NEW YEAR’S EVE, ONE

Friday, December 31, 1999, 11:55p.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 nave 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.

The Time Traveler’s Wife Audrey Niffenegger

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.

The Time Traveler’s Wife Audrey Niffenegger

THREE

Saturday, March 13, 1999 (Henry is 35, Clare is 27)

HENRY: Charisse and Gomez have just had their third child, Rosa Evangeline Gomolinski. We allow a week to pass, then descend on them with presents and food.

Gomez answers the door. Maximilian, three years old, is clinging to his leg, and hides his face behind Gomez’s knee when we say “Hi Max!” Joseph, more extroverted at one, races up to Clare babbling “Ba ba ba” and burps loudly as she picks him up. Gomez rolls his eyes, and Clare laughs, and Joe laughs, and even I have to laugh at the complete chaos. Their house looks as though a glacier with a Toys “R” Us store inside it has moved through, leaving pools of Legos and abandoned stuffed bears.

“Don’t look,” says Gomez. “None of this is real. We’re just testing one of Charisse’s virtual reality games. We call it ‘Parenthood.’”

“Gomez?” Charisse’s voice floats out of the bedroom. “Is that Clare and Henry?”

We all tromp down the hall and into the bedroom. I catch a glimpse of the kitchen as we pass. A middle-aged woman is standing at the sink, washing dishes.

Charisse is lying in bed with the baby in her arms. The baby is asleep. She is tiny and has black hair and a sort of Aztec look about her. Max and Joe are light-haired. Charisse looks awful (to me. Clare insists later that she looked “wonderful”). She has gained a lot of weight and looks exhausted and ill. She has had a Caesarean. I sit down on the chair. Clare and Gomez sit on the bed. Max clambers over to his mother and snuggles under her free arm. He stares at me and puts his thumb in his mouth. Joe is sitting on Gomez’s lap.

“She’s beautiful,” says Clare. Charisse smiles. “And you look great.”

“I feel like shit” says Charisse. “But I’m done. We got our girl.” She strokes the baby’s face, and Rosa yawns and raises one tiny hand. Her eyes are dark slits.

“Rosa Evangeline,” Clare coos to the baby. “That’s so pretty.”

“Gomez wanted to name her Wednesday, but I put my foot down,” says Charisse. “Well, she was born on a Thursday, anyway” explains Gomez.

“Wanna hold her?” Clare nods, and Charisse carefully hands her daughter into Clare’s arms.

Seeing Clare with a baby in her arms, the reality of our miscarriages grabs me and for a moment I feel nauseous. I hope I’m not about to time travel. The feeling retreats and I am left with the actuality of what we’ve been doing: we have been losing children. Where are they, these lost children, wandering, hovering around confused?

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“Henry, would you like to hold Rosa?” Clare asks me.

I panic. “No,” I say, too emphatically. “I’m not feeling so hot,” I explain. I get up and walk out of the bedroom, through the kitchen and out the back door. I stand in the backyard. It is raining lightly. I stand and breathe.

The back door slams. Gomez comes out and stands beside me. “You okay?” he asks.

“I think so. I was getting claustrophobic in there.” “Yeah, I know what you mean.”

We stand silently for minutes. I am trying to remember my father holding me when I was little. All I can remember is playing games with him, running, laughing, riding around on his shoulders. I realize that Gomez is looking at me, and that tears are coursing down my cheeks. I wipe my sleeve across my face. Somebody has to say something.

“Don’t mind me,” I say.

Gomez makes an awkward gesture. “I’ll be right back,” he says, and disappears into the house. I think he’s gone for good, but he reappears with a lit cigarette in hand. I sit down on the decrepit picnic table, which is damp with rain and covered with pine needles. It’s cold out here.

“You guys still trying to have a kid?”

I am startled by this until I realize that Clare probably tells Charisse everything, and Charisse probably tells Gomez nothing.

“Yeah.”

“Is Clare still upset about that miscarriage?” “Miscarriages. Plural. We’ve had three.”

“‘To lose one child, Mr. DeTamble, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose three looks like carelessness.”

“That’s not really all that funny, Gomez.”

“Sorry.” Gomez does look abashed, for once. I don’t want to talk about this. I have no words to talk about it, and I can barely talk about it with Clare, with Kendrick and the other doctors at whose feet we’ve laid our sad case. “Sorry,” Gomez repeats.

I stand up. “We’d better go in.”

“Ah, they don’t want us, they want to talk about girl stuff.” “Mmm. Well, then. How about those Cubs?” I sit down again.

“Shut up.” Neither of us follows baseball. Gomez is pacing back and forth. I wish he

The Time Traveler’s Wife Audrey Niffenegger

would stop, or, better yet, go inside. “So what’s the problem?” he asks, casually. “With what? The Cubs? No pitching, I’d say.”

“No, dear Library Boy, not the Cubs. What is the problem that is causing you and Clare to be sans infants?”

“That is really not any of your business, Gomez.”

He plunges on, unfazed. “Do they even know what the problem is?” “Fuck off, Gomez”

“Tut, tut. Language. Because I know this great doctor....” “Gomez—”

“Who specializes in fetal chromosomal disorders.” “Why on earth would you know—”

“Expert witness.” “Oh.”

“Her name is Amit Montague ” he continues, “she’s a genius. She’s been on TV and won all these awards. Juries adore her.”

“Oh, well, if juries love her—” I begin, sarcastically. “Just go and see her. Jesus, I’m trying to be helpful.” I sigh. “Okay. Um, thanks.”

“Is that ‘Thanks, we will run right out and do as you suggest, dear Comrade,’ or ‘Thanks, now go screw yourself?”

I stand up, brush damp pine needles off the seat of my pants. “Let’s go in,” I say, and we

do.

The Time Traveler’s Wife Audrey Niffenegger

FOUR

Wednesday, July 21, 1999/September 8, 1998 (Henry is 36, Clare is 28)

HENRY: We are lying in bed. Clare is curled on her side, her back to me, and I am curled around her, facing her back. It’s about two in the morning, and we have just turned out the light after a long and pointless discussion of our reproductive misadventures. Now I lie pressed against Clare, my hand cupping her right breast, and I try to discern if we are in this together or if I have been somehow left behind.

“Clare,” I say softly, into her neck. “Mmm?”

“Let’s adopt.” I’ve been thinking about this for weeks, months. It Ferris like a brilliant escape route: we will have a baby. It will be healthy. Clare will be healthy. We will be happy. It is the obvious answer.

Clare says, “But that would be fake. It would be pretending.” She sits UP» faces me, and I do the same.

It would be a real baby, and it would be ours. “What’s pretend about that? I’m sick of pretending. We pretend all the time. I want to really do this.”

“We don’t pretend all the time. What are you talking about?”

“We pretend to be normal people, having normal lives! I pretend it’s perfectly okay with me that you’re always disappearing God knows where. You pretend everything is okay even when you almost get killed and Kendrick doesn’t know what the hell to do about it! I pretend I don’t care when our babies die...” She is sobbing, bent double, her face covered by her hair, a curtain of silk sheltering her face.

I’m tired of crying. I’m tired of watching Clare cry. I am helpless before her tears, there is nothing I can do that will change anything.

“Clare...”I reach out to touch her, to comfort her, to comfort myself, and she pushes me away. I get out of bed, and grab my clothes. I dress in the bathroom. I take Clare’s keys from her purse, and I put on my shoes. Clare appears in the hall.

“Where are you going?” “I don’t know.” “Henry—”

I walk out the door, and slam it. It feels good to be outside. I can’t remember where the car is. Then I see it across the street. I walk over to it and get in.

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My first idea was to sleep in the car, but once I am sitting in it I decide to drive somewhere. The beach: I will drive to the beach. I know that this is a terrible idea. I’m tired, I’m upset, it would be madness to drive...but I just feel like driving. The streets are empty. I start the car. It roars to life. It takes me a minute to get out of the parking space. I see Clare’s face in the front window. Let her worry. For once I don’t care.

I drive down Ainslie to Lincoln, cut over to Western, and drive north. It’s been a while since I’ve been out alone in the middle of the night in the present, and I can’t even remember the last time I drove a car when I didn’t absolutely have to. This is nice. I speed past Rosehill Cemetery and down the long corridor of car dealerships. I turn on the radio, punch through the presets to WLUW; they’re playing Coltrane so I crank up the volume and wind the window down. The noise, the wind, the soothing repetition of stoplights and streetlights make me calm, anesthetize me, and after a while I kind of forget why I’m out here in the first place. At the Evanston border I cut over to Ridge, and then take Dempster to the lake. I park near the lagoon, leave the keys in the ignition, get out, and walk. It’s cool and very quiet. I walk out onto the pier and stand at the end of it, looking down the shoreline at Chicago, flickering under its orange and purple sky.

I’m so tired. I’m tired of thinking about death. I’m tired of sex as a means to an end. And I’m frightened of where it all might end. I don’t know how much pressure I can take from Clare.

What are these fetuses, these embryos, these clusters of cells we keep making and losing? What is it about them that is important enough to risk Clare’s life, to tinge every day with despair? Nature is telling us to give up, Nature is saying: Henry, you’re a very fucked-up organism and we don’t want to make any more of you. And I am ready to acquiesce.

I have never seen myself in the future with a child. Even though I have spent quite a bit of time with my young self, even though I spend a lot of time with Clare as a child, I don’t feel like my life is incomplete without one of my very own. No future self has ever encouraged me to keep plugging away at this. I actually broke down and asked, a few weeks ago; I ran into my self in the stacks at the Newberry, a self from 2004. Are we ever going to have a baby? I asked. My self only smiled and shrugged. You just have to live it, sorry, he replied,smug and sympathetic. Oh, Jesus, just tell me I cried, raising my voice as he raised his hand and disappeared. Asshole, I said loudly, and Isabelle stuck her head in the security door and asked me why I was yelling in the stacks and did I realize that they could hear me in the Reading Room?

I just don’t see any way out of this. Clare is obsessed. Amit Montague encourages her, tells her stories about miracle babies, gives her vitamin drinks that remind me of Rosemary s Baby. Maybe I could go on strike. Sure, that’s it; a sex strike. I laugh to myself. The sound isswallowed by the waves gently lapping the pier. Fat chance. I’d be groveling on my knees within days.

My head hurts. I try to ignore it; I know it’s because I’m tired. I wonder if I could sleep

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on the beach without anyone bothering me. It’s a beautiful night. Just at this moment I am startled by an intense beam of light that pans across the pier and into my face and suddenly I’m in Kimy’s kitchen, lying on my back under her kitchen table, surrounded by the legs of chairs. Kimy is seated in one of the chairs and is peering at me under the table. My left hip is pressing against her shoes.

“Hi, buddy,” I say weakly. I feel like I’m about to pass out.

“You gonna give me a heart attack one of these days, buddy,” Kimy says. She prods me with her foot. “Get out from under there and put on some clothes.”

I flop over and back out from under the table on my knees. Then I curl up on the linoleum and rest for a moment, gathering my wits and trying not to gag.

“Henry.. .you okay?” She leans over me. “You want something to eat? You want some soup? I got minestrone soup...Coffee?” I shake my head. “You want to lie on the couch? You sick?”

“No, Kimy, it’s okay, I’ll be okay.” I manage to get to my knees and then to my feet. I stagger into the bedroom and open Mr. Kim’s closet, which is almost empty except for a few pairs of neatly pressed jeans in various sizes ranging from small boy to grown-up, and several crisp white shirts, my little clothing stash, ready and waiting. Dressed, I walk back to the kitchen, lean over Kimy, and give her a peck on the cheek. “What’s the date?”

“September 8, 1998. Where you from?”

“Next July.” We sit down at the table. Kimy is doing the New York Times crossword puzzle.

“What’s going on, next July?”

“It’s been a very cool summer, your garden’s looking good. All the tech stocks are up. You should buy some Apple stock in January.”

She makes a note on a piece of brown paper bag. “Okay. And you? How are you doing? How’s Clare? You guys got a baby yet?”

“Actually, I am hungry. How about some of that soup you were mentioning?”

Kimy lumbers out of her chair and opens the fridge. She gets out a saucepan and starts to heat up some soup. “You didn’t answer my question.”

“No news, Kimy. No baby. Clare and I fight about it just about every waking moment. Please don’t start on me.”

Kimy has her back to me. She stirs the soup vigorously. Her back radiates chagrin. “I’m not ‘starting on you,’ I just ask, okay? I just wondering. Sheesh.”

We are silent for a few minutes. The noise of the spoon scraping the bottom of the saucepan is getting to me. I think about Clare, looking out the window at me as I drove away.

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“Hey, Kimy.”

“Hey, Henry.”

“How come you and Mr. Kim never had kids?” Long silence. Then: “We did have child.” “You did?”

She pours the steaming soup into one of the Mickey Mouse bowls I loved when I was a kid. She sits down and runs her hands over her hair, smoothes the white straggling hairs into the little bun at the back. Kimy looks at me. “Eat your soup. I be right back.” She gets up and walks out of the kitchen, and I hear her shuffling down the plastic runner that covers the carpeting in the hall. I eat the soup. It’s almost gone when she comes back.

“Here. This is Min. She is my baby.” The photograph is black and white, blurry. In it a young girl, perhaps five or six years old, stands in front of Mrs. Kim’s building, this building, the building I grew up in. She is wearing a Catholic school uniform, smiling, and holding an umbrella. “It’s her first day school. She is so happy, so scared.”

I study the photo. I am afraid to ask. I look up. Kimy is staring out the window, over the river. “What happened?”

“Oh. She died. Before you were born. She had leukemia, she die.”

I suddenly remember. “Did she used to sit out in a rocker in the backyard? In a red dress?”

Mrs. Kim stares at me, startled. “You see her?”

“Yes, I think so. A long time ago. When I was about seven. I was standing on the steps to the river, buck naked, and she told me I better not come into her yard, and I told her it was my yard and she didn’t believe me. I couldn’t figure it out.” I laugh. “She told me her mom was gonna spank me if I didn’t go away.”

Kimy laughs shakily. “Well, she right, huh?” “Yeah, she was just off by a few years.”

Kimy smiles. “Yeah, Min, she a little firecracker. Her dad call her Miss Big Mouth. He loved her very much.” Kimy turns her head, surreptitiously touches her hand to her eyes. I remember Mr. Kim as a taciturn man who spent most of his time sitting in his armchair watching sports on TV.

“What year was Min born?”

“1949. She died 1956. Funny, she would be middle-aged lady with kids now, herself. She would be forty-nine years old. Kids would be maybe in college, maybe a little older.” Kimy looks at me, and I look back at her.

The Time Traveler’s Wife Audrey Niffenegger

“We’re trying, Kimy. We’re trying everything we can think of.” “I didn’t say nothing.”

“Uh-huh.”

Kimy bats her eyelashes at me like she’s Louise Brooks or somebody. “Hey, buddy, I am stuck on this crossword. Nine down, starts with K—”

CLARE: I watch the police divers swim out into Lake Michigan. It’s an overcast morning, already very hot. I am standing on the Dempster Street pier. There are five fire engines, three ambulances, and seven squad cars standing on Sheridan Road with their lights blinking and flashing. There are seventeen firemen and six paramedics. There are fourteen policemen and one policewoman, a short fat white woman whose head seems squashed by her cap, who keeps saying stupid platitudes intended to comfort me until I want to push her off the pier. I’m holding Henry’s clothes. It’s five o’clock in the morning. There are twenty-one reporters, some of whom are TV reporters with trucks and microphones and video people, and some of whom are print reporters with photographers. There is an elderly couple hanging around the edges of the action, discreet but curious. I try not to think about the policeman’s description of Henry jumping off the end of the pier, caught in the beam of the police car searchlight. I try not to think.

Two new policemen come walking down the pier. They confer with some of the police who are already here, and then one of them, the older one, detaches and walks to me. He has a handlebar mustache, the old-fashioned kind that ends in little points. He introduces himself as Captain Michels, and asks me if I can think of any reason my husband might have wanted to take his own life.

“Well, I really don’t think he did, Captain. I mean, he’s a very good swimmer, he’s probably just swimming to, urn, Wilmette or someplace”—

I wave my hand vaguely to the north—“and he’ll be back any time now....”

The Captain looks dubious. “Does he make a habit of swimming in toe middle of the night?” He’s an insomniac. “Had you been arguing? Was he upset?”

“No,” I lie. “Of course not.” I look out over the water. I am sure I don’t sound very convincing. “I was sleeping and he must have decided to go swimming and he didn’t want to wake me up.”

“Did he leave a note?”

“No.” As I rack my brains for a more realistic explanation I hear a splash near the shore. Hallelujah. Not a moment too soon. “There he is!” Henry starts to stand up in the water, hears me yell, and ducks down again and swims to the pier.

“Clare. What’s going on?”

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I kneel on the pier. Henry looks tired, and cold. I speak quietly. “They thought you drowned. One of them saw you throw yourself off the pier. They’ve been searching for your body for two hours.”

Henry looks worried, but also amused. Anything to annoy the police. All the police have clustered around me and they are peering down at Henry silently.

“Are you Henry DeTamble?” asks the captain.

“Yes. Would you mind if I got out of the water?” We all follow Henry to the shore, Henry swimming and the rest of us walking along beside him on the pier. He climbs out of the water and stands dripping on the beach like a wet rat. I hand him his shirt, which he uses to dry himself off. He puts on the rest of his clothes, and stands calmly, waiting for the police to figure out what they want to do with him. I want to kiss him and then kill him. Or vice versa. Henry puts his arm around me. He is clammy and damp. I lean close to him, for his coolness, and he leans into me, for warmth. The police ask him questions. He answers them very politely. These are the Evanston police, with a few Morton Grove and Skokie police who have come by just for the heck of it. If they were Chicago police they would know Henry, and they would arrest him.

“Why didn’t you respond when the officer told you to get out of the water?” “I was wearing earplugs, Captain.”

“Earplugs?”

“To keep the water out of my ears.” Henry makes a show of digging in his pockets. “I don’t know where they got to. I always wear earplugs when I swim.”

“Why were you swimming at three o’clock in the morning?” “I couldn’t sleep ”

And so on. Henry lies seamlessly, marshaling the facts to support his thesis. In the end, grudgingly, the police issue him a citation, for swimming when the beach is officially closed. It’s a $500 fine. When the police let us go, the reporters and photographers and TV cameras converge on us as we walk to the car. No comment. Just out for a swim. Please, we would really rather not have our picture taken. Click. We finally make it to the car, which is sitting all by itself with the keys in it on Sheridan Road. I start the ignition and roll down my window. The police and the reporters and the elderly couple are all standing on the grass, watching us. We are not looking at each other.

“Clare.”

“Henry.” “I’m sorry.”

“Me too.” He looks over at me, touches my hand on the steering wheel. We drive home in silence.

The Time Traveler’s Wife Audrey Niffenegger

Friday, January 14, 2000 (Clare is 28, Henry is 36)

CLARE: Kendrick leads us through a maze of carpeted, drywalled, acoustical-tiled hallways and into a conference room. There are no windows, only blue carpet and a long, polished black table surrounded by padded swivel chairs. There’s a whiteboard and a few Magic Markers, a clock over the door, and a coffee urn with cups, cream, and sugar ready beside it. Kendrick and I sit at the table, but Henry paces around the room. Kendrick takes off his glasses and massages the sides of his small nose with his fingers. The door opens and a young Hispanic man in surgical scrubs wheels a cart into the room. On the cart is a cage covered with a cloth. “Where d’ya want it?” the young man asks, and Kendrick says, “Just leave the whole cart, if you don’t mind,” and the man shrugs and leaves. Kendrick walks to the door and turns a knob and the lights dim to twilight. I can barely see Henry standing next to the cage. Kendrick walks to him and silently removes the cloth.

The smell of cedar wafts from the cage. I stand and stare into it. I don’t see anything but the core of a roll of toilet paper, some food bowls, a water bottle, an exercise wheel, fluffy cedar chips. Kendrick opens the top of the cage and reaches in, scoops out something small and white. Henry and I crowd around, staring at the tiny mouse that sits blinking on Kendrick’s palm. Kendrick takes a tiny penlight out of his pocket, turns it on and rapidly flashes it over the mouse. The mouse tenses, and then it is gone.

“Wow,” I say. Kendrick places the cloth back over the cage and turns the lights up.

“It’s being published in next week’s issue of Nature,” he says, smiling. “It’s the lead article.”

“Congratulations,” Henry says. He glances at the clock. “How long are they usually gone? And where do they go?”

Kendrick gestures at the urn and we both nod. “They tend to be gone about ten minutes or so,” he says, pouring three cups of coffee as he speaks and handing us each one. “They go to the Animal Lab in the basement, where they were born. They don’t seem to be able to go more than a few minutes either way.”

Henry nods. “They’ll go longer as they get older.” “Yes, that’s been true so far.”

“How did you do it?” I ask Kendrick. I still can’t quite believe that he has done it.

Kendrick blows on his coffee and takes a sip, makes a face. The coffee is bitter, and I add sugar to mine. “Well,” he says, “it helped a lot that Celera has been sequencing the whole mouse genome. It told us where to look for the four genes we were targeting. But we could have done it without that.

The Time Traveler’s Wife Audrey Niffenegger

“We started by cloning your genes and then used enzymes to snip out the damaged portions of DNA. Then we took those pieces and snuck them into mouse embryos at the four-cell-division stage. That was the easy part.”

Henry raises his eyebrows. “Sure, of course. Clare and I do that all the time in our kitchen. So what was the hard part?” He sits on the table and sets his coffee beside him. In the cage I can hear the squeaking of the exercise wheel.

Kendrick glances at me. “The hard part was getting the dams, the mother mice, to carry the altered mice to term. They kept dying, hemorrhaging to death.”

Henry looks very alarmed. “The mothers died?”

Kendricks nods. “The mothers died, and the babies died. We couldn’t figure it out, so we started watching them around the clock, and then we saw what was going on. The embryos were traveling out of their dam’s womb, and then in again, and the mothers bled to death internally. Or they would just abort the fetus at the ten-day mark. It was very frustrating.”

Henry and I exchange looks and then look away. “We can relate to that,” I tell Kendrick. “Ye-ess,” he says. “But we solved the problem.”

“How?” Henry asks.

“We decided that it might be an immune reaction. Something about the fetal mice was so foreign that the dams’ immune systems were trying to fight them as though they were a virus or something. So we suppressed the dams’ immune systems, and then it all worked like magic.”

My heart is beating in my ears. Like magic.

Kendrick suddenly stoops and grabs for something on the floor. “Gotcha,” he says, displaying the mouse in his cupped hands.

“Bravo!” Henry says. “What’s next?”

“Gene therapy,” Kendrick tells him. “Drugs.” He shrugs. “Even though we can make it happen, we still don’t know why it happens. Or how it happens. So we try to understand that.” He offers Henry the mouse. Henry cups his hands and Kendrick tips the mouse into them. Henry inspects it curiously.

“It has a tattoo,” he says.

“It’s the only way we can keep track of them,” Kendrick tells him. “They drive the Animal Lab technicians nuts, they’re always escaping.”

Henry laughs. “That’s our Darwinian advantage,” he says. “We escape.” He strokes the mouse, and it shits on his palm.

“Zero tolerance for stress,” says Kendrick, and puts the mouse back in its cage, where it flees into the toilet-paper core.

The Time Traveler’s Wife Audrey Niffenegger

As soon as we get home I am on the phone to Dr. Montague, babbling about immuno-suppressants and internal bleeding. She listens carefully and then tells me to come in next week, and in the meantime she will do some research. I put down the phone and Henry regards me nervously over the Times business section. “It’s worth a try,” I tell him.

“Lots of dead mouse moms before they figured it out,” Henry says. “But it worked! Kendrick made it work!”

Henry just says, “Yeah ” and goes back to reading. I open my mouth and then change my mind and walk out to the studio, too excited to argue. It worked like magic. Like magic.

The Time Traveler’s Wife Audrey Niffenegger

FIVE

Thursday, May 11, 2000 (Henry is 39, Clare is 28)

HENRY: I’m walking down Clark Street in late spring, 2000. There’s nothing too remarkable about this. It’s a lovely warm evening in Andersonville, and all the fashionable youth are sitting at little tables drinking fancy cold coffee at Kopi’s, or sitting at medium-sized tables eating couscous at Reza’s, or just strolling, ignoring the Swedish knickknacks stores and exclaiming over each other’s dogs. I should be at work, in 2002, but oh, well. Matt will have to cover for my afternoon Show and Tell, I guess. I make a mental note to take him out to dinner.

As I idle along, I unexpectedly see Clare across the street. She is standing in front of George’s, the vintage clothing store, looking at a display of baby clothes. Even her back is wistful, even her shoulders sigh with longing. As I watch her, she leans her forehead against the shop window and stands there, dejected. I cross the street, dodging a UPS van and a Volvo, and stand behind her. Clare looks up, startled, and sees my reflection in the glass.

“Oh, it’s you,” she says, and turns. “I thought you were at the movies with Gomez.” Clare seems a little defensive, a little guilty, as though I have caught her doing something illicit.

“I probably am. I’m supposed to be at work, actually. In 2002.”

Clare smiles. She looks tired, and I do the dates in my head and realize that our fifth miscarriage was three weeks ago. I hesitate, and then I put my arms around her, and to my relief she relaxes against me, leans her head on my shoulder.

“How are you?” I ask.

“Terrible,” she says softly. “Tired.” I remember. She stayed in bed for weeks. “Henry, I quit.” She watches me, trying to gauge my reaction to this, weighing her intention against my knowledge. “I give up. It isn’t going to happen.”

Is there anything to stop me from giving her what she needs? I can’t think of a single reason not to tell her. I stand and rack my brain for anything that would preclude Clare knowing. All I remember is her certainty, which I am about to create.

“Persevere, Clare.” “What?”

“Hang in there. In my present we have a baby.”

Clare closes her eyes, whispers, “Thank you.” I don’t know if she’s talking to me or to God. It doesn’t matter. “Thank you,” she says, again, looking at me, talking to me, and I feel as though I am an angel in some demented version of the Annunciation. I lean over and kiss

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her; I can feel resolve, joy, purpose coursing through Clare. I remember the tiny head full of black hair crowning between Clare’s legs and I marvel at how this moment creates that miracle, and vice versa. Thank you. Thank you.

“Did you know?” Clare asks me.

“No.” She looks disappointed. “Not only did I not know, I did everything I could think of to prevent you from getting pregnant again.”

“Great.” Clare laughs. “So whatever happens, I just have to be quiet and let it rip?” “Yep.”

Clare grins at me, and I grin back. Let it rip.

The Time Traveler’s Wife Audrey Niffenegger

SIX

Saturday, June 3, 2000 (Clare is 29, Henry is 36)

CLARE: I’m sitting at the kitchen table idly flipping through the Chicago Tribune and watching Henry unpack the groceries. The brown paper bags stand evenly lined up on the counter and Henry produces ketchup, chicken, gouda cheese from them like a magician. I keep waiting for the rabbit and the silk scarves. Instead it’s mushrooms, black beans, fettucine, lettuce, a pineapple, skim milk, coffee, radishes, turnips, a rutabaga, oatmeal, butter, cottage cheese, rye bread, mayonnaise, eggs, razors, deodorant, Granny Smith apples, half-and-half, bagels, shrimp, cream cheese, Frosted MiniWheats, marinara sauce, frozen orange juice, carrots, condoms, sweet potatoes...condoms? I get up and walk to the counter, pick up the blue box and shake it at Henry. “What, are you having an affair?”

He looks up at me defiantly as he rummages in the freezer. “No, actually, I had an epiphany. I was standing in the toothpaste aisle when it happened. Want to hear it?”

“No.”

Henry stands up and turns to me. His expression is like a sigh. “Well here it is anyway: we can’t keep trying to have a baby.”

Traitor. “We agreed..”

“...to keep trying. I think five miscarriages is enough. I think we have tried.”

“No. I mean—why not, try again?” I try to keep the pleading out of my voice, to keep the anger that rises up in my throat from spilling into my words.

Henry walks around the counter, stands in front of me, but doesn’t touch me, knows that he can’t touch me. “Clare. The next time you miscarry it’s going to kill you, and I am not going to keep doing something that’s going to end up with you dead. Five pregnancies.. .I know you want to try again, but I can’t. I can’t take it anymore, Clare. I’m sorry.”

I walk out the back door and stand in the sun, by the raspberry bushes. Our children, dead and wrapped in silky gampi tissue paper, cradled in tiny wooden boxes, are in shade now, in the late afternoon, by the roses. I feel the heat of the sun on my skin and shiver for them, deep in the garden, cool on this mild June day. Help, I say in my head, to our future child. He doesn’t know, so I can’t tell him. Come soon.

Friday, June 9, 2000/November 19, 1986 (Henry is 36, Clare is 15)

The Time Traveler’s Wife Audrey Niffenegger

HENRY: It’s 8:45 a.m. on a Friday morning and I’m sitting in the waiting room of a certain Dr. Robert Gonsalez. Clare doesn’t know I’m here. I’ve decided to get a vasectomy.

Dr. Gonsalez’s office is on Sheridan Road, near Diversey, in a posh medical center just up the way from the Lincoln Park Conservatory. This waiting room is decorated in browns and hunter green, lots of paneling and framed prints of Derby winners from the 1880s. Very manly. I feel as though I should be wearing a smoking jacket and clenching a large cigar between my jaws. I need a drink.

The nice woman at Planned Parenthood assured me in her soothing, practiced voice that this would hardly hurt a bit. There are five other guys sitting here with me. I wonder if they’ve got the clap, or maybe their prostates are acting up. Maybe some of them are like me, sitting here waiting to end their careers as potential dads. I feel a certain solidarity with these unknown men, all of us sitting here together in this brown wooden leather room on this gray morning waiting to walk into the examining room and take off our pants. There’s a very old man who sits leaning forward with his hands clasped around his cane, his eyes closed behind thick glasses that magnify his eyelids. He’s probably not here to get snipped. The teenage boy who sits leafing through an ancient copy of Esquire is feigning indifference. I close my eyes and imagine that I am in a bar and the bartender has her back to me now as she mixes a good single-malt Scotch with just a small amount of tepid water. Perhaps it’s an English pub. Yes, that would account for the decor. The man on my left coughs, a deep lung-shaking sort of cough, and when I open my eyes I’m still sitting in a doctor’s waiting room. I sneak a look at the watch of the guy on my right. He’s got one of those immense sports watches that you can use to time sprints or call the mothership. It’s 9:58. My appointment is in two minutes. The doctor seems to be running late, though. The receptionist calls, “Mr. Liston,” and the teenager stands up abruptly and walks through the heavy paneled door into the office. The rest of us look at each other, furtively, as though we are on the subway and someone is trying to sell us Streetwise.

I am rigid with tension and I remind myself that this is a necessary and good thing that I am about to do. I am not a traitor. I am not a traitor. I am saving Clare from horror and pain. She will never know. It will not hurt. Maybe it will hurt a little. Someday I will tell her and she will realize I had to do it. We tried. I have no choice. I am not a traitor. Even if I hurts it will be worth it. I am doing it because I love her. I think of Clare sitting on our bed, covered in blood, weeping, and I feel sick.

“Mr. DeTamble.” I rise, and now I really feel sick. My knees buckle. My head swims, and I’m bent over, retching, I’m on my hands and knees, the ground is cold and covered with the stubble of dead grass. There’s nothing in my stomach, I’m spitting up mucous. It’s cold. I look up. I’m in the clearing, in the Meadow. The trees are bare, the sky is flat clouds with early darkness approaching. I’m alone.

I get up and find the clothes box. Soon I am wearing a Gang of Four T-shirt and a sweater and jeans, heavy socks and black military boots, a black wool overcoat and large baby blue

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mittens. Something has chewed its way into the box and made a nest. The clothes indicate the mid-eighties. Clare is about fifteen or sixteen. I wonder whether to hang around and wait for her or just go. I don’t know if I can face Clare’s youthful exuberance right now. I turn and walk toward the orchard.

It looks like late November. The Meadow is brown, and makes a rattling noise in the wind. Crows are fighting over windfall apples at the edge of the orchard. Just as I reach them I hear someone panting, running behind me. I turn, and it’s Clare.

“Henry—” she’s out of breath, she sounds like she has a cold. I let her stand, rasping, for a minute. I can’t talk to her. She stands, breathing, her breath steaming in front of her in white clouds, her hair vivid red in the gray and brown, her skin pink and pale.

I turn and walk into the orchard.

“Henry—” Clare follows me, catches my arm. “What? What did I do? Why won’t you talk to me?”

Oh God. “I tried to do something for you, something important, and it didn’t work. I got nervous, and ended up here.”

“What was it?”

“I can’t tell you. I wasn’t even going to tell you about it in the present. You wouldn’t like

it.”

“Then why did you want to do it?” Clare shivers in the wind. “It was the only way. I couldn’t get you to listen to me. I thought we could stop fighting if I did it.” I sigh. I will try again, and, if necessary, again.

“Why are we fighting?” Clare is looking up at me, tense and anxious. Her nose is running.

“Have you got a cold?”

“Yes. What are we fighting about?”

“It all began when the wife of your ambassador slapped the mistress of my prime minister at a soiree being held at the embassy. This affected the tariff on oatmeal, which led to high unemployment and rioting—”

“Henry.”

“Yes?”

“Just once, just once, would you stop making fun of me and tell me something I am asking you?”

“I can’t.”

Without apparent premeditation, Clare slaps me, hard. I step back, surprised, glad.

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“Hit me again.”

She is confused, shakes her head. “Please, Clare.”

“No. Why do you want me to hit you? I wanted to hurt you.” “I want you to hurt me. Please.” I hang my head.

“What is the matter with you?”

“Everything is terrible and I can’t seem to feel it.” “ What is terrible? What is going on?”

“Don’t ask me.” Clare comes up, very close to me, and takes my hand, one pulls off the ridiculous blue mitten, brings my palm to her mouth, and bites. The pain is excruciating. She stops, and I look at my hand, Blood comes slowly, in tiny drops, around the bite mark. I will probably get blood poisoning, but at the moment I don’t care.

“Tell me.” Her face is inches from mine. I kiss her, very roughly. She is resistant. I release her, and she turns her back on me.

“That wasn’t very nice,” she says in a small voice.

What is wrong with me? Clare, at fifteen, is not the same person who’s been torturing me for months, refusing to give up on having a baby, risking death and despair, turning lovemaking into a battlefield strewn with the corpses of children. I put my hands on her shoulders. “I’m sorry. I’m very sorry, Clare, it’s not you. Please.”

She turns. She’s crying, and she’s a mess. Miraculously, there’s a Kleenex in my coat pocket. I dab at her face, and she takes the tissue from me and blows her nose.

“You never kissed me before.” Oh, no. My face must be funny, because Clare laughs. I can’t believe it. What an idiot I am.

“Oh, Clare, Just—forget that, okay? Just erase it. It never happened. Come here. Take two, yes? Clare?”

She tentatively steps toward me. I put my arms around her, look at her. Her eyes are rimmed red, her nose is swollen, and she definitely has a bad cold. I place my hands over her ears and tip her head back, and kiss her, and try to put my heart into hers, for safekeeping, in case I lose it again.

Friday, June 9, 2000 (Clare is 29, Henry is 36)

CLARE: Henry has been terribly quiet, distracted, and pensive all evening. All through dinner he seemed to be mentally searching imaginary stacks for a book he’d read in 1942 or

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something. Plus his right hand is all bandaged up. After dinner he went into the bedroom and lay face down on the bed with his head hanging over the foot of the bed and his feet on my pillow. I went to the studio and scrubbed molds and deckles and drank my coffee, but I wasn’t enjoying myself because I couldn’t figure out what Henry’s problem was. Finally I go back into the house. He is still lying in the same position. In the dark.

I lie down on the floor. My back makes loud cracking sounds as I stretch out. “Clare?”

“Mmmm?”

“Do you remember the first time I kissed you?” “Vividly.”

“I’m sorry.” Henry rolls over.

I’m burning up with curiosity. “What were you so upset about? You were trying to do something, and it didn’t work, and you said I wouldn’t like it. What was it?”

“How do you manage to remember all that?”

“I am the original elephant child. Are you going to tell me now?” “No.”

“If I guess will you tell me if I’m right?” “Probably not.”

“Why not?”

“Because I am exhausted, and I don’t want to fight tonight.”

I don’t want to fight either. I like lying here on the floor. It’s kind of cold but very solid. “You went to get a vasectomy.”

Henry is silent. He is so silent for so long that I want to put a mirror in front of his mouth to see if he’s breathing. Finally: “How did you know?”

“I didn’t exactly know. I was afraid that might be it. And I saw the note you made for the appointment with the doctor this morning.”

“I burned that note.”

“I saw the impression on the sheet below the one you wrote on.”

Henry groans. “Okay, Sherlock. You got me.” We continue to lie peaceably in the dark. “Go ahead.”

“What?”

“Get a vasectomy. If you have to.”

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Henry rolls over again and looks at me. All I see is his dark head against the dark ceiling. “You’re not yelling at me.”

“No. I can’t do this anymore, either. I give up. You win, we’ll stop trying to have a baby.” “I wouldn’t exactly describe that as winning. It just seems—necessary.”

“Whatever.”

Henry climbs off the bed and sits on the floor with me. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” He kisses me. I imagine the bleak November day in 1986 that Henry has just come from, the wind, the warmth of his body in the cold orchard. Soon, for the first time in many months, we are making love without worrying about the consequences. Henry has caught the cold I had sixteen years ago. Four weeks later, Henry has had his vasectomy and I discover that I am pregnant for the sixth time.

The Time Traveler’s Wife Audrey Niffenegger

BABY DREAMS

September, 2000 (Clare is 29)

CLARE: I dream I’m walking down stairs into my grandmother Abshire’s basement. The long soot mark from the time the crow flew down the chimney is still there on the left-hand wall; the steps are dusty and the handrail leaves gray marks on my hand as I steady myself; I descend and walk into the room that always scared me when I was little. In this room are deep shelves with rows and rows of canned goods, tomatoes and pickles, corn relish and beets. They look embalmed. In one of the jars is the small fetus of a duck. I carefully open the jar and pour the ducking and the fluid into my hand. It gasps and retches. “Why did you leave me?” it asks, when it can speak. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

I dream that my mother and I are walking together down a quiet residential street in South Haven. I am carrying a baby. As we walk, the baby becomes heavier and heavier, until I can barely lift it. I turn to Mama and tell her that I can’t carry this baby any farther; she takes it from me easily and we continue on. We come to a house and walk down the small walkway to its backyard. In the yard there are two screens and a slide projector. People are seated in lawn chairs, watching slides of trees. Half of a tree is on each screen. One half is summer and the other winter; they are the same tree, different seasons. The baby laughs and cries out in delight, I dream I am standing on the Sedgewick El platform, waiting for the Brown Line train. I am carrying two shopping bags, which upon inspection turn out to contain boxes of saltine crackers and a very small, stillborn baby with red hair, wrapped in Saran Wrap.

I dream I am at home, in my old room. It’s late at night, the room is dimly illuminated by the aquarium light. I suddenly realize, with horror, that there is a small animal swimming round and round the tank; I hastily remove the lid and net the animal, which turns out to be a gerbil with gills. “I’m so sorry” I say. “I forgot about you.” The gerbil just stares at me reproachfully.

I dream I am walking up stairs in Meadowlark House. All the furniture is gone, the rooms are empty, dust floats in the sunlight which makes golden pools on the polished oak floors. I walk down the long hall, glancing in the bedrooms, and come to my room, in which a small wooden cradle sits alone. There is no sound. I am afraid to look into the cradle. In Mama’s room white sheets are spread over the floor. At my feet is a tiny drop of blood, which touches the tip of a sheet and spreads as I watch until the entire floor is covered in blood.

Saturday, September 23, 2000 (Clare is 29, Henry is 37)

The Time Traveler’s Wife Audrey Niffenegger

CLARE: I’m living under water. Everything seems slow and far away. I know there’s a world up there, a sunlit quick world where time runs like dry sand through an hourglass, but down here, where I am, air and sound and time and feeling are thick and dense. I’m in a diving bell with this baby, just the two of us trying to survive in this alien atmosphere, but I feel very alone. Hello? Are you there? No answer comes back. He’s dead, I tell Amit. No, she says, smiling anxiously, no, Clare, see, there’s his heartbeat. T can’t explain. Henry hovers around trying to feed me, massage me, cheer me up, until I snap at him. I walk across the yard, into my studio. It’s like a museum, a mausoleum, so still, nothing living or breathing, no ideas here, just things, things that stare at me accusingly. I’m sorry, I tell my blank, empty drawing table, my dry vats and molds, the half-made sculptures. Stillborn, I think, looking at the blue iris paper-wrapped armature that seemed so hopeful in June. My hands are clean and soft and pink. I hate them. I hate this emptiness. I hate this baby. No. No, I don’t hate him. I just can’t find him.

I sit at my drawing board with a pencil in my hand and a sheet of white paper before me. Nothing comes. I close my eyes and all I can think of is red. So I get a tube of watercolor, cadmium red dark, and I get a big mop of a brush, and I fill a jar with water, and I begin to cover the paper with red. It glistens. The paper is limp with moisture, and darkens as it dries. I watch it drying. It smells of gum arabic. In the center of the paper, very small, in black ink, I draw a heart, not a silly Valentine but an anatomically correct heart, tiny, doll-like, and then veins, delicate road maps of veins, that reach all the way to the edges of the paper, that hold the small heart enmeshed like a fly in a spiderweb. See, there’s his heartbeat.

It has become evening. I empty the water jar and wash the brush. I lock the studio door, cross the yard, and let myself in the back door. Henry is making spaghetti sauce. He looks up as I come in.

“Better?” he asks.

“Better,” I reassure him, and myself.

Wednesday, September 27, 2000 (Clare is 29)

CLARE: It’s lying on the bed. There’s some blood, but not so much. It’s lying on its back, trying to breathe, its tiny ribcage quivering, but it’s too soon, it’s convulsing, and blood is gushing from the cord in time with the beating of its heart. I kneel beside the bed and pick it up, pick him up, my tiny boy, jerking like a small freshly caught fish, drowning in air. I hold him, so gently, but he doesn’t know I’m here, holding him, he is slippery and his skin is almost imaginary, his eyes are closed and I think wildly of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, of 911 and Henry, oh, don t go before Henry can see you! but his breath is bubbling with fluid, small sea creature breathing water and then he opens his mouth wide and I can see right

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through him and my hands are empty and he’s gone, gone.

I don’t know how long, time passes. I am kneeling. Kneeling, I pray. Dear God. Dear God. Dear God. The baby stirs in my womb. Hush. Hide.

I wake up in the hospital. Henry is there. The baby is dead.

The Time Traveler’s Wife Audrey Niffenegger

SEVEN

Thursday, December 28, 2000 (Henry is 33, and 37, Clare is 29)

HENRY: I am standing in our bedroom, in the future. It’s night, but moonlight gives the room a surreal, monochromatic distinctness. My ears are ringing, as they often do, in the future. I look down on Clare and myself, sleeping. It feels like death. I am sleeping tightly balled up, knees to chest, wound up in blankets, mouth slightly open. I want to touch me. I want to hold me in my arms, look into my eyes. But it won’t happen that way; I stand for long minutes staring intently at my sleeping future self. Eventually I walk softly to Clare’s side of the bed, kneel. It feels immensely like the present. I will myself to forget the other body in the bed, to concentrate on Clare.

She stirs, her eyes open. She isn’t sure where we are. Neither am I.

I am overwhelmed by desire, by a longing to be connected to Clare as strongly as possible, to be here, now. I kiss her very lightly, lingering, linking about nothing. She is drunk with sleep, moves her hand to my face and wakes more as she feels the solidity of me. Now she is present; she runs her hand down my arm, a caress. I carefully peel the sheet from her, so as not to disturb the other me, of whom Clare is still not aware. I wonder if this other self is somehow impervious to waking, but decide not to find out. I am lying on top of Clare, covering her completely with my body. I wish I could stop her from turning her head, but she will turn her head any minute now. As I penetrate Clare she looks at me and I think I don’t exist and a second later she turns her head and sees me. She cries out, not loudly, and looks back at me, above her, in her. Then she remembers, accepts it, this is pretty strange but it’s okay, and in this moment I love her more than life.

Monday, February 12, 2001 (Henry is 37, Clare is 29)

HENRY: Clare has been in a strange mood all week. She’s distracted. It is as though something only Clare can hear has riveted her attention, as though she’s receiving revelations from God through her fillings, or trying to decode satellite transmissions of Russian cryptology in her head. When I ask her about it, she just smiles and shrugs. This is so unlike Clare that I am alarmed, and immediately desist.

I come home from work one evening and I can see just by looking at Clare that something awful has happened. Her expression is scared and pleading. She comes close to me and stops, and doesn’t say anything. Someone has died, I think. Who has died? Dad? Kimy? Philip?

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“Say something,” I ask. “What’s happened?” “I’m pregnant.”

“How can you—” Even as I say it I know exactly how. “Never mind, I remember.” For me, that night was years ago, but for Clare it is only weeks in the past. I was coming from 1996, when we were trying despera

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