Part II: A Past That Is Also a Future — THE EPISODE OF THE MONROE STREET PARKING GARAGE - The Time Traveler's Wife

Monday, January 7, 2006 (Clare is 34, Henry is 42)

Clare: We are sleeping deep early morning winter sleep when the phone rings. I snap into wakefulness, my heart surging and realize Henry is there beside me. He reaches over me and picks up the phone. I glance at the clock; it’s 4:32 a.m. ‘“Lo” says Henry. He listens for a long minute. I am wide awake now. Henry is expressionless. “Okay. Stay there. We’ll leave right now.” He leans over and replaces the receiver.

“Who was it?”

“Me. It was me. I’m down in the Monroe Street Parking Garage, no clothes, fifteen degrees below zero. God, I hope the car starts.”

We jump out of bed and throw on yesterday’s clothes. Henry is booted and has his coat on before I’m in my jeans and he runs out to start the car. I stuff Henry’s shirt and long underwear and jeans and socks and boots and extra coat and mittens and a blanket into a shopping bag, wake Alba and stuff her into her coat and boots, fly into my coat and out the door. I pull out of the garage before the car is warmed up and it dies. I restart it, we sit for a minute and I try again. It snowed six inches yesterday and Ainslie is rutted with ice. Alba is whining in her car seat and Henry shushes her. When we get to Lawrence I speed up and in ten minutes we are on the Drive; there’s no one out at this hour. The Honda’s heater purrs. Over the lake the sky is becoming lighter. Everything is blue and orange, brittle in the extreme cold. As we sail down Lake Shore Drive I have a strong deja vu: the cold, the lake in dreamy silence, the sodium glow of the streetlights: I’ve been here before, been here before. I’m deeply enmeshed in this moment and it stretches on, carrying me away from the strangeness of the thing into awareness of the duplicity of now; although we are speeding through this winter cityscape time stands immobile. We pass Irving, Belmont, Fullerton, LaSalle: I exit at Michigan. We fly down the deserted corridor of expensive shops, Oak Street, Chicago, Randolph, Monroe, and now we are diving down into the subterranean concrete world of the parking garage. I take the ticket the ghostly female machine voice offers me. “Drive to the northwest end,” says Henry. “The pay phone by the security station.” I follow his instructions. The deja vu is gone. I feel as though I’ve been abandoned by a protective angel. The garage is virtually empty. I speed across acres of yellow lines to the pay phone: the receiver dangles from its cord. No Henry.

“Maybe you got back to the present?”

“But maybe not...” Henry is confused, and so am I. We get out of the car. It’s cold down here. My breath condenses and vanishes. I don’t feel as though we should leave, but I don’t have any idea what might have happened. I walk over to the security station and peer in the window. No guard. The video monitors show empty concrete. “Shit. Where would I go? Let’s drive around.” We get back into the car and cruise slowly through the vast pillared chambers of vacant space, past signs directing us to Go Slow, More Parking, Remember Your Car’s Location. No Henry anywhere. We look at each other in defeat.

“When were you coming from?”

“I didn’t say”

We drive home in silence. Alba is sleeping. Henry stares out the window. The sky is cloudless and pink in the east, and there are more cars out now, early commuters. As we wait for the stoplight at Ohio Street I hear seagulls squawking. The streets are dark with salt and water. The city is soft, white, obscured by snow. Everything is beautiful. I am detached, I am a movie. We are seemingly unscathed, but sooner or later there will be hell to pay.