressed about it. And here you are. Ta da!"

  I've always liked Helen, and I am sad to have to mislead her. This does explain something she said to me at our wedding, though. I love it when little puzzle pieces drop into place like this.

  "That's very compelling reasoning, Helen, but I'm not Clare's boyfriend."

  "Then why are you sitting in her car?"

  I have a brainstorm. Clare is going to kill me for this. "I'm a friend of Clare's parents. They were worried about her taking the car to a party where there might be alcohol, so they asked me to go along and play chauffeur in case she got too pickled to drive."

  Helen pouts. "That's extremely not necessary. Our little Clare hardly drinks enough to fill a tiny, tiny thimble--"

  "I never said she did. Her parents were just being paranoid."

  High heels click down the sidewalk. This time it is Clare. She freezes when she sees that I have company.

  Helen jumps out of the car and says, "Clare! This naughty man says he is not your boyfriend."

  Clare and I exchange glances. "Well, he's not," says Clare curtly.

  "Oh," says Helen. "Are you leaving?"

  "It's almost midnight. I'm about to turn into a pumpkin." Clare walks around the car and opens her door. "Come on, Henry, let's go." She starts the car and flips on the lights.

  Helen stands stock still in the headlights. Then she walks over to my side of the car. "Not her boyfriend, huh, Henry? You had me going there for a minute, yes you did. Bye bye, Clare." She laughs, and Clare pulls out of the parking space awkwardly and drives away. Ruth lives on Conger. As we turn onto Broadway, I see that all the street lights are off. Broadway is a two-lane highway. It's ruler-straight, but without the streetlights it's like driving into an inkwell.

  "Better turn on your brights, Clare," I say. She reaches forward and turns the headlights off completely.

  "Clare--!"

  "Don't tell me what to do!" I shut up. All I can see are the illuminated numbers of the clock radio. It's 11:36. I hear the air rushing past the car, the engine of the car; I feel the wheels passing over the asphalt, but somehow we seem to be motionless, and the world moves around us at forty-five miles per hour. I close my eyes. It makes no difference. I open them. My heart is pounding.

  Headlights appear in the distance. Clare turns her lights on and we are rushing along again, perfectly aligned between the yellow stripes in the middle of the road and the edge of the highway. It's 11:38.

  Clare is expressionless in the reflected dashboard lights. "Why did you do that?" I ask her, my voice shaking.

  "Why not?" Clare's voice is calm as a summer pond.

  "Because we could have both died in a fiery wreck?"

  Clare slows and turns onto Blue Star Highway. "But that's not what happens" she says. "I grow up and meet you and we get married and here you are."

  "For all you know you crashed the car just then and we both spent a year in traction."

  "But then you would have warned me not to do it," says Clare.

  "I tried, but you yelled at me--"

  "I mean, an older you would have told a younger me not to crash the car."

  "Well, by then it would have already happened."

  We have reached Meagram Lane, and Clare turns onto it. This is the private road that leads to her house. "Pull over, Clare, okay? Please?" Clare drives onto the grass, stops, cuts the engine and the lights. It's completely dark again, and I can hear a million cicadas singing. I reach over and pull Clare close to me, put my arm around her. She is tense and unpliant.

  "Promise me something."

  "What?" Clare asks.

  "Promise you won't do anything like that again. I mean not just with the car, but anything dangerous. Because you don't know. The future is weird, and you can't go around behaving like you're invincible..."

  "But if you've seen me in the future--"

  "Trust me. Just trust me."

  Clare laughs. "Why would I want to do that?"

  "I dunno. Because I love you?"

  Clare turns her head so quickly that she hits me in the jaw,

  "Ouch."

  "Sorry." I can barely see the outline of her profile. "You love me?" she asks.

  "Yes."

  "Right now?"

  "Yes."

  "But you're not my boyfriend."

  Oh. That's what's bugging her. "Well, technically speaking, I'm your husband. Since you haven't actually gotten married yet, I suppose we would have to say that you are my girlfriend."

  Clare puts her hand someplace it probably shouldn't be. "I'd rather be your mistress."

  "You're sixteen, Clare." I gently remove her hand, and stroke her face.

  "That's old enough. Ugh, your hands are all wet." Clare turns on the overhead light and I am startled to see that her face and dress are streaked with blood. I look at my palms
and they are sticky and red. "Henry! What's wrong?"

  "I don't know." I lick my right palm and four deep crescent-shaped cuts appear in a row. I laugh. "It's from my fingernails. When you were driving without the headlights."

  Clare snaps off the overhead light and we are sitting in the dark again. The cicadas sing with all their might. "I didn't mean to scare you."

  "Yeah, you did. But usually I feel safe when you're driving. It's just--"

  "What?"

  "I was in a car accident when I was a kid, and I don't like to ride in cars."

  "Oh--I'm sorry."

  "'S okay. Hey, what time is it?"

  "Oh my God." Clare flips the light on. 12:12. "I'm late. And how can I walk in all bloody like this?" She looks so distraught that I want to laugh.

  "Here." I rub my left palm across her upper lip and under her nose. "You have a nosebleed."

  "Okay." She starts the car, flips on the headlights, and eases back onto the road. "Etta's going to freak when she sees me."

  "Etta? What about your parents?"

  "Mama's probably asleep by now, and it's Daddy's poker night." Clare opens the gate and we pass through.

  "If my kid was out with the car the day after she got her license I would be sitting next to the front door with a stopwatch." Clare stops the car out of sight of the house.

  "Do we have kids?"

  "Sorry, that's classified."

  "I'm gonna apply for that one under the Freedom of Information Act."

  "Be my guest." I kiss her carefully, so as not to disturb the faux nosebleed. "Let me know what you find out." I open the car door. "Good luck with Etta."

  "Good night."

  "Night." I get out and close the door as quietly as possible. The car glides down the drive, around the bend and into the night. I walk after it toward a bed in the Meadow under the stars.

  Sunday, September 27, 1987 (Henry is 32, Clare is 16)

  HENRY: I materialize in the Meadow, about fifteen feet west of the clearing. I feel dreadful, dizzy and nauseated, so I sit for a few minutes to pull myself together. It's chilly and gray, and I am submerged in the tall brown grass, which cuts into my skin. After a while I feel a little better, and it's quiet, so I stand up and walk into the clearing.

  Clare is sitting on the ground, next to the rock, leaning against it. She doesn't say anything, just looks at me with what I can only describe as anger. Uh oh, I think. What have I done? She's in her Grace Kelly phase; she's wearing her blue wool coat and a red skirt. I'm shivering, and I hunt for the clothes box. I find it, and don black jeans, a black sweater, black wool socks, a black overcoat, black boots, and black leather gloves, I look like I'm about to star in a Wim Wenders film. I sit down next to Clare.

  "Hi, Clare. Are you okay?"

  "Hi, Henry. Here." She hands me a Thermos and two sandwiches.

  "Thanks. I feel kind of sick, so I'll wait a little." I set the food on the rock. The Thermos contains coffee; I inhale deeply. Just the smell makes me feel better. "Are you all right?" She's not looking at me. As I scrutinize Clare, I realize that she's been crying.

  "Henry. Would you beat someone up for me?"

  "What?"

  "I want to hurt someone, and I'm not big enough, and I don't know how to fight. Will you do it for me?"

  "Whoa. What are you talking about? Who? Why?"

  Clare stares at her lap. "I don't want to talk about it. Couldn't you just take my word that he totally deserves it?"

  I think I know what's going on; I think I've heard this story before. I sigh, and move closer to Clare, and put my arm around her. She leans her head on my shoulder.

  "This is about some guy you went on a date with, right?"

  "Yeah."

  "And he was a jerk, and now you want me to pulverize him?"

  "Yeah."

  "Clare, lots of guys are jerks. I used to be a jerk--"

  Clare laughs. "I bet you weren't as big of a jerk as Jason Everleigh."

  "He's a football player or something, right?"

  "Yes."

  "Clare, what makes you think I can take on some huge jock half my age? Why were you even going out with someone like that?"

  She shrugs. "At school, everybody's been bugging me 'cause I never date anyone. Ruth and Meg and Nancy--I mean, there are all these rumors going around that I'm a lesbian. Even Mama is asking me why I don't go out with boys. Guys ask me out, and I turn them down. And then Beatrice Dilford, who is a dyke, asked me if I was, and I told her no, and she said that she wasn't surprised, but that's what everybody was saying, so then I thought, well, maybe I'd better go out with a few guys. So the next one who asked was Jason. He's, like, this jock, and he's really good looking, and I knew that if I went out with him everyone would know, and I thought maybe they would shut up."

  "So this was the first time you went out on a date?"

  "Yeah. We went to this Italian restaurant and Laura and Mike were there, and a bunch of people from Theater class, and I offered to go Dutch but he said no, he never did that, and it was okay, I mean, we talked about school and stuff, football. Then we went to see Friday the 13th, Part VII, which was really stupid, in case you were thinking of seeing it,"

  "I've seen it."

  "Oh. Why? It doesn't seem like your kind of thing."

  "Same reason you did; my date wanted to see it."

  "Who was your date?"

  "A woman named Alex."

  "What was she like?"

  "A bank teller with big tits who liked to be spanked." The second this pops out of my mouth I realize that I am talking to Clare the teenager, not Clare my wife, and I mentally smack myself in the head.

  "Spanked?" Clare looks at me, smiling, her eyebrows halfway to her hairline.

  "Never mind. So you went to a movie, and...?"

  "Oh. Well, then he wanted to go to Traver's."

  "What is Traver's?"

  "It's a farm on the north side." Clare's voice drops, I can hardly hear her. "It's where people go to...make out." I don't say anything. "So I told him I was tired, and wanted to go home, and then he got kind of, um, mad." Clare stops talking; for a while we sit, listening to birds, airplanes, wind. Suddenly Clare says, "He was really mad."

  "What happened then?"

  "He wouldn't take me home. I wasn't sure where we were; somewhere out on Route 12, he was just driving around, down little lanes, God, I don't know. He drove down this dirt road, and there was this little cottage. There was a lake nearby, I could hear it. And he had the key to this place."

  I'm getting nervous. Clare never told me any of this; just that she once went on a really horrible date with some guy named Jason, who was a football player. Clare has fallen silent again.

  "Clare. Did he rape you?"

  "No. He said I wasn't...good enough. He said--no, he didn't rape me. He just--hurt me. He made me..." She can't say it. I wait. Clare unbuttons her coat, and removes it. She peels her shirt off, and I see that her back is covered with bruises. They are dark and purple against her white skin. Clare turns and there is a cigarette burn on her right breast, blistered and ugly. I asked her once what that scar was, and she wouldn't say. I am going to kill this guy. I am going to cripple him. Clare sits before me, shoulders back, gooseflesh, waiting. I hand her her shirt, and she puts it on.

  "All right," I tell her quietly. "Where do I find this guy?"

  "I'll drive you," she says.

  Clare picks me up in the Fiat at the end of the driveway, out of sight of the house. She's wearing sunglasses even though it's a dim afternoon, and lipstick, and her hair is coiled at the back of her head. She looks a lot older than sixteen. She looks like she just walked out of Rear Window, though the resemblance would be more perfect if she was blond. We speed through the fall trees, but I don't think either of us notices much color. A tape loop of what happened to Clare in that little cottage has begun to play repeatedly in my head.

  "How big is he?"

  Clare considers. "A couple inches taller than you. A lot hea
vier. Fifty pounds?"

  "Christ."

  "I brought this." Clare digs in her purse and produces a handgun.

  "Clare!"

  "It's Daddy's."

  I think fast. "Clare, that's a bad idea. I mean, I'm mad enough to actually use it, and that would be stupid. Ah, wait." I take it from her, open the chamber, and remove the bullets and put them in her purse. "There. That's better. Brilliant idea, Clare." Clare looks at me, questioning. I stick the gun in my overcoat pocket. "Do you want me to do this anonymously, or do you want him to know it's from you?"

  "I want to be there."

  "Oh."

  She pulls into a private lane and stops. "I want to take him somewhere and I want you to hurt him very badly and I want to watch. I want him scared shitless."

  I sigh. "Clare, I don't usually do this kind of thing. I usually fight in self-defense, for one thing."

  "Please." It comes out of her mouth absolutely flat.

  "Of course." We continue down the drive, and stop in front of a large, new faux Colonial house. There are no cars visible. Van Halen emanates from an open second-floor window. We walk to the front door and I stand to the side while Clare rings the bell. After a moment the music abruptly stops and heavy footsteps clump down stairs. The door opens, and after a pause a deep voice says, "What? You come back for more?" That's all I need to hear. I draw the gun and step to Clare's side. I point it at the guy's chest.

  "Hi, Jason," Clare says. "I thought you might like to come out with us."

  He does the same thing I would do, drops and rolls out of range, but he doesn't do it fast enough. I'm in the door and I take a flying leap onto his chest and knock the wind out of him. I stand up, put my boot on his chest, point the gun at his head. C'est magnifique mais ce n'est pas la guerre. He looks kind of like Tom Cruise, very pretty, all-American. "What position does he play?" I ask Clare.

  "Halfback."

  "Hmm. Never would of guessed. Get up, hands up where I can see them," I tell him cheerfully. He complies, and I walk him out the door. We are all standing in the driveway. I have an idea. I send Clare back into the house for rope; she comes out a few minutes later with scissors and duct tape.

  "Where do you want to do this?"

  "The woods."

  Jason is panting as we march him into the woods. We walk for about five minutes, and then I see a little clearing with a handy young elm at the edge of it. "How about this, Clare?"

  "Yeah."

  I look at her. She is completely impassive, cool as a Raymond Chandler murderess. "Call it, Clare."