The time traveler's wife Read Free

24, 1989. I count. There are 152 dates,
written with great care in the large open Palmer Method blue ball point pen of a
six-year-old.
    "You made the list? These are all
accurate?"
    "Actually, you dictated this to me. You
told me a few years ago that you memorized the dates from this list. So I don't
know how exactly this exists; I mean, it seems sort of like a Mobius strip. But
they are accurate. I used them to know when to go down to the Meadow to meet
you." The waitress reappears and we order: Tom Kha Kai for me and Gang
Mussaman for Clare. A waiter brings tea and I pour us each a cup.
    "What is the Meadow?" I am practically
hopping with excitement. I have never met anyone from my future before, much
less a Botticelli who has encountered me 152 times.
    "The Meadow is a part of my parents' place
up in Michigan. There's woods at one edge of it, and the house on the opposite
end. More or less in the middle is a clearing about ten feet in diameter with a
big rock in it, and if you're in the clearing no one at the house can see you
because the land swells up and then dips in the clearing. I used to play there
because I liked to play by myself and I thought no one knew I was there. One
day when I was in first grade I came home from school and went out to the
clearing and there you were."
    "Stark naked and probably throwing
up."
    "Actually, you seemed pretty
self-possessed. I remember you knew my name, and I remember you vanishing quite
spectacularly. In retrospect, it's obvious that you had been there before. I
think the first time for you was in 1981; I was ten. You kept saying 'Oh my
god,' and staring at me. Also, you seemed pretty freaked out about the nudity,
and by then I just kind of took it for granted that this old nude guy was going
to magically appear from the future and demand clothing." Clare smiles.
"And food."
    "What's funny?"
    "I made you some pretty weird meals over
the years. Peanut butter and anchovy sandwiches. Pate and beets on Ritz
crackers. I think partly I wanted to see if there was anything you wouldn't eat
and partly I was trying to impress you with my culinary wizardry."
    "How old was I?"
    "I think the oldest I have seen you was
forty-something. I'm not sure about youngest; maybe about thirty? How old are
you now?"
    "Twenty-eight."
    "You look very young to me now. The last
few years you were mostly in your early forties, and you seemed to be having
kind of a rough life... It's hard to say. When you're little all adults seem
big, and old."
    "So what did we do? In the Meadow? That's
a lot of time, there."
    Clare smiles. "We did lots of things. It
changed depending on my age, and the weather. You spent a lot of time helping me
do my homework. We played games. Mostly we just talked about stuff. When I was
really young I thought you were an angel; I asked you a lot of questions about
God. When I was a teenager I tried to get you to make love to me, and you never
would, which of course made me much more determined about it. I think you
thought you were going to warp me sexually, somehow. In some ways you were very
parental."
    "Oh. That's probably good news but somehow
at the moment I don't seem to want to be thought of as parental." Our eyes
meet. We both smile and we are conspirators. "What about winter? Michigan
winters are pretty extreme."
    "I used to smuggle you into our basement;
the house has a huge basement with several rooms, and one of them is a storage
room and the furnace is on the other side of the wall. We call it the Reading
Room because all the useless old books and magazines are stored there. One time
you were down there and we had a blizzard and nobody went to school or to work
and I thought I was going to go crazy trying to get food for you because there
wasn't all that much food in the house. Etta was supposed to go grocery
shopping when the storm hit. So you were stuck reading old Reader's Digests for
three days, living on sardines and