Thank God."
"Why 'thank God'? I think that would be fun. You could go places together."
"One time traveler per family is more than enough. It's dangerous, Clare."
"Does she worry about you?"
"Yes," I say softly. "She does." I wonder what Clare is doing now, in 1999.
Maybe she's still asleep. Maybe she won't know I'm gone.
"Do you love her?"
"Very much," I whisper. We He silently side by side, watching the swaying
trees, the birds, the sky. I hear a muffled sniffling noise and glancing at Clare I am
astonished to see that tears are streaming across her face toward her ears. I sit up
and lean over her. "What's wrong, Clare?" She just shakes her head back and
forth and presses her lips together. I smooth her hair, and pull her into a sitting
position, wrap my arms around her. She's a child, and then again she isn't.
"What's wrong?"
It comes out so quietly that I have to ask her to repeat it: "It's just that I
thought maybe you were married to me."
Wednesday, June 27, 1984 (Clare is 13)
Clare: I am standing in the Meadow. It's late June, late afternoon; in a few minutes
it will be time to wash up for supper. The temperature is dropping. Ten minutes
ago the sky was coppery blue and there was a heavy heat over the Meadow,
everything felt curved, like being under a vast glass dome, all near noises
swallowed up in the heat while an overwhelming chorus of insects droned. I
have been sitting on the tiny footbridge watching waterbugs skating on the still
small pool, thinking about Henry. Today isn't a Henry day; the next one is
twenty-two days away. It is now much cooler. Henry is puzzling to me. All my
life I have pretty much just accepted Henry as no big deal; that is, although
Henry is a secret and therefore automatically fascinating, Henry is also some
kind of miracle and just recently it's started to dawn on me that most girls don't
have a Henry or if they do they've all been pretty quiet about it. There's a wind
coming; the tall grass is rippling and I close my eyes so it sounds like the sea
(which I have never seen except on TV). When I open them the sky is yellow and
then green. Henry says he comes from the future. When I was little I didn't see
any problem with that; I didn't have any idea what it might mean. Now I wonder
if it means that the future is a place, or like a place, that I could go to; that is go to
in some way other than just getting older. I wonder if Henry could take me to the
future. The woods are black and the trees bend over and whip to the side and
bow down. The insect hum is gone and the wind is smoothing everything, the
grass is flat and the trees are creaking and groaning. I am afraid of the future; it
seems to be a big box waiting for me. Henry says he knows me in the future.
Huge black clouds are moving up from behind the trees, they come up so
suddenly that I laugh, they are like puppets, and everything is swirling toward
me and there is a long low peal of thunder. I am suddenly aware of myself
standing thin and upright in a Meadow where everything has flattened itself
down and so I lie down hoping to be unnoticed by the storm which rolls up and I
am flat on my back looking up when water begins to pour down from the sky.
My clothes are soaked in an instant and I suddenly feel that Henry is there, an
incredible need for Henry to be there and to put his hands on me even while it
seems to me that Henry is the rain and I am alone and wanting him.
Sunday, September 23, 1984 (Henry is 35, Clare is 13)
Henry: I am in the clearing, in the Meadow. It's very early in the morning, just
before dawn. It's late summer, all the flowers and grasses are up to my chest. It's
chilly. I am alone. I wade through the plants and locate the clothes box, open it
up, and find blue jeans and a white oxford shirt and flip-flops. I've never seen
these clothes before, so I have no idea where I am in time. Clare has also left me a
snack: there's a peanut butter and jelly sandwich carefully wrapped in aluminum
foil, with an apple and a bag of lay's potato chips. Maybe this is one of Clare's
school lunches. My expectations veer in the direction of the late seventies or early
eighties. I sit down on the rock and eat the food, and then I feel much better. The
sun is rising. The whole Meadow is blue, and then orange, and pink, the
shadows are elongated, and then it is day. There's no sign of Clare. I crawl a few
feet into the vegetation, curl up on the ground even though it is wet with dew,
and sleep.
When I wake up the sun is higher and Clare is sitting next to me reading a
book. She smiles at me and says, "Daylight in the swamp. The birds are singing
and the frogs are croaking and it's time to get up!"
I groan and rub my eyes. "Hi, Clare. What's the date?"
"Sunday, September 23, 1984."
Clare is thirteen. A strange and difficult age, but not as difficult as what we are
going through in my present. I sit up, and yawn. "Clare, if I asked very nicely,
would you go into your house and smuggle out a cup of coffee for me?"
"Coffee?" Clare says this as though she has never heard of the substance. As
an adult she is as much of an addict as I am. She considers the logistics.
"Pretty please?"
"Okay, I'll try." She stands up, slowly. This is the year Clare got tall, quickly.
In the past year she has grown five inches, and she has not yet become
accustomed to her new body. Breasts and legs and hips, all newly minted. I try
not to think about it as I watch her walk up the path to the house. I glance at the
book she was reading. It's a Dorothy Sayers, one I haven't read. I'm on page
thirty-three by the time she gets back. She has brought a Thermos, cups, a
blanket, and some doughnuts. A summer's worth of sun has freckled Clare's
nose, and I have to resist the urge to run my hands through her bleached hair,
which falls over her arms as she spreads out the blanket.
"Bless you." I receive the Thermos as though it contains a sacrament. We settle
ourselves on the blanket. I kick off the flip-flops, pour out a cup of coffee, and
take a sip. It's incredibly strong and bitter. "Yowza! This is rocket fuel, Clare."
"Too strong?" She looks a little depressed, and I hasten to compliment her.
"Well, there's probably no such thing as too strong, but it's pretty strong. I like
it, though. Did you make it?"
"Uh-huh. I never made coffee before, and Mark came in and was kind of
bugging me, so maybe I did it wrong."
"No, it's fine." I blow on the coffee, and gulp it down. I feel better
immediately. I pour another cup.
Clare takes the Thermos from me. She pours herself half an inch of coffee and
takes a cautious sip. "Ugh," she says. "This is disgusting. Is it supposed to taste
like this?"
"Well, it's usually a little less ferocious. You like yours with lots of cream and
sugar."
Clare pours the rest of her coffee into the Meadow and takes a doughnut. Then
she says, "You're making me into a freak."
I don't have a ready reply for this, since the idea has never occurred to me.
"Uh, no I'm not."
"You are so."
"Am not." I pause. "What do you mean, I'm making you into a freak? I'm not
making you into anything."
"You know, like telling me that I like coffee with cream and sugar before I
hardly even taste it. I mean, how am I going to figure out if that's what I like or if I
just like it because you tell me I like it?"
"But Clare, it's just personal taste. You should be able to figure out how you
like coffee whether I say anything or not. Besides, you're the one who's always
bugging me to tell you about the future."
"Knowing the future is different from being told what I like," Clare says.
"Why? It's all got to do with free will."
Clare takes off her shoes and socks. She pushes the socks into the shoes and
places them neatly at the edge of the blanket. Then she takes my cast-off
flip-flops and aligns them with her shoes, as though the blanket is a tatami mat.
"I thought free will had to do with sin."
I think about this. "No, " I say, "why should free will be limited to right and
wrong? I mean, you just decided, of your own free will, to take off your shoes. It
doesn't matter, nobody cares if you wear shoes or not, and it's not sinful, or
virtuous, and it doesn't affect the future, but you've exercised your free will"
Clare shrugs. "But sometimes you tell me something and I feel like the future
is already there, you know? Like my future has happened in the past and I can't
do anything about it."
"That's called determinism," I tell her. "It haunts my dreams."
Clare is intrigued. "Why?"
"Well, if you are feeling boxed in by the idea that your future is unalterable,
imagine how I feel. I'm constantly running up against the fact that I can't change
anything, even though I am right there, watching it."
"But Henry, you do change things! I mean, you wrote down that stuff that I'm
supposed to give you in 1991 about the baby with Down Syndrome, And the List,
if I didn't have the List I would never know when to come meet you. You change
things all the time."
I smile. "I can only do things that work toward what has already happened. I
can't, for example, undo the fact that you just took off your shoes."
Clare laughs. "Why would you care if I take them off or not?"
"I don't. But even if I did, it's now an unalterable part of the history of the
universe and I can't do a thing about it." I help myself to a doughnut. It's a
Bismarck, my favorite. The frosting is melting in the sun a little, and it sticks to
my fingers.
Clare finishes her doughnut, rolls up the cuffs of her jeans and sits
cross-legged. She scratches her neck and looks at me with annoyance. "Now
you're making me self-conscious. I feel like every time I blow my nose it's a
historic event."
"Well, it is."
She rolls her eyes. "What's the opposite of determinism?"
"Chaos."
"Oh. I don't think I like that. Do you like that?"
I take a big bite out of the Bismarck and consider