Part I: The Man Out of Time — CHRISTMAS EVE, ONE ALWAYS CRASHING IN THE SAME CAR - The Time Traveler's Wife

Saturday, December 24, 1988 (Henry is 40, Clare is 17)

Henry: It’s a dark winter afternoon. I’m in the basement in Meadowlark House in the Reading Room. Clare has left me some food: roast beef and cheese on whole wheat with mustard, an apple, a quart of milk, and an entire plastic tub of Christmas cookies, snowballs, cinnamon-nut diamonds, and peanut cookies with Hershey’s Kisses stuck into them. I am wearing my favorite jeans and a Sex Pistols T-shirt. I ought to be a happy camper, but I’m not: Clare has also left me today’s South Haven Daily; it’s dated December 24, 1988. Christmas Eve. This evening, in the Get Me High Lounge, in Chicago, my twenty-five-year-old self will drink until I quietly slide off the bar stool and onto the floor and end up having my stomach pumped at Mercy Hospital. It’s the nineteenth anniversary of my mother’s death.

I sit quietly and think about my mom. It’s funny how memory erodes. If all I had to work from were my childhood memories, my knowledge of my mother would be faded and soft, with a few sharp moments standing out. When I was five I heard her sing Lulu at the Lyric Opera. I remember Dad, sitting next to me, smiling up at Mom at the end of the first act with utter exhilaration. I remember sitting with Mom at Orchestra Hall, watching Dad play Beethoven under Boulez. I remember being allowed to come into the living room during a party my parents were giving and reciting Blake’s Tyger, Tyger burning bright to the guests, complete with growling noises; I was four, and when I was done my mother swept me up and kissed me and everyone applauded. She was wearing dark lipstick and I insisted on going to bed with her lip prints on my cheek. I remember her sitting on a bench in Warren Park while my dad pushed me on a swing, and she bobbed close and far, close and far.

One of the best and most painful things about time traveling has been the opportunity to see my mother alive. I have even spoken to her a few times; little things like “Lousy weather today, isn’t it?” I give her my seat on the El, follow her in the supermarket, watch her sing. I hang around outside the apartment my father still lives in, and watch the two of them, sometimes with my infant self, take walks, eat in restaurants, go to the movies. It’s the ‘60s, and they are elegant, young, brilliant musicians with all the world before them. They are happy as larks, they shine with their luck, their joy. When we run across each other they wave; they think I am someone who lives in the neighborhood, someone who takes a lot of walks, someone who gets his hair cut oddly and seems to mysteriously ebb and flow in age. I once heard my father wonder if I was a cancer patient. It still amazes me that Dad has never realized that this man lurking around the early years of their marriage was his son.

I see how my mother is with me. Now she is pregnant, now they bring me home from the hospital, now she takes me to the park in a baby carriage and sits memorizing scores, singing softly with small hand gestures to me, making faces and shaking toys at me. Now we walk hand in hand and admire the squirrels, the cars, the pigeons, anything that moves. She wears cloth coats and loafers with Capri pants. She is dark-haired with a dramatic face, a full mouth, wide eyes, short hair; she looks Italian but actually she’s Jewish. My mom wears lipstick, eye liner, mascara, blush, and eyebrow pencil to go to the dry cleaner’s. Dad is much as he always is, tall, spare, a quiet dresser, a wearer of hats. The difference is his face. He is deeply content. They touch each other often, hold hands, walk in unison. At the beach the three of us wear matching sunglasses and I have a ridiculous blue hat. We all lie in the sun slathered in baby oil. We drink Rum and Coke, and Hawaiian Punch.

My mother’s star is rising. She studies with Jehan Meek, with Mary Delacroix, and they carefully guide her along the paths of fame; she sings a number of small but gemlike roles, attracting the ears of Louis Behaire at the Lyric. She understudies Linea Waverleigh’s Aida. Then she is chosen to sing Carmen. Other companies take notice, and soon we are traveling around the world. She records Schubert for Decca, Verdi and Weill for EMI, and we go to London, to Paris, to Berlin, to New York. I remember only an endless series of hotel rooms and airplanes. Her performance at Lincoln Center is on television; I watch it with Gram and Gramps in Muncie. I am six years old and I hardly believe that it’s my mom, there in black and white on the small screen. She is singing Madama Butterfly.

They make plans to move to Vienna after the end of the Lyric’s ‘69 -’70 season. Dad auditions at the Philharmonic. Whenever the phone rings it’s Uncle Ish, Mom’s manager, or someone from a record label.

I hear the door at the top of the stairs open and clap shut and then slowly descending footsteps. Clare knocks quietly four times and I remove the straight-backed chair from under the doorknob. There’s still snow in her hair and her cheeks are red. She is seventeen years old. Clare throws her arms around me and hugs me excitedly. “Merry Christmas, Henry!” she says. “It’s so great you’re here!” I kiss her on the cheek; her cheer and bustle have scattered my thoughts but my sense of sadness and loss remains. I run my hands over her hair and come away with a small handful of snow that melts immediately.

“What’s wrong?” Clare takes in the untouched food, my uncheerful demeanor. “You’re sulking because there’s no mayo?”

“Hey. Hush.” I sit down on the broken old La-Z-Boy and Clare squeezes in beside me. I put my arm around her shoulders. She puts her hand on my inner thigh. I remove it, and hold it. Her hand is cold. “Have I ever told you about my mom?”

“No.” Clare is all ears; she’s always eager for any bits of autobiography I let drop. As the dates on the List grow few and our two years of separation loom large, Clare is secretly convinced she can find me in real time if I would only dole out a few facts. Of course, she can’t, because I won’t, and she doesn’t.

We each eat a cookie. “Okay. Once upon a time, I had a mom. I had a dad, too, and they were very deeply in love. And they had me. And we were all pretty happy. And both of them were really terrific at their jobs, and my mother, especially, was great at what she did, and we used to travel all over, seeing the hotel rooms of the world. So it was almost Christmas—”

“What year?”

“The year I was six. It was the morning of Christmas Eve, and my dad was in Vienna because we were going to move there soon and he was finding us an apartment. So the idea was that Dad would fly into the airport and Mom and I would drive out and pick him up and we would all continue on to Grandma’s house for the holidays.

“It was a gray, snowy morning and the streets were covered in sheets of ice that hadn’t been salted yet. Mom was a nervous driver. She hated expressways, hated driving to the airport, and had only agreed to do this because it made a lot of sense. We got up early, and she packed the car. I was wearing a winter coat, a knit hat, boots, jeans, a pullover sweater, underwear, wool socks that were kind of tight, and mittens. She was dressed entirely in black, which was more unusual then than it is now.”

Clare drinks some of the milk directly from the carton. She leaves a cinnamon-colored lipstick print. “What kind of car?”

“It was a white ‘62 Ford Fairlane.”

“What’s that?”

“Look it up. It was built like a tank. It had fins. My parents loved it— it had a lot of history for them.

“So we got in the car. I sat in the front passenger seat, we both wore our seatbelts. And we drove. The weather was absolutely awful. It was hard to see, and the defrost in that car wasn’t the greatest. We went through this maze of residential streets, and then we got on the expressway. It was after rush hour, but traffic was a mess because of the weather and the holiday So we were moving maybe fifteen, twenty miles an hour. My mother stayed in the right-hand lane, probably because she didn’t want to change lanes without being able to see very well and because we weren’t going to be on the expressway very long before we exited for the airport.

“We were behind a truck, well behind it, giving it plenty of room up there. As we passed an entrance a small car, a red Corvette, actually, got on behind us. The Corvette, which was being driven by a dentist who was only slightly inebriated, at 10:30 a.m., got on just a bit too quickly, and was unable to slow down soon enough because of the ice on the road, and hit our car. And in ordinary weather conditions, the Corvette would have been mangled and the indestructible Ford Fairlane would have had a bent fender and it wouldn’t have been that big of a deal.

“But the weather was bad, the roads were slick, so the shove from the Corvette sent our car accelerating forward just as traffic slowed down. The truck ahead of us was barely moving. My mother was pumping the brakes but nothing was happening.

“We hit the truck practically in slow motion, or so it seemed to me. In actuality we were going about forty. The truck was an open pickup truck full of scrap metal. When we hit it, a large sheet of steel flew off the back of the truck, came through our windshield, and decapitated my mother.”

Clare has her eyes closed. “No.”

“It’s true.”

“But you were right there—you were too short!”

“No, that wasn’t it, the steel embedded in my seat right where my forehead should have been. I have a scar where it started to cut my forehead.” I show Clare. “It got my hat. The police couldn’t figure it out. All my clothes were in the car, on the seat and the floor, and I was found stark naked by the side of the road.”

“You time traveled.”

“Yes. I time traveled.” We are silent for a moment. “It was only the second time it ever happened to me. I had no idea what was going on. I was watching us plow into this truck, and then I was in the hospital. In fact, I was pretty much unhurt, just in shock.”

“How.. .why do you think it happened?”

“Stress—pure fear. I think my body did the only trick it could.”

Clare turns her face to mine, sad and excited. “So...”

“So. Mom died, and I didn’t. The front end of the Ford crumpled up, the steering column went through Mom’s chest, her head went through the now empty windshield and into the back of the truck, there was an unbelievable amount of blood. The guy in the Corvette was unscathed. The truck driver got out of his truck to see what hit him, saw Mom, fainted on the road and was run over by a school bus driver who didn’t see him and was gawking at the accident. The truck driver had two broken legs. Meanwhile, I was completely absent from the scene for ten minutes and forty-seven seconds. I don’t remember where I went; maybe it was only a second or two for me. Traffic came to a complete halt. Ambulances were trying to come from three different directions and couldn’t get near us for half an hour. Paramedics came running on foot. I appeared on the shoulder. The only person who saw me appear was a little girl; she was in the back seat of a green Chevrolet station wagon. Her mouth opened, and she just stared and stared.”

“But—Henry, you were—you said you don’t remember. And how could you know this anyway? Ten minutes and forty-seven seconds? Exactly?”

I am quiet for a while, searching for the best way to explain. “You know about gravity, right? The larger something is, the more mass it has, the more gravitational pull it exerts? It pulls smaller things to it, and they orbit around and around?”

“Yes....”

“My mother dying...it’s the pivotal thing...everything else goes around and around it...I dream about it, and I also—time travel to it. Over and over. If you could be there, and could hover over the scene of the accident, and you could see every detail of it, all the people, cars, trees, snowdrifts—if you had enough time to really look at everything, you would see me. I am in cars, behind bushes, on the bridge, in a tree. I have seen it from every angle, I am even a participant in the aftermath: I called the airport from a nearby gas station to page my father with the message to come immediately to the hospital. I sat in the hospital waiting room and watched my father walk through on his way to find me. He looks gray and ravaged. I walked along the shoulder of the road, waiting for my young self to appear, and I put a blanket around my thin child’s shoulders. I looked into my small uncomprehending face, and I thought...I thought....”I am weeping now. Clare wraps her arms around me and I cry soundlessly into her mohair-sweatered breasts.

“What? What, Henry?”

“I thought, I should have died, too!”

We hold each other. I gradually get hold of myself. I have made a mess of Clare’s sweater. She goes to the laundry room and comes back wearing one of Alicia’s white polyester chamber music playing shirts. Alicia is only fourteen, but she’s already taller and bigger than Clare. I stare at Clare, standing before me, and I am sorry to be here, sorry to ruin her Christmas.

“I’m sorry, Clare. I didn’t mean to put all this sadness on you. I just find Christmas.. .difficult.”

“Oh, Henry! I’m so glad you’re here, and, you know, I’d rather know—I mean, you just come out of nowhere, and disappear, and if I know things, about your life, you seem more...real. Even terrible things.. .I need to know as much as you can say.” Alicia is calling down the stairs for Clare. It is time for Clare to join her family, to celebrate Christmas. I stand, and we kiss, cautiously, and Clare says “Coming!” and gives me a smile and then she’s running up the stairs. I prop the chair under the door again and settle in for a long night.