The time traveler's wife (39 page)

"Wow," I say. Kimy smiles. "That
don't happen so much these days. Now he's a grown-up, when he comes. But he
don't come as much as he used to."

"I've never seen him go forward like that,
into the future."

"Well, you don't have so much future with
him, yet."

It takes me a second to figure out what she
means. When I do, I wonder what kind of future it will be, and then I think
about the future expanding, gradually opening enough for Henry to come to me
from the past. I drink my chocolate and stare out into Kimy's frozen yard.

"Do you miss him?" I ask her.

"Yeah, I miss him. But he's grown-up now.
When he comes like a little boy, it's like a ghost, you know?" I nod. Kimy
finishes her game, gathers up the cards. She looks at me, smiles. "When
you guys gonna have a baby, huh?"

"I don't know, Kimy. I'm not sure we
can."

She stands up, walks over to the stove and
stirs the stew. "Well, you never know." "True." You never
know. Later, Henry and I are lying in bed. Snow is still falling; the radiators
make faint clucking noises. I turn to him and he looks at me and I say,
"Let's make a baby."

Monday, March 11, 1996 (Henry is 32)

Henry: I have tracked down Dr. Kendrick; he is
affiliated with the University of Chicago Hospital. It is a vile wet cold day
in March. March in Chicago seems like it ought to be an improvement over
February, but sometimes it isn't. I get on the IC and sit facing backwards.
Chicago streams out behind us and soon enough we are at 59th Street. I
disembark and struggle through the sleety rain. It's 9:00 a.m., it's Monday.
Everyone is drawn into themselves, resisting being back in the workweek. I like
Hyde Park. It makes me feel as though I've fallen out of Chicago and into some
other city, Cambridge, perhaps. The gray stone buildings are dark with rain and
the trees drip fat icy drops on passersby. I feel the blank serenity of the
fait accompli; I will be able to convince Kendrick, though I have failed to
convince so many doctors, because I do convince him. He will be my doctor
because in the future he is my doctor. I enter a small faux Mies building next
to the hospital. I take the elevator to Three, open the glass door that bears
the golden legend Drs. C. P. Shane and D. L Kendrick, announce myself to the
receptionist and sit in one of the deep lavender upholstered chairs. The waiting
room is pink and violet, I suppose to soothe the patients. Dr. Kendrick is a
geneticist, and not incidentally, a philosopher; the latter, I think, must be
of some use in coping with the harsh practical realities of the former. Today
there is no one here but me. I'm ten minutes early. The wallpaper is broad
stripes the exact color of Pepto-Bismol. It clashes with the painting of a
watermill opposite me, mostly browns and greens. The furniture is
pseudocolonial, but there's a pretty nice rug, some kind of soft Persian
carpet, and I feel kind of sorry for it, stuck here in this ghastly waiting
room. The receptionist is a kind-looking middle-aged woman with very deep
wrinkles from years of tanning; she is deeply tanned now, in March in Chicago.
At 9:35 I hear voices in the corridor and a blond woman enters the waiting room
with a little boy in a small wheelchair. The boy appears to have cerebral palsy
or something like it. The woman smiles at me; I smile back. As she turns I see
that she is pregnant. The receptionist says, "You may go in, Mr.
DeTamble," and I smile at the boy as I pass him. His enormous eyes take me
in, but he doesn't smile back. As I enter Dr. Kendrick's office, he is making
notes in a file. I sit down and he continues to write. He is younger than I
thought he would be; late thirties. I always expect doctors to be old men. I
can't help it, it's left over from my childhood of endless medical men.
Kendrick is red-haired, thin-faced, bearded, with thick wire-rimmed glasses. He
looks a little bit like D. H. Lawrence. He's wearing a nice charcoal-gray suit
and a narrow dark green tie with a rainbow trout tie clip. An ashtray overflows
at his elbow; the room is suffused with cigarette smoke, although he isn't
smoking right now. Everything is very modern: tubular steel, beige twill, blond
wood. He looks up at me and smiles.

"Good morning, Mr. DeTamble. What can I do
for you?" He is looking at his calendar. "I don't seem to have any
information about you, here? What seems to be the problem?"

"Dasein."

Kendrick is taken aback. " Dasein? Being?
How so?"

"I have a condition which I'm told will
become known as Chrono-Impairment. I have difficulty staying in the
present." "I'm sorry?"

"I time travel. Involuntarily."

Kendrick is flustered, but subdues it. I like him.
He is attempting to deal with me in a manner befitting a sane person, although
I'm sure he is considering which of his psychiatrist friends to refer me to.

"But why do you need a geneticist? Or are
you consulting me as a philosopher?"

"It's a genetic disease. Although it will
be pleasant to have someone to chat with about the larger implications of the
problem."

"Mr. DeTamble. You are obviously an
intelligent man...I've never heard of this disease. I can't do anything for
you." "You don't believe me." "Right. I don't."

Now I am smiling, ruefully. I feel horrible
about this, but it has to be done. "Well. I've been to quite a few doctors
in my life, but this is the first time I've ever had anything to offer in the
way of proof. Of course no one ever believes me. You and your wife are
expecting a child next month?"

He is wary. "Yes. How do you know?"

"In a few years I look up your child's
birth certificate. I travel to my wife's past, I write down the information in
this envelope. She gives it to me when we meet in the present. I give it to
you, now. Open it after your son is born."

"We're having a daughter."

"No, you're not, actually," I say
gently. "But let's not quibble about it. Save that, open it after the
child is born. Don't throw it out. After you read it, call me, if you want
to." I get up to leave. "Good luck," I say, although I do not
believe in luck, these days. I am deeply sorry for him, but there's no other
way to do this.

"Goodbye, Mr. DeTamble," Dr. Kendrick
says coldly. I leave. As I get into the elevator I think to myself that he must
be opening the envelope right now. Inside is a sheet of typing paper. It says:

Colin Joseph Kendrick April 6, 1996 1:18 a.m. 6
lbs. 8 oz Caucasian male Down Syndrome

Saturday, April 6, 1996, 5:32 a.m. (Henry is
32, Clare is 24)

Henry: We are sleeping all tangled together;
all night we have been waking, turning, getting up, coming back to bed. The
Kendricks' baby was born in the early hours of today. Soon the phone will ring.
It does ring. The phone is on Clare's side of the bed, and she picks it up and
says "Hello?" very quietly, and hands it to me.

"How did you know? How did you know?"
Kendrick is almost whispering.

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry." Neither of
us says anything for a minute. I think Kendrick is crying.

"Come to my office."

"When?"

"Tomorrow," he says, and hangs up the
phone.

Sunday, April 7, 1996 (Henry is 32 and 8, Clare
is 24)

Henry: Clare and I are driving to Hyde Park.
We've been silent for most of the ride. It's raining, and the wipers provide the
rhythm section for the water streaming off the car and the wind. As though
continuing a conversation we haven't exactly been having. Clare says, "It
doesn't seem fair."

"What? Kendrick?" "Yeah."

"Nature isn't fair."

"Oh—no. I mean, yeah, it's sad about the
baby, but actually I meant us. It seems not fair that we're exploiting
this." "Unsporting, you mean?"

"Uh-huh."

I sigh. The 57th Street exit sign appears and
Clare changes lanes and pulls off the drive. "I agree with you, but it's
too late. And I tried... "

"Well, it's too late, anyway."

"Right." We lapse into silence again.
I direct Clare through the maze of one-way streets, and soon we are sitting in
front of Kendrick's office building.

"Good luck."

"Thanks." I am nervous.

"Be nice." Clare kisses me. We look
at each other, all our hopes submerged in feeling guilty about Kendrick. Clare
smiles, and looks away. I get out of the car and watch as Clare drives off
slowly down 59th Street and crosses the Midway. She has an errand to do at the
Smart Gallery. The main door is unlocked and I take the elevator up to Three.
There's no one in Kendrick's waiting room, and I walk through it and down the
hall. Kendrick's door is open. The lights are off. Kendrick stands behind his
desk with his back to me, looking out the window at the rainy street below. I
stand silently in the doorway for a long moment. Finally I walk into the
office. Kendrick turns and I am shocked at the difference in his face. Ravaged
is not the word. He is emptied; something has gone that was there before.
Security; trust; confidence. I am so accustomed to living on a metaphysical
trapeze that I forget that other people tend to enjoy more solid ground.

"Henry DeTamble," says Kendrick.

"Hello."

"Why did you come to me?"

"Because I had come to you. It wasn't a
matter of choice." Fate?

"Call it whatever you want. Things get
kind of circular, when you're me. Cause and effect get muddled."

Kendrick sits down at his desk. The chair
squeaks. The only other sound is the rain. He reaches in his pocket for his
cigarettes, finds them, looks at me. I shrug. He lights one, and smokes for a
little while. I regard him.

"How did you know?" he says.

"I told you before. I saw the birth
certificate."

"When?" "1999."

"Impossible." "Explain it,
then."

Kendrick shakes his head. "I can't. I've
been trying to work it out, and I can't. Everything—was correct. The hour, the
day, the weight, the.. .abnormality." He looks at me desperately.
"What if we had decided to name him something else— Alex, or Fred, or Sam...?"

I shake my head, and stop when I realize I'm
mimicking him. "But you didn't. I won't go so far as to say you couldn't,
but you did not. All I was doing was reporting. I'm not a psychic."

"Do you have any children?"

"No." I don't want to discuss it,
although eventually I will have to. "I'm sorry about Colin. But you know,
he's really a wonderful boy."

Kendrick stares at me. "I tracked down the
mistake. Our test results were accidentally switched with those of a couple
named Kenwick."

"What would you have done if you had
known?"

He looks away. "I don't know. My wife and
I are Catholic, so I imagine the end result would be the same. It's ironic..
"

"Yes."

Kendrick stubs out his cigarette and lights
another. I resign myself to a smoke-induced headache. "How does it work?"

"What?"

"This supposed time travel thing that you
supposedly do." He sounds angry. "You say some magic words? Climb in
a machine?"

I try to explain plausibly. "No. I don't
do anything. It just happens. I can't control it, I just—one minute everything
is fine, the next I'm somewhere else, some other time. Like changing channels.
I just suddenly find myself in another time and place."

"Well, what do you want me to do about
it?"

I lean forward, for emphasis. "I want you
to find out why, and stop it."

Kendrick smiles. It's not a friendly smile.
"Why would you want to do that? It seems like it would be quite handy for
you. Knowing all these things that other people don't know."

"It's dangerous. Sooner or later it's
going to kill me."

"I can't say that I would mind that."

There's no point in continuing. I stand up, and
walk to the door. "Goodbye, Dr. Kendrick." I walk slowly down the
hall, giving him a chance to call me back, but he doesn't. As I stand in the
elevator I reflect miserably that whatever went wrong, it just had to go that
way, and sooner or later it will right itself. As I open the door I see Clare
waiting for me across the street in the car. She turns her head and there is
such an expression of hope, such anticipation in her face that I am overwhelmed
by sadness, I am dreading telling her, and as I walk across the street to her
my ears are buzzing and I lose my balance and I am falling but instead of
pavement I hit carpeting and I lie where I fall until I hear a familiar child's
voice saying "Henry, are you okay?" and I look up to see myself, age
eight, sitting up in bed, looking at me.

"I'm fine, Henry." He looks dubious.
"Really, I'm okay."

"You want some Ovaltine?"

"Sure." He gets out of bed, toddles
across the bedroom and down the hall. It's the middle of the night. He fusses
around in the kitchen for a while, and eventually returns with two mugs of hot
chocolate. We drink them slowly, in silence. When we're done Henry takes the
mugs back to the kitchen and washes them. No sense in leaving the evidence
around, When he comes back I ask, "What's up?"