The time traveler's wife (40 page)

"Not much. We went to see another doctor
today."

"Hey, me too. Which one?"

"I forget the name. An old guy with a lot
of hair in his ears." "How was it?"

Henry shrugs. "He didn't believe me."

"Uh-huh. You should just give up. None of
them ever will believe you. Well, the one I saw today believed me, I think, but
he didn't want to help."

"How come?"

"He just didn't like me, I guess."

"Oh. Hey, do you want some blankets?"

"Um, maybe just one." I strip the bedspread
off Henry's bed and curl up on the floor. "Good night. Sleep tight."
I see the flash of my small self's white teeth in the blueness of the bedroom,
and then he turns away into a tight ball of sleeping boy and I am left staring
at my old ceiling, willing myself back to Clare.

Clare: Henry walks out of the building looking
unhappy, and suddenly he cries out and he's gone. I jump out of the car and run
over to the spot where Henry was, just an instant ago, but of course there's
just a pile of clothing there, now. I gather everything up and stand for a few
heartbeats in the middle of the street, and as I stand there I see a man's face
looking down at me from a window on the third floor. Then he disappears. I walk
back to the car and get in, and sit staring at Henry's light blue shirt and
black pants, wondering if there's any point in staying here. I've got
Brideshead Revisited in my purse, so I decide to hang around for a while in
case Henry reappears soon. As I turn to find the book I see a red-haired man
running toward the car. He stops at the passenger door and peers in at me. This
must be Kendrick. I flip the lock and he climbs into the car, and then he
doesn't know what to say.

"Hello," I say. "You must be
David Kendrick. I'm Clare DeTamble."

"Yes—" he's completely flustered,
"yes, yes. Your husband—"

"Just vanished in broad daylight."

"Yes!"

"You seem surprised."

"Well—"

"Didn't he tell you? He does that."
So far I'm not very impressed with this guy, but I persevere. "I'm so
sorry about your baby. But Henry says he's a darling kid, and that he draws
really well and has a lot of imagination. And your daughter's very gifted, and
it will all be fine. You'll see."

He's gaping at me. "We don't have a
daughter. Just—Colin."

"But you will. Her name is Nadia."

"It's been a shock. My wife is very
upset... "

"But it will be okay. Really." To my
surprise this stranger begins to cry, his shoulders shaking, his face buried in
his hands. After a few minutes he stops, and raises his head. I hand him a
Kleenex, and he blows his nose.

"I'm so sorry," he begins.

"Never mind. What happened in there, with
you and Henry? It went badly." "How do you know?"

"He was all stressed out, so he lost his
grip on now."

"Where is he?" Kendrick looks around
as though I might be hiding Henry in the back seat. "I don't know. Not
here. We were hoping you could help, but I guess not."

"Well, I don't see how—" At this
instant Henry appears in exactly the same spot he disappeared from. There's a
car about twenty feet away, and the driver slams his brakes as Henry throws
himself across the hood of our car. The man rolls down his window and Henry
sits up and makes a little how, and the man yells something and drives off. My
blood is singing in rny ears. I look over at Kendrick, who is speechless. I
jump out of the car, and Henry eases himself off the hood.

"Hi, Clare. That was close, huh?" I
wrap my arms around him; he's shaking. "Have you got my clothes?"
"Yeah, right here—oh hey, Kendrick is here."

"What? Where?"

"In the car."

"Why?"

"He saw you disappear and it seems to have
affected his brain."

Henry sticks his head in the driver's side
door. "Hello." He grabs his clothing and starts to get dressed.
Kendrick gets out of the car and trots around to us.

"Where were you?"

"1971. I was drinking Ovaltine with
myself, as an eight-year-old, in my old bedroom, at one in the morning. I was
there for about an hour. Why do you ask?" Henry regards Kendrick coldly as
he knots his tie.

"Unbelievable."

"You can go on saying that as long as you
want, but unfortunately it's true." "You mean you became eight years
old?"

"No. I mean I was sitting in my old
bedroom in my dad's apartment, in 1971, just as I am, thirty-two years old, in
the company of myself, at eight. Drinking Ovaltine. We were chatting about the incredulity
of the medical profession." Henry walks around to the side of the car and
opens the door. "Clare, let's vamoose. This is pointless."

I walk to the driver's side. "Goodbye, Dr.
Kendrick. Good luck with Colin."

"Wait—" Kendrick pauses, collects himself.
"This is a genetic disease?"

"Yes," says Henry. "It's a
genetic disease, and we're trying to have a child "

Kendrick smiles, sadly. "A chancy thing to
do."

I smile back at him. "We're used to taking
chances. Goodbye." Henry and I get into the car, and drive away. As I pull
onto Lake Shore Drive I glance at Henry, who to my surprise is grinning
broadly.

"What are you so pleased about?"

"Kendrick. He is totally hooked."

"You think?"

"Oh, yeah."

"Well, great. But he seemed kind of
dense." "He's not."

"Okay." We drive home in silence, an
entirely different quality of silence than we arrived with. Kendrick calls
Henry that evening, and they make an appointment to begin the work of figuring
out how to keep Henry in the here and now.

Friday, April 12, 1996 (Henry is 32)

Henry: Kendrick sits with his head bowed. His
thumbs move around the perimeter of his palms as though they want to escape
from his hands. As the afternoon has passed the office has been illuminated
with golden light; Kendrick has sat immobile except for those twitching thumbs,
listening to me talk. The red Indian carpet, the beige twill armchairs' steel
legs have flared bright; Kendrick's cigarettes, a pack of Camels, have sat
untouched while he listened. The gold rims of his round glasses have been
picked out by the sunlight; the edge of Kendrick's right ear has glowed red,
his foxish hair and pink skin have been as burnished by the light as the yellow
chrysanthemums in the brass bowl on the table between us. All afternoon,
Kendrick has sat there in his chair, listening. And I have told him everything.
The beginning, the learning, the rush of surviving and the pleasure of knowing
ahead, the terror of know-'ng things that can't be averted, the anguish of
loss. Now we sit in silence and finally he raises his head and looks at me. In
Kendrick's light eyes is a sadness that I want to undo; after laying everything
before him I want to take it all back and leave, excuse him from the burden of
having to think about any of this. He reaches for his cigarettes, selects one,
lights it, inhales and then exhales a blue cloud that turns white as it crosses
the path of the light along with its shadow.

"Do you have difficulty sleeping?" he
asks me, his voice rasping from disuse.

"Yes."

"Is there any particular time of day that
you tend to.. .vanish?" "No.. .well, early morning maybe more than
other times." "Do you get headaches?"

"Yes."

"Migraines?"

"No. Pressure headaches. With vision
distortion, auras."

"Hmm." Kendrick stands up. His knees
crack. He paces around the office, smoking, following the edge of the rug. It's
beginning to bug me when he stops and sits down again. "Listen," he
says, frowning, "there are these things called clock genes. They govern
circadian rhythms, keep you in sync with the sun, that sort of thing. We've
found them in many different types of cells, all over the body, but they are
especially tied to vision, and you seem to experience many of your symptoms
visually. The suprachiasmatic nucleus of the hypothalamus, which is located right
above your optic chiasm, serves as the reset button, as it were, of your sense
of time—so that's what I want to begin with."

"Um, sure," I say, since he's looking
at me as though he expects a reply. Kendrick gets up again and strides over to
a door I haven't noticed before, opens it and disappears for a minute. When he
returns he's holding latex gloves and a syringe.

"Roll up your sleeve," Kendrick
demands.

"What are you doing?" I ask, rolling
my sleeve above my elbow. He doesn't answer, unwraps the syringe, swabs my arm
and ties it off, sticks me expertly. I look away. The sun has passed, leaving
the office in gloom.

"Do you have health insurance?" he
asks me, removing the needle and untying my arm. He puts cotton and a Band-Aid
over the puncture.

"No. I'll pay for everything myself."
I press my fingers against the sore spot, bend my elbow. Kendrick smiles.
"No, no. You can be my little science experiment, hitchhike on my NIH
grant for this." "For what?"

"We're not going to mess around,
here." Kendrick pauses, stands holding the used gloves and the little vial
of my blood that he's just drawn. "We're going to have your DNA
sequenced."

"I thought that took years."

"It does, if you're doing the whole
genome. We are going to begin by looking at the most likely sites; Chromosome
17, for example." Kendrick throws the latex and needle in a can labeled
Biohazard and writes something on the little red vial of blood. He sits back
down across from me and places the vial on the table next to the Camels.

"But the human genome won't be sequenced
until 2000. What will you compare it to?"

"2000? So soon? You're sure? I guess you
are. But to answer your question, a disease that is as—disruptive—as yours
often appears as a kind of stutter, a repeated bit of code that says, in
essence, Bad News. Huntington's disease, for instance, is just a bunch of extra
CAG triplets on Chromosome 4."

I sit up and stretch. I could use some coffee.
"So that's it? Can I run away and play now?"

"Well, I want to have your head scanned,
but not today. I'll make an appointment for you at the hospital. MRI, CAT scan,
and X-rays. I'm also going to send you to a friend of mine, Alan Larson; he has
a sleep lab here on campus."

"Fun " I say, standing up slowly so
the blood doesn't all rush to my head. Kendrick tilts his face up at me. I
can't see his eyes, his glasses are shiny opaque disks at this angle. "It
is fun," he says. "It's such a great puzzle, and we finally have the
tools to find out—"

"To find out what?"

"Whatever it is. Whatever you are."
Kendrick smiles and I notice that his teeth are uneven and yellowed. He stands,
extends his hand, and I shake it, thank him; there's an awkward pause: we are
strangers again after the intimacies of the afternoon, and then I walk out of
his office, down stairs, into the street, where the sun has been waiting for
me. Whatever I am. What am I? What am I?

A VERY SMALL
SHOE

Spring, 1996 (Clare is 24, Henry is 32)

Clare: When Henry and I had been married for
about two years we decided, without talking about it very much, to see if we
could have a baby. I knew that Henry was not at all optimistic about our
chances of having a baby and I was not asking him or myself why this might be
because I was afraid that he had seen us in the future without any baby and I just
didn't want to know about that. And I didn't want to think about the
possibility that Henry's difficulties with time travel might be hereditary or
somehow mess up the whole baby thing, as it were. So I was simply not thinking
about a lot of important stuff because I was completely drunk with the notion
of a baby: a baby that looked sort of like Henry, black hair and those intense
eyes and maybe very pale like me and smelled like milk and talcum powder and
skin, a sort of dumpling baby, gurgling and laughing at everyday stuff, a
monkey baby, a small cooing sort of baby. I would dream about babies. In my
dreams I would climb a tree and find a very small shoe. In a nest; I would
suddenly discover that the cat/book/sandwich I thought I Was holding was really
a baby; I would be swimming in the lake and find a colony of babies growing at
the bottom. I suddenly began to see babies everywhere; a sneezing red-haired
girl in a sunbonnet at the A&P; a tiny staring Chinese boy, son of the
owners, in the Golden Wok (home of wonderful vegetarian eggrolls); a sleeping
almost bald baby at a Batman movie. In a fitting room in a JCPenney a very
trusting woman actually let me hold her three-month-old daughter; it was all I
could do to continue sitting in that pink-beige vinyl chair and not spring up
and run madly away hugging that tiny soft being to my breasts. 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.