The Time Traveler's Wife

by Audrey Niffenegger

  I'm thrashing in grass, it's cold, wind rushes over me, I'm naked and cold in darkness, there's snow on the ground, I am on my knees in the snow, blood drips onto the snow and I reach out--

  "My god, he's bleeding--"

  "How the hell did that happen?"

  "Shit, he's ripped off all the electrodes, help me get him back on the bed--"

  I open my eyes. Kendrick and Dr. Larson are crouched over me. Dr. Larson looks upset and worried, but Kendrick has a jubilant smile on his face.

  "Did you get it?" I ask, and he replies, "It was perfect." I say, "Great," and then I pass out.

  TWO

  Sunday, October 12, 1997 (Henry is 34, Clare is 26)

  HENRY: I wake up and smell iron and it's blood. Blood is everywhere and Clare is curled up in the middle of it like a kitten.

  I shake her and she says, "No."

  "ComeonClarewakeupyou'rebleeding."

  "I was dreaming..."

  "Clare, please..."

  She sits up. Her hands, her face, her hair are drenched in blood. Clare holds out her hand and on it reclines a tiny monster. She says, simply, "He died," and bursts into tears. We sit together on the edge of the blood-soaked bed, holding each other, and crying.

  Monday, February 16, 1998 (Clare is 26, Henry is 34)

  CLARE: Henry and I are just about to go out. It's a snowy afternoon, and I'm pulling on my boots when the phone rings. Henry walks down the hall and into the living room to answer it. I hear him say, "Hello?" and then "Really?" and then "Well, hot damn!" Then he says, "Wait, let me get some paper--" and there's a long silence, punctuated once in a while with "Wait, explain that" and I take off my boots and my coat and pad into the living room in my socks. Henry is sitting on the couch with the phone cradled in his lap like a pet, furiously taking notes, I sit down next to him and he grins at me. I look at the pad; the top of the page starts off: 4 genes: per4, timeless1, Clock, new gene=timetraveler?? Chrom=17 x 2, 4, 25, 200+ repeats TAG, sex linked? no, +too many dopamine recpts, what proteins???...and I realize: Kendrick has done it! He's figured it out! I can't believe it. He's done it. Now what?

  Henry puts down the phone, turns to me. He looks as stunned as I feel.

  "What happens next?" I ask him.

  "He's going to clone the genes and put them into mice."

  "What?"

  "He's going to make timetraveling mice. Then he's going to cure them."

  We both start to laugh at the same time, and then we are dancing, flinging each other around the room, laughing and dancing until we fall back onto the couch, panting. I look over at Henry, and I wonder that on a cellular level he is so different, so other, when he's just a man in a white button-down shirt and a pea jacket whose hand feels like skin and bone in mine, a man who smiles just like a human. I always knew he was different, what does it matter? a few letters of code? but somehow it must matter, and somehow we must change it, and somewhere on the other side of the city Dr. Kendrick is sitting in his office figuring out how to make mice that defy the rules of time. I laugh, but it's life and death, and I stop laughing and put my hand over my mouth.

  INTERMEZZO

  Wednesday, August 12, 1998 (Clare is 27)

  CLARE: Mama is asleep, finally. She sleeps in her own bed, in her own room; she has escaped from the hospital, at last, only to find her room, her refuge, transformed into a hospital room. But now she is past knowing. All night she talked, wept, laughed, yelled, called out "Philip!" and "Mama!" and "No, no, no..." All night the cicadas and the tree frogs of my childhood pulsed their electric curtain of sound and the night light made her skin look like beeswax, her bone hands flailing in supplication, clutching at the glass of water I held to her crusted lips. Now it is dawn. Mama's window looks out over the east. I sit in the white chair, by the window, facing the bed, but not looking, not looking at Mama so effaced in her big bed, not looking at the pill bottles and the spoons and the glasses and the IV pole with the bag hanging obese with fluid and the blinking red LED display and the bed pan and the little kidney-shaped receptacle for vomit and the box of latex gloves and the trash can with the BIOHAZARD warning label full of bloody syringes. I am looking out the window, toward the east. A few birds are singing. I can hear the doves that live in the wisteria waking up. The world is gray. Slowly color leaks into it, not rosy-fingered but like a slowly spreading stain of blood orange, one moment lingering at the horizon and then flooding the garden and then golden light, and then a blue sky, and then all the colors vibrant in their assigned places, the trumpet vines, the roses, the white salvia, the marigolds, all shimmering in the new morning dew like glass. The silver birches at the edges of the woods dangle like white strings suspended from the sky. A crow flies across the grass. Its shadow flies under it, and meets it as it lands under the window and caws, once. Light finds the window, and creates my hands, my body heavy in Mama's white chair. The sun is up.

  I close my eyes. The air conditioner purrs. I'm cold, and I get up and walk to the other window, and turn it off. Now the room is silent. I walk to the bed. Mama is still. The laborious breathing that has haunted my dreams has stopped. Her mouth is open slightly and her eyebrows are raised as though in surprise, although her eyes are closed; she could be singing. I kneel by the bed, I pull back the covers and lay my ear against her heart. Her skin is warm. Nothing. No heart beats, no blood moves, no breath inflates the sails of her lungs. Silence.

  I gather up her reeking, wasted body into my arms, and she is perfect, she is my own perfect beautiful Mama again, for just a moment, even as her bones jut against my breasts and her head lolls, even as her cancer-laden belly mimics fecundity she rises up in memory shining, laughing, released: free.

  Footsteps in the hall. The door opens and Etta's voice.

  "Clare? Oh--!"

  I lower Mama back to the pillows, smooth her nightgown, her hair.

  "She's gone."

  Saturday, September 12, 1998 (Henry is 35, Clare is 27)

  HENRY: Lucille was the one who loved the garden. When we came to visit, Clare would walk through the front door of the Meadowlark House and straight out the back door to find Lucille, who was almost always in the garden, rain or shine. When she was well we would find her kneeling in the beds, weeding or moving plants or feeding the roses. When she was ill Etta and Philip would bring her downstairs wrapped in quilts and seat her in her wicker chair, sometimes by the fountain, sometimes under the pear tree where she could see Peter working, digging and pruning and grafting. When Lucille was well she would regale us with the doings of the garden: the red-headed finches who had finally discovered the new feeder, the dahlias that had done better than expected over by the sundial, the new rose that turned out to be a horrible shade of lavender but was so vigorous that she was loathe to get rid of it. One summer Lucille and Alicia conducted an experiment: Alicia spent several hours each day practicing the cello in the garden, to see if the plants would respond to the music. Lucille swore that her tomatoes had never been so plentiful, and she showed us a zucchini that was the size of my thigh. So the experiment was deemed a success, but was never repeated because it was the last summer Lucille was well enough to garden.

  Lucille waxed and waned with the seasons, like a plant. In the summer, when we all showed up, Lucille would rally and the house rang with the happy shouts and pounding of Mark and Sharon's children, who tumbled like puppies in the fountain and cavorted sticky and ebullient on the lawn. Lucille was often grimy but always elegant. She would rise to greet us, her white and copper hair in a thick coil with fat strands straggling into her face, white kidskin gardening gloves and Smith & Hawken tools thrown down as she received our hugs. Lucille and I always kissed very formally, on both cheeks, as though we were very old French countesses who hadn't seen each other in a while. She was never less than kind to me, although she could devastate her daughter with a glance. I miss her. Clare...well, 'miss' is inadequate. Clare is bereft. Clare walks into rooms and forgets why she is there. Clare sits staring at a boo
k without turning a page for an hour. But she doesn't cry. Clare smiles if I make a joke. Clare eats what I put in front of her. If I try to make love to her Clare will try to go along with it...and soon I leave her alone, afraid of the docile, tearless face that seems to be miles away. I miss Lucille, but it is Clare I am bereft of, Clare who has gone away and left me with this stranger who only looks like Clare.

  Wednesday, November 26, 1998 (Clare is 27, Henry is 35)

  CLARE: Mama's room is white and bare. All the medical paraphernalia is gone. The bed is stripped down to the mattress, which is stained and ugly in the clean room. I'm standing in front of Mama's desk. It's a heavy white Formica desk, modern and strange in an otherwise feminine and delicate room full of antique French furniture. Mama's desk stands in a little bay, windows embrace it, morning light washes across its empty surface. The desk is locked. I have spent an hour looking for the key, with no luck. I lean my elbows on the back of Mama's swivel chair, and stare at the desk. Finally, I go downstairs. The living room and dining room are empty. I hear laughter in the kitchen, so I push the door open. Henry and Nell are huddled over a cluster of bowls and a pastry cloth and a rolling pin.

  "Easy, boy, easy! You gonna toughen 'em up, you go at 'em like that. You need a light touch, Henry, or they gonna have a texture like bubble gum."

  "Sorry sorry sorry. I will be light, just don't whack me like that. Hey, Clare." Henry turns around smiling and I see that he is covered with flour.

  "What are you making?"

  "Croissants. I have sworn to master the art of folding pastry dough or perish in the attempt."

  "Rest in peace, son," says Nell, grinning.

  "What's up?" Henry asks as Nell efficiently rolls out a ball of dough and folds it and cuts it and wraps it in waxed paper.

  "I need to borrow Henry for a couple of minutes, Nell." Nell nods and points her rolling pin at Henry. "Come back in fifteen minutes and we'll start the marinade."

  "Yes'm."

  Henry follows me upstairs. We stand in front of Mama's desk.

  "I want to open it and I can't find the keys."

  "Ah." He darts a look at me, so quick I can't read it. "Well, that's easy." Henry leaves the room and is back in minutes. He sits on the floor in front of Mama's desk, straightening out two large paper clips. He starts with the bottom left drawer, carefully probing and turning one paper clip, and then sticks the other one in after it. "Voila" he says, pulling on the drawer. It's bursting with paper. Henry opens the other four drawers without any fuss. Soon they are all gaping, their contents exposed: notebooks, loose-leaf papers, gardening catalogs, seed packets, pens and short pencils, a checkbook, a Hershey's candy bar, a tape measure, and a number of other small items that now seem forlorn and shy in the daylight. Henry hasn't touched anything in the drawers. He looks at me; I glance at the door almost involuntarily and Henry takes the hint. I turn to Mama's desk.

  The papers are in no order at all. I sit on the floor and pile the contents of a drawer in front of me. Everything with her handwriting on it I smooth and pile on my left. Some of it is lists, and notes to herself: Do not ask P about S. Or: Remind Etta dinner B's Friday. There are pages and pages of doodles, spirals and squiggles, black circles, marks like the feet of birds. Some of these have a sentence or a phrase embedded in them. To part her hair with a knife. And: couldn't couldn't do it. And: If I am quiet it will pass me by. Some sheets are poems so heavily marked and crossed out that very little remains, like fragments of Sappho: Like old meat, relaxed and tender

  no air XXXXXXX she said yes

  she said XXXXXXXXXXXXXX

  Or:

  his hand XXXXXXXXXXXXXX

  XXXXX to possess,

  XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

  in extreme XXXXXXXXXX

  Some poems have been typed:

  At the moment

  all hope is weak

  and small.

  Music and beauty

  are salt in my sadness;

  a white void rips through my ice.

  Who could have said

  that the angel of sex

  was so sad?

  or known desire

  would melt this vast

  winter night into

  a flood of darkness.

  1/23/79

  The spring garden:

  a ship of summer

  swimming through

  my winter vision.

  4/6/79

  1979 was the year Mama lost the baby and tried to kill herself. My stomach aches and my eyes blur. I know now how it was with her then. I take all of those papers and put them aside without reading any more. In another drawer I find more recent poems. And then I find a poem addressed to me: The Garden Under Snow

  for clare

  now the garden is under snow

  a blank page our footprints write on

  clare who was never mine

  but always belonged to herself

  Sleeping Beauty

  a crystalline blanket

  she waits

  this is her spring

  this is her sleeping/awakening

  she is waiting

  everything is waiting

  for a kiss

  the improbable shapes of tubers roots

  I never thought

  my baby

  her almost face

  a garden, waiting

  HENRY: It's almost dinner time and I'm in Nell's way, so when she says, "Shouldn't you go see what your woman is up to?" it seems like a good idea to go and find out.

  Clare is sitting on the floor in front of her mother's desk surrounded by white and yellow papers. The desk lamp throws a pool of light around her, but her face is in shadow; her hair a flaming copper aura. She looks up at me, holds out a piece of paper, and says, "Look, Henry, she wrote me a poem." As I sit beside Clare and read the poem I forgive Lucille, a little, for her colossal selfishness and her monstrous dying, and I look up at Clare. "It's beautiful," I say, and she nods, satisfied, for a moment, that her mother really did love her. I think about my mother singing lieder after lunch on a summer afternoon, smiling at our reflection in a shop window, twirling in a blue dress across the floor of her dressing room. She loved me. I never questioned her love. Lucille was changeable as wind. The poem Clare holds is evidence, immutable, undeniable, a snapshot of an emotion. I look around at the pools of paper on the floor and I am relieved that something in this mess has risen to the surface to be Clare's lifeboat.

  "She wrote me a poem," Clare says, again, in wonder. Tears are streaking down her cheeks. I put my arms around her, and she's back, my wife, Clare, safe and sound, on the shore at last after the shipwreck, weeping like a little girl whose mother is waving to her from the deck of the foundering boat.

  NEW YEAR'S EVE, ONE

  Friday, December 31, 1999, 11:55 p.m. (Henry is 36, Clare is 28)

  HENRY: Clare and I are standing on a rooftop in Wicker Park with a multitude of other hardy souls, awaiting the turn of the so-called millennium. It's a clear night, and not that cold; I can see my breath, and my ears and nose are a bit numb. Clare is all muffled up in her big black scarf and her face is startlingly white in the moon/street light. The rooftop belongs to a couple of Clare's artist friends. Gomez and Charisse are nearby, slow-dancing in parkas and mittens to music only they can hear. Everyone around us is drunkenly bantering about the canned goods they have stockpiled, the heroic measures they have taken to protect their computers from meltdown. I smile to myself, knowing that all this millennial nonsense will be completely forgotten by the time the Christmas trees are picked up off the curbs by Streets and San.

  We are waiting for the fireworks to begin. Clare and I lean against the waist-high false front of the building and survey the City of Chicago. We are facing east, looking toward Lake Michigan. "Hello, everybody" Clare says, waving her mitten at the lake, at South Haven, Michigan. "It's funny," she says to me. "It's already the new year there. I'm sure they're all in bed."

  We are six stories up,
and I am surprised by how much I can see from here. Our house, in Lincoln Square, is somewhere to the north and west of here; our neighborhood is quiet and dark. Downtown, to the southeast, is sparkling. Some of the huge buildings are decorated for Christmas, sporting green and red lights in their windows. The Sears and The Hancock stare at each other like giant robots over the heads of lesser skyscrapers. I can almost see the building I lived in when I met Clare, on North Dearborn, but it's obscured by the taller, uglier building they put up a few years ago next to it. Chicago has so much excellent architecture that they feel obliged to tear some of it down now and then and erect terrible buildings just to help us all appreciate the good stuff. There isn't much traffic; everyone wants to be somewhere at midnight, not on the road. I can hear bursts of firecrackers here and there, punctuated occasionally with gunfire from the morons who seem to forget that guns do more than make loud noises. Clare says, "I'm freezing" and looks at her watch. "Two more minutes." Bursts of celebration around the neighborhood indicate that some people's watches are fast.

  I think about Chicago in the next century. More people, many more. Ridiculous traffic, but fewer potholes. There will be a hideous building that looks like an exploding Coke can in Grant Park; the West Side will slowly rise out of poverty and the South Side will continue to decay. They will finally tear down Wrigley Field and build an ugly megastadium, but for now it stands blazing with light in the Northeast.

  Gomez begins the countdown: "Ten, nine, eight..." and we all take it up: "seven, six, five, four, THREE! TWO! ONE! Happy New Year!" Champagne corks pop, fireworks ignite and streak across the sky, and Clare and I dive into each other's arms. Time stands still, and I hope for better things to come.

  THREE