The time traveler's wife (44 page)

"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.

"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.

"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?"

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.

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.

"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. 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.