The Time Traveler’s Wife

It’s hard being left behind. I wait for Henry, not knowing where he is, wondering if he’s okay. It’s hard to be the one who stays.

I keep myself busy. Time goes faster that way.

[…] Everything seems simple until you think about it. Why is love intensified by absence?

Long ago, men went to sea, and women waited for them, standing on the edge of the water, scanning the horizon for the tiny ship. Now I wait for Henry. He vanishes unwillingly, without warning. […] Why has he gone where I cannot follow?

It’s ironic, really. All my pleasures are homey ones: armchair splendor, the sedate excitements of domesticity. All I ask for are the humble delights. A mystery novel in bed, the smell of Clare’s long red-gold hair damp from washing, a postcard from a friend on vacation, cream dispersing into coffee, the softness of the skin under Clare’s breasts, the symmetry of grocery bags sitting on the kitchen counter waiting to be unpacked. […] These are the things that can pierce me with longing when I am displaced from them by Time’s whim.

And Clare, always Clare. […] I hate to be where she is not, when she is not. And yet, I am always going, and she cannot follow.

“I’m at the School of the Arts Institute; I’ve been doing sculpture, and I’ve just started to study papermaking.”

“Cool. What’s your work like?”

For the first time, Clare seemed uncomfortable. “It’s kind of…big, and it’s about…birds.” She looks at the table, then takes a sip of tea.

“Birds?”

“Well, really it’s about, um, longing.”

“It’s okay, Henry. I’m your guide, I’m here to show you around. It’s a special tour. Don’t be afraid, Henry […] I brought you a T-shirt, Henry. So you won’t get cold while we look at the exhibits.”

[…] Me at five, dark spiky hair, moon pale with brown almost Slavic eyes, wiry, coltish. At five I am happy, cushioned in normality and the arms of my parents. Everything changed, starting now.

I walk forward slowly, bend toward him, speak softly. “Hello. I’m glad to see you, Henry. Thank you for coming tonight.”

I reach up and pull my hair back from my face, show him the scar from the accident. Unconsciously, he mimics my gesture, touches the same scar on his own forehead.

“It’s just like mine,” says my self, amazed. “How did you get it?”

“The same as you. It is the same. We are the same.”

A translucent moment. I didn’t understand, and then I did, just like that. I watch it happen. I want to be both of us at once, feel again the feeling of losing the edges of my self, of seeing the admixture of future and present for the first time. But I’m too accustomed, too comfortable with it, and so I am left on the outside, remembering the wonder of being nine and suddenly seeing, knowing, that my friend, guide, brother was me. Me, only me. The loneliness of it.

“What’s the opposite of determinism?”

“Chaos.”

“Oh. I don’t think I like that. Do you like that?”

I take a big bite out of my Bismarck and consider chaos. “Well, I do and I don’t. Chaos is more freedom; in fact, total freedom. But no meaning. I want to be free to act, and I also want my actions to mean something.”

“You are making me different.”

“I know.”

I turn to look at Clare and just for a moment I forget that she is young, and that this is long ago; I see Clare, my wife, superimposed on the face of this young girl, and I don’t know what to say to this Clare who is old and young and different from other girls, who knows that different might be hard.

“My mother dying…it’s the pivotal thing…everything else goes around and around it…I dream about it, and I also—time travel to it. Over and over. […] if you had enough time to really look at everything, you would see me. I am in cars, behind bushes, on the bridge, in a tree. I have seen it from every angle, and I am even a participant in the aftermath: I call the airport from a nearby gas station to page my father with the message to come immediately to the hospital. I sat in the hospital waiting room and watched my father walk through on his way to find me. […] I walked along the shoulder of the road, waiting for my young self to appear, and I put a blanket around my thin child’s shoulders.”

“Clare, why in the world would you want to marry such a person? Think of the children you would have! Popping into next week and back before breakfast!”

I laugh. “But it will be exciting! Like Mary Poppins, or Peter Pan.”

She squeezes my hand just a little. “Think for a minute, darling: in fairy tales it’s always the children who have the fine adventures. The mothers have to stay at home and wait for the children to fly in the window.”

[…] “Do you ever miss him?” she asks me.

“Everyday. Every minute.”

“Every minute,” she says. “Yes. It’s that way, isn’t it?”

I realize that I have forgotten my present Henry in my joy at seeing my once and future Henry, and I am ashamed. I feel an almost maternal longing to go solace the strange boy who is becoming the man before me, the one who kisses me and leaves me with an admonition to be nice. As I walk up the stairs […] I move as in a dream to find the Henry who is my here and now.

“You were very lucky.”

He smiles, still shielding his face in his hands. “Well, we were and we weren’t. One minute we had everything we could dream of, and the next minute she was in pieces on the expressway.” Henry winces.

“But don’t you think,” I persist, “that it’s better to be extremely happy for a short while, even if you lose it, than to be just okay for your whole life?”

[…] “I’ve often wondered about that. Do you believe that?”

I think about my childhood, all the waiting, and wondering, and the joy of seeing Henry walking through the Meadow after now seeing him for weeks, months […] “Yes,” I say, “I do.”

Mr. DeTamble nods. “Henry has chosen well.”

The dreams merge, now. In one part of this dream I was swimming in the ocean, I was a mermaid. […] Swimming was life flying, all the fish were birds...There was a boat on the surface of the ocean, and we all swan up to see the boat. It was just a little sailboat, and my mother was on it, all by herself. I swam up to her and she was surprised to see me there, she said Why Clare, I thought you were getting married today, and I suddenly realized, the way you do in dreams, that I couldn’t get married to Henry if I was a mermaid, and I started to cry […].

The next evening I’m standing in the doorway of Clare’s studio, watching her finish drawing a thicket of black lines around a little red bird. Suddenly I see Clare, in her small room, closed in by all her stuff, and I realize that she’s trying to say something, and I know what I have to do.

My body wanted a baby. I felt empty and I wanted to be full. I wanted someone to love who would stay: stay and be there, always. And I wanted Henry to be in this child, so that when he was gone he wouldn’t be entirely gone, there would be a bit of him with me…insurance, in case of fire, flood, act of God.

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 […] I never questioned her love. Lucille was changeable as wind. The poem Clare holds is evidence, immutable, undeniable, a snapshot of emotion.

“What we need,” Henry says, “is a fresh start. A blank slate. Let’s call her Tabula Rasa.”

“Let’s call her Titanium White.”

[…] “Alba DeTamble.” It rolls around in my mouth as I say it.

“That nice, all the little iambs, tripling along […] ‘Alba (Latin) White. (Provencal) Dawn of Day’. Hmm.”

[…] “A white city on a hill. A fortress.”

“He made the boxes because he was lonely. He didn’t have anyone to love, and he made the boxes so he could love them, and so people would know that he existed, and because birds are free and the boxes are hiding places for the birds so they will feel safe, and he wanted to be free and safe. The boxes are so he can be a bird.”

“Say the poem about the lovers on the carpet.”

I blank, and then I remember.

[…] Angel! If there were a place that we didn’t know if, and there,
On some unsayable carpet, lovers displayed
What they could never bring to mastery here—the bold
Exploits of their high-flying hearts,
Their towers of pleasure, their ladders
That have long since been standing where there was no ground, leaning
Just on each other, trembling—and could master all of this,
Before the surrounding spectators, the innumerable soundless dead:
Would these, then, throw down their final, forever saved-up,
Forever hidden, unknown to us, eternally valid
Coins of happiness before the at last
Genuinely smiling pair on the gratified
Carpet?”

“There,” says Dr. Montague, clicking off the monitor. “Everyone is serene.”

The sunlight covers Alba now. She stirs, brings her small hand over her eyes, and sighs. I write her name, and my name, and the date at the bottom of the paper.

The drawing is finished. It will serve as a record—I loved you, I made you, and I made this for you—long after I am gone, and Henry is gone, and even Alba is gone. It will say, we made you, and you are here and now.

This is a secret: sometimes I am glad when Henry is gone. Sometimes I enjoy being alone. Sometimes I walk through the house late at night and I shiver with the pleasure of not talking, not touching, just walking, or sitting, or taking a bath. […] Sometimes I go for long walks with Alba and I don’t leave a note saying where I am. […] Sometimes I get a babysitter and I go to the movies or I ride my bicycle after dark along the bike path by Montrose beach with no lights; it’s like flying.

We sit up, and I hold her for a while. She is shaking.

“Clare. Clare. What’s wrong?”

I can’t make out her reply at first, then: “You’re going away. Now I won’t see you for years and years.”

“Only two years. Two years and a few months.” She is quiet. “Oh, Clare. I’m sorry. I can’t help it […].”

“How come I always have to wait?”

“Because you have perfect DNA and you aren’t being thrown around in time like a hot potato. Besides, patience is a virtue.”

“You can do whatever you want with your own body, Henry, but—”

“Clare! […] It’s over, okay? I’m done. Kendrick says he can’t do anything more.”

“But—” I pause to absorb what he just said. “But then…what happens?”

Henry shakes his head. “I don’t know. Probably what we thought might happen…happens. But if that’s what happens, then…I can’t just leave Alba without trying to help her…oh, Clare, just let me do this for her! […] It’s not like we were ever exempt, Clare,” he says softly. “I’m just trying to make her a safety net.”

“Any tissue that’s gonna make it will turn bright red. If it doesn’t look like a lobster, it’s a problem.”

I watch Henry’s feet floating in the yellow plastic basin. They are white as snow, white as marble, white as titanium, white as paper, white as bread, white as sheets, white as white can be. […] I watch to see his feet turn bright red. It’s like waiting for a photograph to develop, watching for the image slowly graying into black in the tray of chemicals. A flush of red appears at the ankles of both feet. […] The right foot remains stubbornly blanched.

“I made you something,” Clare says.

“Feet? I could use some feet.”

“Wings,” she says, dropping the white sheet to the floor.

The wings are huge and they float in the air, wavering in the candlelight. They are darker than the darkness, threatening but also redolent of longing, of freedom, of rushing through space. The feeling of standing solidly, on my own two feet, of running, running like flying. […] (Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor future/ grows any smaller…Superabundant being/ wells up in my heart.)

“Kiss me,” Clare says, and I turn to her, white face and dark lips floating in the dark, and I submerge, I fly, I am released: being wells up in my heart.

“[…] Clare leans over me, crying, and Alba whispers, “Daddy…”

“Love you…”

“Henry—”

“Always…”

“Oh God oh God—”

“World enough…”

“No!”

“And time…”

[…] Henry’s skin is warm, his eyes are open, staring past me, he is heavy in my arms, so heavy, his pale skin torn apart, red everywhere, ripped flesh framing a secret world of blood.

I know that you have been waiting for me all your life […] Clare, like a sailor, Odysseus along and buffeted by tall waves, sometimes wily and sometimes just a play-thing of the gods. Please, Clare. When I am dead. Stop waiting and be free. […] Love the world and yourself in it. Stop waiting and be free.

[…] when I was young I didn’t understand, but now, I know, how absence can be present, like a damaged nerve, like a dark bird. If I had to live on without you I know I could not do it. But I hope, I have this vision of you walking unencumbered, with your hair shining in the sun.

This morning everything is clean; the storm has left branches strewn around the yard, which I will presently go out and pick up: all the beach’s sand has been redistributed and laid down fresh in an even blanket pocked with impressions of rain, and the daylilies bend and glisten in the white seven a.m. light. I sit at the dining room table with a cup of tea, looking at the water, listening. Waiting.

Today is not much different from all other days. I get up at dawn, put on slacks and a sweater, brush my hair, make toast, and tea, and sit looking at the lake, wondering if he will come today. […] But I have no choice. He is coming, and I am here.