The Time Traveler's Wife

by Audrey Niffenegger

  I drag my eyes back to her. "Was I? I didn't want to be."

  Ingrid shakes her head. "You didn't care if I lived or died."

  Oh, Ingrid. "I do care. I don't want you to die."

  "You didn't care. You left me, and you never came to the hospital." Ingrid speaks as though the words choke her.

  "Your family didn't want me to come. Your mom told me to stay away."

  "You should have come."

  I sigh. "Ingrid, your doctor told me I couldn't visit you."

  "I asked and they said you never called."

  "I called. I was told you didn't want to talk to me, and not to call anymore." The painkiller is kicking in. The prickling pain in my legs dulls. I slide my hands under the afghan and place my palms against the skin of my left stump, and then my right.

  "I almost died and you never spoke to me again."

  "I thought you didn't want to talk to me. How was I supposed to know?"

  "You got married and you never called me and you invited Celia to the wedding to spite me."

  I laugh, I can't help it. "Ingrid, Clare invited Celia. They're friends; I've never figured out why. Opposites attract, I guess. But anyway, it had nothing to do with you."

  Ingrid says nothing. She's pale under her makeup. She digs in her coat pocket and brings out a pack of English Ovals and a lighter.

  "Since when do you smoke?" I ask her. Ingrid hated smoking. Ingrid liked coke and crystal meth and drinks with poetic names. She extracts a cigarette from the pack between two long nails, and lights it. Her hands are shaking. She drags on the cigarette and smoke curls from her lips.

  "So how's life without feet?" Ingrid asks me. "How'd that happen, anyway?"

  "Frostbite. I passed out in Grant Park in January."

  "So how do you get around?"

  "Wheelchair, mostly."

  "Oh. That sucks."

  "Yeah," I say. "It does." We sit in silence for a moment.

  Ingrid asks, "Are you still married?"

  "Yeah."

  "Kids?"

  "One. A girl."

  "Oh." Ingrid leans back, drags on her cigarette, blows a thin stream of smoke from her nostrils. "I wish I had kids."

  "You never wanted kids, Ing."

  She looks at me, but I can't read the look. "I always wanted kids. I didn't think you wanted kids, so I never said anything."

  "You could still have kids."

  Ingrid laughs. "Could I? Do I have kids, Henry? In 2006 do I have a husband and a house in Winnetka and 2.5 kids?"

  "Not exactly." I shift my position on the couch. The pain has receded but what's left is the shell of the pain, an empty space where there should be pain but instead there is the expectation of pain.

  "'Not exactly'," Ingrid mimics. "How not exactly? Like, as in, 'Not exactly, Ingrid, really you're a bag lady?'"

  "You're not a bag lady."

  "So I'm not a bag lady. Okay, great." Ingrid stubs out her cigarette and crosses her legs. I always loved Ingrid's legs. She's wearing boots with high heels. She and Celia must have been to a party. Ingrid says, "We've eliminated the extremes: I'm not a suburban matron and I'm not homeless. Come on, Henry, give me some more hints."

  I am silent. I don't want to play this game.

  "Okay, let's make it multiple choice. Let's see... A) I'm a stripper in a real sleazy club on Rush Street. Um, B) I'm in prison for ax-murdering Celia and feeding her to Malcolm. Heh. Yeah, ah, C) I'm living on the Rio del Sol with an investment banker. How 'bout it Henry? Do any of those sound good to you?"

  "Who's Malcolm?"

  "Celia's Doberman."

  "Figures."

  Ingrid plays with her lighter, flicking it on and off. "How about D) I'm dead?" I flinch. "Does that appeal to you at all?"

  "No. It doesn't."

  "Really? I like that one best." Ingrid smiles. It's not a pretty smile. It's more like a grimace. "I like that one so much that it's given me an idea." She gets up and strides across the room and down the hall. I can hear her opening and shutting a drawer. When she reappears she has one hand behind her back. Ingrid stands in front of me, and says, "Surprise!" and she's pointing a gun at me.

  It's not a very big gun. It's slim and black and shiny. Ingrid holds it close to her waist, casually, as though she's at a cocktail party. I stare at the gun. Ingrid says, "I could shoot you."

  "Yes. You could," I say.

  "Then I could shoot myself," she says.

  "That could also happen."

  "But does it?"

  "I don't know, Ingrid. You get to decide."

  "Bullshit, Henry. Tell me," Ingrid commands.

  "All right. No. It doesn't happen that way." I try to sound confident.

  Ingrid smirks. "But what if I want it to happen that way?"

  "Ingrid, give me the gun."

  "Come over here and get it."

  "Are you going to shoot me?" Ingrid shakes her head, smiling. I climb off the couch, onto the floor, crawl toward Ingrid, trailing the afghan, slowed by the painkiller. She backs away, holding the gun trained on me. I stop.

  "Come on, Henry. Nice doggie. Trusting doggie." Ingrid flicks off the safety catch and takes two steps toward me. I tense. She is aiming point blank at my head. But then Ingrid laughs, and places the muzzle of the gun against her temple. "How about this, Henry? Does it happen like this?"

  "No." No!

  She frowns. "Are you sure, Henry?" Ingrid moves the gun to her chest. "Is this better? Head or heart, Henry?" Ingrid steps forward. I could touch her. I could grab her--Ingrid kicks me in the chest and I fall backward, I am sprawled on the floor looking up at her and Ingrid leans over and spits in my face.

  "Did you love me?" Ingrid asks, looking down at me.

  "Yes," I tell her.

  "Liar," Ingrid says, and she pulls the trigger.

  Monday, December 18, 2006 (Clare is 35, Henry is 43)

  CLARE: I wake up in the middle of the night and Henry is gone. I panic. I sit up in bed. The possibilities crowd into my mind. He could be run over by cars, stuck in abandoned buildings, out in the cold--I hear a sound, someone is crying. I think it is Alba, maybe Henry went to see what was wrong with Alba, so I get up and go into Albas room, but Alba is asleep, curled around Teddy, her blankets thrown off the bed. I follow the sound down the hall and there, sitting on the living room floor, there is Henry, with his head in his hands.

  I kneel beside him. "What's wrong?" I ask him.

  Henry raises his face and I can see the shine of tears on his cheeks in the streetlight that comes in the windows. "Ingrid's dead," Henry says.

  I put my arms around him. "Ingrid's been dead for a long time," I say softly.

  Henry shakes his head. "Years, minutes...same thing," he says. We sit on the floor in silence. Finally Henry says, "Do you think it's morning yet?"

  "Sure." The sky is still dark. No birds are singing.

  "Let's get up," he says. I bring the wheelchair, help him into it, and wheel him into the kitchen. I bring his bathrobe and Henry struggles into it. He sits at the kitchen table staring out the window into the snow-covered backyard. Somewhere in the distance a snowplow scrapes along a street. I turn on the light. I measure coffee into a filter, measure water into the coffee maker, turn it on. I get out cups. I open the fridge, but when I ask Henry what he wants to eat he just shakes his head. I sit down at the kitchen table opposite Henry and he looks at me. His eyes are red and his hair is sticking out in many directions. His hands are thin and his face is bleak.

  "It was my fault," Henry says. "If I hadn't been there..."

  "Could you have stopped her?" I ask.

  "No. I tried."

  "Well, then."

  The coffee maker makes little exploding noises. Henry runs his hands over his face. He says, "I always wondered why she didn't leave a note." I am about to ask him what he means when I realize that Alba is standing in the kitchen doorway. She's wearing a pink nightgown and green mouse slippers. Alba squints and yawns in the harsh light of the
kitchen.

  "Hi, kiddo," Henry says. Alba comes over to him and drapes herself over the side of his wheelchair. "Mmmmorning," Alba says.

  "It's not really morning," I tell her. "It's really still nighttime."

  "How come you guys are up if it's nighttime?" Alba sniffs. "You're making coffee, so it's morning."

  "Oh, it's the old coffee-equals-morning fallacy," Henry says. "There's a hole in your logic, buddy."

  "What?" Alba asks. She hates to be wrong about anything.

  "You are basing your conclusion on faulty data; that is, you are forgetting that your parents are coffee fiends of the first order, and that we just might have gotten out of bed in the middle of the night in order to drink MORE COFFEE." He's roaring like a monster, maybe a Coffee Fiend.

  "I want coffee," says Alba. "I am a Coffee Fiend." She roars back at Henry. But he scoops her off of him and plops her down on her feet. Alba runs around the table to me and throws her arms around my shoulders. "Roar!" she yells in my ear.

  I get up and pick Alba up. She's so heavy now. "Roar, yourself." I carry her down the hall and throw her onto her bed, and she shrieks with laughter. The clock on her nightstand says 4:16 a.m. "See?" I show her. "It's too early for you to get up." After the obligatory amount of fuss Alba settles back into bed, and I walk back to the kitchen. Henry has managed to pour us both coffee. I sit down again. It's cold in here.

  "Clare."

  "Mmm?"

  "When I'm dead--" Henry stops, looks away, takes a breath, begins again. "I've been getting everything organized, all the documents, you know, my will, and letters to people, and stuff for Alba, it's all in my desk." I can't say anything. Henry looks at me.

  "When?" I ask. Henry shakes his head. "Months? Weeks? Days?"

  "I don't know, Clare." He does know, I know he knows.

  "You looked up the obituary, didn't you?" I say. Henry hesitates, and then nods. I open my mouth to ask again, and then I am afraid.

  HOURS, IF NOT DAYS

  Friday, December 24, 2006 (Henry is 43, Clare is 35)

  HENRY: I wake up early, so early that the bedroom is blue in the almost-dawn light. I lie in bed, listening to Clare's deep breathing, listening to the sporadic noise of traffic on Lincoln Avenue, crows calling to each other, the furnace shutting off. My legs ache. I prop myself up on my pillows and find the bottle of Vicodin on my bedside table. I take two, wash them down with flat Coke.

  I slide back into the blankets and turn onto my side. Clare is sleeping face down, with her arms wrapped protectively around her head. Her hair is hidden under the covers. Clare seems smaller without her ambiance of hair. She reminds me of herself as a child, sleeping with the simplicity she had when she was little. I try to remember if I have ever seen Clare as a child, sleeping. I realize that I never have. It's Alba that I am thinking of. The light is changing. Clare stirs, turns toward me, onto her side. I study her face. There are a few faint lines, at the corners of her eyes and mouth, that are the merest suggestion of the beginnings of Clare's face in middle age. I will never see that face of hers, and I regret it bitterly, the face with which Clare will go on without me, which will never be kissed by me, which will belong to a world that I won't know, except as a memory of Clare's, relegated finally to a definite past.

  Today is the thirty-seventh anniversary of my mother's death. I have thought of her, longed for her, every day of those thirty-seven years, and my father has, I think, thought of her almost without stopping. If fervent memory could raise the dead, she would be our Eurydice, she would rise like Lady Lazarus from her stubborn death to solace us. But all of our laments could not add a single second to her life, not one additional beat of the heart, nor a breath. The only thing my need could do was bring me to her. What will Clare have when I am gone? How can I leave her?

  I hear Alba talking in her bed. "Hey," says Alba. "Hey, Teddy! Shh, go to sleep now." Silence. "Daddy?" I watch Clare, to see if she will wake up. She is still, asleep. "Daddy!" I gingerly turn, carefully extricate myself from the blankets, maneuver myself to the floor. I crawl out of our bedroom, down the hall and into Alba's room. She giggles when she sees me. I make a growling noise, and Alba pats my head as though I am a dog. She is sitting up in bed, in the midst of every stuffed animal she has. "Move over, Red Riding Hood." Alba scoots aside and I lift myself onto the bed. She fussily arranges some of the toys around me. I put my arm around her and lean back and she holds out Blue Teddy to me. "He wants to eat marshmallows."

  "It's a little early for marshmallows, Blue Teddy. How about some poached eggs and toast?"

  Alba makes a face. She does it by squinching together her mouth and eyebrows and nose. "Teddy doesn't like eggs," she announces.

  "Shhhh. Mama's sleeping."

  "Okay" Alba whispers, loudly. "Teddy wants blue Jell-O." I hear Clare groan and start to get up in the other room.

  "Cream of Wheat?" I cajole. Alba considers. "With brown sugar?"

  "Okay."

  "You want to make it?" I slide off the bed.

  "Yeah. Can I have a ride?"

  I hesitate. My legs really hurt, and Alba has gotten a little too big to do this painlessly, but I can deny her nothing now. "Sure. Hop on." I am on my hands and knees. Alba climbs onto my back, and we make our way into the kitchen. Clare is standing sleepily by the sink, watching coffee drip into the pot. I clamber up to her and butt my head against her knees and she grabs Alba's arms and hoists her up, Alba giggling madly all the while. I crawl into my chair. Clare smiles and says, "What's for breakfast, cooks?"

  "Jell-O!" Alba shrieks.

  "Mmm. What kind of Jell-O? Cornflake Jell-O?"

  "Nooooo!"

  "Bacon Jell-O?"

  "Ick!" Alba wraps herself around Clare, pulls on her hair.

  "Ouch. Don't, sweetie. Well, it must be oatmeal Jell-O, then."

  "Cream of Wheat!"

  "Cream of Wheat Jell-O, yum." Clare gets out the brown sugar and the milk and the Cream of Wheat package. She sets them on the counter and looks at me inquiringly. "How 'bout you? Omelet Jell-O?"

  "If you're making it, yeah." I marvel at Clare's efficiency, moving around the kitchen as though she's Betty Crocker, as though she's been doing this for years. She'll be okay without me, I think as I watch her, but I know that she will not. I watch Alba mix the water and the wheat together, and I think of Alba at ten, at fifteen, at twenty. It is not nearly enough, yet. I am not done, yet. I want to be here. I want to see them, I want to gather them in my arms, I want to live--

  "Daddy's crying" Alba whispers to Clare.

  "That's because he has to eat my cooking" Clare tells her, and winks at me, and I have to laugh.

  NEW YEAR'S EVE, TWO

  Sunday, December 31, 2006 (Clare is 35, Henry is 43) (7:25 p.m.)

  CLARE: We're having a party! Henry was kind of reluctant at first but he seems perfectly content now. He's sitting at the kitchen table showing Alba how to cut flowers out of carrots and radishes. I admit that I didn't exactly play fair: I brought it up in front of Alba and she got all excited and then he couldn't bear to disappoint her.

  "It'll be great, Henry. We'll ask everyone we know."

  "Everyone?" he queried, smiling.

  "Everyone we like," I amended. And so for days I've been cleaning, and Henry and Alba have been baking cookies (although half the dough goes into Alba's mouth if we don't watch her). Yesterday Charisse and I went to the grocery store and bought dips, chips, spreads, every possible kind of vegetable, and beer, and wine, and champagne, little colored hors d'oeuvres toothpicks, and napkins with Happy New Year printed in gold, and matching paper plates and Lord knows what else. Now the whole house smells like meatballs and the rapidly dying Christmas tree in the living room.

  Alicia is here washing our wineglasses.

  Henry looks up at me and says, "Hey, Clare, it's almost showtime. Go take your shower." I glance at my watch and realize that yes, it's time.

  Into the shower and wash hair and dry hair and into underwear an
d bra, stockings and black silk party dress, heels and a tiny dab of perfume and lipstick and one last look in the mirror (I look startled) and back into the kitchen where Alba, oddly enough, is still pristine in her blue velvet dress and Henry is still wearing his holey red flannel shirt and ripped-up blue jeans.

  "Aren't you going to change?"

  "Oh--yeah. Sure. Help me, huh?" I wheel him into our bedroom.

  "What do you want to wear?" I'm hunting through his drawers for underwear and socks.

  "Whatever. You choose." Henry reaches over and shuts the bedroom door. "Come here."

  I stop riffing through the closet and look at Henry. He puts the brake on the wheelchair and maneuvers his body onto the bed.

  "There's no time" I say.

  "Right, exactly. So let's not waste time talking." His voice is quiet and compelling. I flip the lock on the door.

  "You know, I just got dressed--"

  "Shhh." He holds out his arms to me, and I relent, and sit beside him, and the phrase one last time pops into my mind unbidden.

  (8:05 p.m.)

  HENRY: The doorbell rings just as I am knotting my tie. Clare says nervously, "Do I look all right?" She does, she is pink and lovely, and I tell her so. We emerge from the bedroom as Alba runs to answer the door and starts yelling "Grandpa! Grandpa! Kimy!" My father stomps his snowy boots and leans to hug her. Clare kisses him on both cheeks. Dad rewards her with his coat. Alba commandeers Kimy and takes her to see the Christmas tree before she even gets her coat off.

  "Hello, Henry," says Dad, smiling, leaning over me and suddenly it hits me: tonight my life will flash before my eyes. We've invited everyone who matters to us: Dad, Kimy, Alicia, Gomez, Charisse, Philip, Mark and Sharon and their kids, Gram, Ben, Helen, Ruth, Kendrick and Nancy and their kids, Roberto, Catherine, Isabelle, Matt, Amelia, artist friends of Clare's, library school friends of mine, parents of Alba's friends, Clare's dealer, even Celia Attley, at Clare's insistence... The only people missing have been unavoidably detained: my mother, Lucille, Ingrid... Oh, God. Help me.

  (8:20 p.m.)

  CLARE: Gomez and Charisse come breezing in like kamikaze jet fighters. "Hey Library Boy, you lazy coot, don't you ever shovel your sidewalks?"

  Henry smacks his forehead. "I knew I forgot something." Gomez dumps a shopping bag full of CDs in Henry's lap and goes out to clean the walks. Charisse laughs and follows me into the kitchen. She takes out a huge bottle of Russian vodka and sticks it in the freezer. We can hear Gomez singing "Let It Snow" as he makes his way down the side of the house with the shovel.