THE TIME TRAVELER’S WIFE PROLOGUE

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 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.