p. 1

the time traveler s wife by aubrey niffenegger when henry meets clare he is twenty-eight and she is twenty he is a hip librarian she is a beautiful art student henry has never met clare before clare has known henry since she was six a powerfully original love story bottom line amazing trip people to those who say there are no new love stories i heartily recommend the time traveler s wife an enchanting novel which is beautifully crafted and as dazzlingly imaginative as it is dizzyingly romantic scott turow audrey niffenegger s innovative debut the time traveler s wife is the story of clare a beautiful art student and henry an adventuresome librarian who have known each other since clare was six and henry was thirty-six and were married when clare was twenty-three and henry thirty-one impossible but true because henry is one of the first people diagnosed with chrono-displacement disorder periodically his genetic clock resets and he finds himself misplaced in time pulled to moments of emotional gravity from his life past and future his disappearances are spontaneous his experiences unpredictable alternately harrowing and amusing.

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p. 2

the time traveler s wife depicts the effects of time travel on henry and clare s marriage and their passionate love for each other as the story unfolds from both points of view clare and henry attempt to live normal lives pursuing familiar goals steady jobs good friends children of their own all of this is threatened by something they can neither prevent nor control making their story intensely moving and entirely unforgettable the time traveler s wife a novel by audrey niffenegger copyright notice clock time is our bank manager tax collector police inspector this inner time is our wife j b priestley man and time love after love the time will come

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p. 3

when with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door in your own mirror and each will smile at the other s welcome and say sit here eat you will love again the stranger who was your self give wine give bread give back your heart to itself to the stranger who has loved you all your life whom you ignored for another who knows you by heart take down the love letters from the bookshelf the photographs the desperate notes peel your own image from the mirror sit feast on your life derek walcott for elizabeth hillman tamandl may 20 1915 december 18 1986 and norbert charles tamandl february 11 1915 may 23 1957

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p. 4

prologue clare it s hard being left behind i wait for henry not knowing where he is wondering if he s okay it s hard to be the one who stays i keep myself busy time goes faster that way i go to sleep alone and wake up alone i take walks i work until i m tired i watch the wind play with the trash that s been under the snow all winter everything seems simple until you think about it why is love intensified by absence long ago men went to sea and women waited for them standing on the edge of the water scanning the horizon for the tiny ship now i wait for henry he vanishes unwillingly without warning i wait for him each moment that i wait feels like a year an eternity each moment is as slow and transparent as glass through each moment i can see infinite moments lined up waiting why has he gone where i cannot follow henry how does it feel how does it feel sometimes it feels as though your attention has wandered for just an instant then with a start you realize that the book you were holding the red plaid cotton shirt with white buttons the favorite black jeans and the maroon socks with an almost-hole in one heel the living room the about-to-whistle tea kettle in the kitchen all of these have vanished you are standing naked as a jaybird up to your ankles in ice water in a ditch along an unidentified rural route you wait a minute to see if maybe you will just snap right back to your book your apartment et cetera after

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p. 5

about five minutes of swearing and shivering and hoping to hell you can just disappear you start walking in any direction which will eventually yield a farmhouse where you have the option of stealing or explaining stealing will sometimes land you in jail but explaining is more tedious and time-consuming and involves lying anyway and also sometimes results in being hauled off to jail so what the hell sometimes you feel as though you have stood up too quickly even if you are lying in bed half asleep you hear blood rushing in your head feel vertiginous falling sensations your hands and feet are tingling and then they aren t there at all you ve mislocated yourself again it only takes an instant you have just enough time to try to hold on to flail around possibly damaging yourself or valuable possessions and then you are skidding across the forest-green-carpeted hallway of a motel 6 in athens ohio at 4:16 a.m monday august 6 1981 and you hit your head on someone s door causing this person a ms tina schulman from philadelphia to open this door and start screaming because there s a naked carpet-burned man passed out at her feet you wake up in the county hospital concussed with a policeman sitting outside your door listening to the phillies game on a crackly transistor radio mercifully you lapse back into unconsciousness and wake up again hours later in your own bed with your wife leaning over you looking very worried sometimes you feel euphoric everything is sublime and has an aura and suddenly you are intensely nauseated and then you are gone you are throwing up on some suburban geraniums or your father s tennis shoes or your very own bathroom floor three days ago or a wooden sidewalk in oak park illinois circa 1903 or a tennis court on a fine autumn day in the 1950s or your own naked feet in a wide variety of times and places how does it feel it feels exactly like one of those dreams in which you suddenly realize that you have to take a test you haven t studied for and you aren t wearing any clothes and you ve left your wallet at home.

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p. 6

when i am out there in time i am inverted changed into a desperate version of myself i become a thief a vagrant an animal who runs and hides i startle old women and amaze children i am a trick an illusion of the highest order so incredible that i am actually true is there a logic a rule to all this coming and going all this dislocation is there a way to stay put to embrace the present with every cell i don t know there are clues as with any disease there are patterns possibilities exhaustion loud noises stress standing up suddenly flashing light any of these can trigger an episode but i can be reading the sunday times coffee in hand and clare dozing beside me on our bed and suddenly i m in 1976 watching my thirteen-year-old self mow my grandparents lawn some of these episodes last only moments it s like listening to a car radio that s having trouble holding on to a station i find myself in crowds audiences mobs just as often i am alone in a field house car on a beach in a grammar school in the middle of the night i fear finding myself in a prison cell an elevator full of people the middle of a highway i appear from nowhere naked how can i explain i have never been able to carry anything with me no clothes no money no id i spend most of my sojourns acquiring clothing and trying to hide fortunately i don t wear glasses it s ironic really all my pleasures are homey ones armchair splendor the sedate excitements of domesticity all i ask for are humble delights a mystery novel in bed the smell of clare s long red-gold hair damp from washing a postcard from a friend on vacation cream dispersing into coffee the softness of the skin under clare s breasts the symmetry of grocery bags sitting on the kitchen counter waiting to be unpacked i love meandering through the stacks at the library after the patrons have gone home lightly touching the spines of the books these are the things that can pierce me with longing when i am displaced from them by time s whim and clare always clare clare in the morning sleepy and crumple-faced clare with her arms plunging into the papermaking vat pulling up the mold and shaking it so and

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p. 7

so to meld the fibers clare reading with her hair hanging over the back of the chair massaging balm into her cracked red hands before bed clare s low voice is in my ear often i hate to be where she is not when she is not and yet i am always going and she cannot follow i the man out of time oh not because happiness exists that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss but because truly being here is so much because everything here apparently needs us this fleeting world which in some strange way keeps calling to us us the most fleeting of all ah but what can we take along into that other realm not the art of looking which is learned so slowly and nothing that happened here nothing the sufferings then and above all the heaviness and the long experience of love just what is wholly unsayable from the ninth duino elegy rainer maria rilke,

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p. 8

translated by stephen mitchell first date one saturday october 26 1991 henry is 28 clare is 20 clare the library is cool and smells like carpet cleaner although all i can see is marble i sign the visitors log clare abshire 11:15 10-26-91 special collections i have never been in the newberry library before and now that i ve gotten past the dark foreboding entrance i am excited i have a sort of christmas-morning sense of the library as a big box full of beautiful books the elevator is dimly lit almost silent i stop on the third floor and fill out an application for a reader s card then i go upstairs to special collections my boot heels rap the wooden floor the room is quiet and crowded full of solid heavy tables piled with books and surrounded by readers chicago autumn morning light shines through the tall windows i approach the desk and collect a stack of call slips i m writing a paper for an art history class my research topic is the kelmscott press chaucer i look up the book itself and fill out a call slip for it but i also want to read about papermaking at kelmscott the catalog is confusing i go back to the desk to ask for help as i explain to the woman what i am trying to find she glances over my shoulder at someone passing behind me perhaps mr detamble can help you she says i turn prepared to start explaining again and find myself face to face with henry i am speechless here is henry calm clothed younger than i have ever seen him henry is working at the newberry

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p. 9

library standing in front of me in the present here and now i am jubilant henry is looking at me patiently uncertain but polite is there something i can help you with he asks henry i can barely refrain from throwing my arms around him it is obvious that he has never seen me before in his life have we met i m sorry i don t henry is glancing around us worrying that readers co-workers are noticing us searching his memory and realizing that some future self of his has met this radiantly happy girl standing in front of him the last time i saw him he was sucking my toes in the meadow i try to explain i m clare abshire i knew you when i was a little girl i m at a loss because i am in love with a man who is standing before me with no memories of me at all everything is in the future for him i want to laugh at the weirdness of the whole thing i m flooded with years of knowledge of henry while he s looking at me perplexed and fearful henry wearing my dad s old fishing trousers patiently quizzing me on multiplication tables french verbs all the state capitals henry laughing at some peculiar lunch my seven-year-old self has brought to the meadow henry wearing a tuxedo undoing the studs of his shirt with shaking hands on my eighteenth birthday here now come and have coffee with me or dinner or something surely he has to say yes this henry who loves me in the past and the future must love me now in some bat-squeak echo of other time to my immense relief he does say yes we plan to meet tonight at a nearby thai restaurant all the while under the amazed gaze of the woman behind the desk and i leave forgetting about kelmscott and chaucer and floating down the marble stairs through the lobby and out into the october chicago sun running across the park scattering small dogs and squirrels whooping and rejoicing henry it s a routine day in october sunny and crisp i m

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p. 10

at work in a small windowless humidity-controlled room on the fourth floor of the newberry cataloging a collection of marbled papers that has recently been donated the papers are beautiful but cataloging is dull and i am feeling bored and sorry for myself in fact i am feeling old in the way only a twenty-eight-year-old can after staying up half the night drinking overpriced vodka and trying without success to win himself back into the good graces of ingrid carmichel we spent the entire evening fighting and now i can t even remember what we were fighting about my head is throbbing i need coffee leaving the marbled papers in a state of controlled chaos i walk through the office and past the page s desk in the reading room i am halted by isabelle s voice saying perhaps mr detamble can help you by which she means henry you weasel where are you slinking off to and this astoundingly beautiful amber-haired tall slim girl turns around and looks at me as though i am her personal jesus my stomach lurches obviously she knows me and i don t know her lord only knows what i have said done or promised to this luminous creature so i am forced to say in my best librarianese is there something i can help you with the girl sort of breathes henry in this very evocative way that convinces me that at some point in time we have a really amazing thing together this makes it worse that i don t know anything about her not even her name i say have we met and isabelle gives me a look that says you asshole but the girl says i m clare abshire i knew you when i was a little girl and invites me out to dinner i accept stunned she is glowing at me although i am unshaven and hung over and just not at my best we are going to meet for dinner this very evening at the beau thai and clare having secured me for later wafts out of the reading room as i stand in the elevator dazed i realize that a massive winning lottery ticket chunk of my future has somehow found me here in the present and i start to laugh i cross the lobby and as i run down the stairs to the street i see clare running across washington square jumping and whooping and i am near tears and i don t know why later that evening:

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p. 11

henry at 6:00 p.m i race home from work and attempt to make myself attractive home these days is a tiny but insanely expensive studio apartment on north dearborn i am constantly banging parts of myself on inconvenient walls countertops and furniture step one unlock seventeen locks on apartment door fling myself into the living room-which-is-also-my-bedroom and begin stripping off clothing step two shower and shave step three stare hopelessly into the depths of my closet gradually becoming aware that nothing is exactly clean i discover one white shirt still in its dry cleaning bag i decide to wear the black suit wing tips and pale blue tie step four don all of this and realize i look like an fbi agent step five look around and realize that the apartment is a mess i resolve to avoid bringing clare to my apartment tonight even if such a thing is possible step six look in full-length bathroom mirror and behold angular wild-eyed 6 1 ten-year-old egon schiele look-alike in clean shirt and funeral director suit i wonder what sorts of outfits this woman has seen me wearing since i am obviously not arriving from my future into her past wearing clothes of my own she said she was a little girl a plethora of unanswerables runs through my head i stop and breathe for a minute okay i grab my wallet and my keys and away i go lock the thirty-seven locks descend in the cranky little elevator buy roses for clare in the shop in the lobby walk two blocks to the restaurant in record time but still five minutes late clare is already seated in a booth and she looks relieved when she sees me she waves at me like she s in a parade hello i say clare is wearing a wine-colored velvet dress and pearls she looks like a botticelli by way of john graham huge gray eyes long nose tiny delicate mouth like a geisha she has long red hair that covers her shoulders and falls to the middle of her back clare is so pale she looks like a waxwork in the candlelight i thrust the roses at her for you thank you says clare absurdly pleased she looks at me and realizes that i am confused by her response you ve never given me flowers before

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p. 12

i slide into the booth opposite her i m fascinated this woman knows me this isn t some passing acquaintance of my future hejiras the waitress appears and hands us menus tell me i demand what everything i mean do you understand why i don t know you i m terribly sorry about that oh no you shouldn t be i mean i know .why that is clare lowers her voice it s because for you none of it has happened yet but for me well i ve known you for a long time how long about fourteen years i first saw you when i was six jesus have you seen me very often or just a few times the last time i saw you you told me to bring this to dinner when we met again clare shows me a pale blue child s diary so here she hands it to me you can have this i open it to the place marked with a piece of newspaper the page which has two cocker spaniel puppies lurking in the upper right-hand corner is a list of dates it begins with september 23 1977 and ends sixteen small blue puppied pages later on may 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.

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p. 13

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

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p. 14

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 be wanting 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 ramen noodles sounds salty i ll look forward to it our meal arrives did you ever learn to cook no i don t think i would claim to know how to cook nell and etta always got mad when i did anything in their kitchen beyond getting myself a coke and since i ve moved to chicago i don t have anybody to cook for so i haven t been motivated to work on it mostly i m too busy with school and all sol just eat there clare takes a bite of her curry this is really good

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p. 15

nell and etta nell is our cook clare smiles nell is like cordon bleu meets detroit she s how aretha franklin would be if she was julia child etta is our housekeeper and all-around everything she s really more almost our mom i mean my mother is well etta s just always there and she s german and strict but she s very comforting and my mother is kind of off in the clouds you know i nod my mouth full of soup oh and there s peter clare adds peter is the gardener wow your family has servants this sounds a little out of my league have i ever uh met any of your family you met my grandma meagram right before she died she was the only person i ever told about you she was pretty much blind by then she knew we were going to get married and she wanted to meet you i stop eating and look at clare she looks back at me serene angelic perfectly at ease are we going to get married i assume so she replies you ve been telling me for years that whenever it is you re coming from you re married to me too much this is too much i close my eyes and will myself to think of nothing the last thing i want is to lose my grip on the here and now henry henry are you okay i feel clare sliding onto the seat beside me i open my eyes and she grips my hands strongly in hers i look at her hands and see that they are the hands of a laborer rough and chapped henry i m sorry i just can t get used to this it s so opposite i mean all my life you ve been the one who knew everything and i sort of forgot that tonight maybe i should go slow she smiles actually almost the last thing you

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