The time traveler's wife(159)

"Henry."

"What?"

"There's that little girl again." "What little girl?"

"The one we saw earlier." Ingrid stops. I look where she is pointing. The girl is standing in the doorway of a flower shop. She's wearing something dark, so all I see is her white face and her bare feet. She's maybe seven or eight; too young to be out alone in the middle of the night. Ingrid walks over to the girl, who watches her impassively.

"Are you okay?" Ingrid asks the girl. "Are you lost?"

The girl looks at me and says, "I was lost, but now I've figured out where I am. Thank you," she adds politely.

"Do you need a ride home? We could give you a ride if we ever manage to find the car." Ingrid is leaning over the girl. Her face is maybe a foot away from the girl's face. As I walk up to them I see that the girl is wearing a man's windbreaker. It comes all the way down to her ankles.

"No, thank you. I live too far away, anyhow." The girl has long black hair and startling dark eyes; in the yellow light of the flower shop she looks like a Victorian match girl, or DeQuincey's Ann.

"Where's your mom?" Ingrid asks her. The girl replies, "She's at home." She smiles at me and says, "She doesn't know I'm here."

"Did you run away?" I ask her.

"No," she says, and laughs. "I was looking for my daddy, but I'm too early, I guess. I'll come back later." She squeezes past Ingrid and pads over to me, grabs my jacket and pulls me toward her. "The car's across the street," she whispers. I look across the street and there it is, Ingrid's red Porsche. "Thanks—" I begin, and the girl darts a kiss at me that lands near my ear and then runs down the sidewalk, her feet slapping the concrete as I stand staring after her. Ingrid is quiet as we get into the car. Finally I say, "That was strange," and she sighs and says, "Henry, for a smart person you can be pretty damn dense sometimes," and she drops me off in front of my apartment without another word.





Sunday, July 29, 1979 (Henry is 42)

Henry: It's sometime in the past. I'm sitting on Lighthouse Beach with Alba. She's ten. I'm forty-two. Both of us are time traveling. It's a warm evening, maybe July or August. I'm wearing a pair of jeans and a white T-shirt I stole from a fancy North Evanston mansion; Alba is wearing a pink nightgown she took from an old lady's clothesline. It's too long for her so we have tied it up around her knees. People have been giving us strange looks all afternoon. I guess we don't exactly look like an average father and daughter at the beach. But we have done our best; we have swum, and we have built a sand castle. We have eaten hotdogs and fries we bought from the vendor in the parking lot. We don't have a blanket, or any towels, and so we are kind of sandy and damp and pleasantly tired, and we sit watching little children running back and forth in the waves and big silly dogs loping after them. The sun is setting behind us as we stare at the water.

"Tell me a story," says Alba, leaning against me like cold cooked pasta. I put my arm around her. "What kind of story?"

"A good story. A story about you and Mama, when Mama was a little girl" "Hmm. Okay. Once upon a time—" "When was that?"

"All times at once. A long time ago, and right now."

"Both?"

"Yes, always both."

"How can it be both?"

"Do you want me to tell this story or not?"

"Yeah "





"All right then. Once upon a time, your mama lived in a big house beside a meadow, and in the meadow was a place called the clearing where she used to go to play. And one fine day your mama, who was only a tiny thing whose hair was bigger than she was, went out to the clearing and there was a man there—"

"With no clothes!"

"With not a stitch on him" I agree. "And after your mama had given him a beach towel she happened to be carrying so he could have something to wear, he explained to her that he was a time traveler, and for some reason she believed him—"

"Because it was true!" .

"Well, yes, but how was she going to know that? Anyway, she did"" believe him, and then later on she was silly enough to marry him and here we are,"

Alba punches me in the stomach. "Tell it right" she demands.

"Ooof. How can I tell anything if you beat on me like that? Geez."

Alba is quiet. Then she says, "How come you never visit Mama in the future?"

"I don't know, Alba. If I could, I'd be there." The blue is deepening over the horizon and the tide is receding. I stand up and offer Alba my hand, pull her up. As she stands brushing sand from her nightgown she stumbles toward me and says, "Oh!" and is gone and I stand there on the beach holding a damp cotton nightgown and staring at Alba's slender footprints in the fading light. RENASCENCE