Work Text:
Wednesday, November 13, 2052 (Henry is 43, Clare is 82)
I grow old waiting for Henry.
Now that I am old enough, now that I live in this house Henry has not yet been to, I wait for an hour each morning. If I let myself, I could spend all day, every day waiting just like this; limiting it, while already knowing he will come to me when I am sitting at this table and in front of this window, keeps me from worrying I will somehow miss him when he comes.
In reality, I know I could wait for him in the afternoon or evening, I could wait for him in the middle of the night and he would still come. Henry will come to me because he did come to me. It has already happened.
Today, I am tired, out of sorts. If I thought I could sleep, I would go back to bed. If my hour were up, I still might try for a nap—but it isn't, and I am incapable of leaving this room while there are still minutes on the clock. I've lived here for nearly seven years, and it's a ritual by now, ingrained in me from long before I began this daily vigil: I must wait, so he can come.
It has occurred to me many times over the years, and it occurs to me now, as I think of him the way I think of him every morning at this time: Henry may have been lying, mistaken, dreaming. He has been dead for more than half of my life, a promise in abstract, a memory who came forward to visit our daughter throughout her childhood but whom I have never once so much as been able to embrace. Sometimes I look back, and I can't remember if I believe Henry would have lied about this. Most of the time, I am sure he wouldn't have, but it's not as if he ever told me everything. There were so many things he held back...
I have been waiting for Henry since I was six years old, but I do not expect to see him today until I hear a sound, or hear something else, and I turn around and he is here. He is naked, as he had always been when he leaves me and when he comes back, and there is gray in his hair. Here is the Henry I have always loved the best, and it has been so long, so long, and oh my God he is here.
I rise from my chair, and he comes to me, and I do not realize I am weeping until he is embracing me. "Henry, Henry, Henry," I say, and after all these years, it is all I can say, all that is in me to say. I meant to tell him so many things. I have always planned to fill his ears with everything he has missed: Alba and her babies, those sweet children he never met, old enough now to have made great-grandparents of the two of us (just barely—our first great-granddaughter is barely three months old, but she counts). I wanted to tell him, too, about Alba's great-granddaughter, who won't be born until 2079. She visited me last summer when she had to choose an ancestor to write about for a fifth-grade school project. She was so thrilled to meet me, so proud of herself for going so much farther back than she ever had before, and I have so looked forward to telling Henry all about her.
But I can't do anything, I can't say anything other than his name as I weep into his shoulder, as he rubs my back and makes shhh-shh-shh noises. I can't speak, because Henry is dead and Henry is alive, Henry is beneath the ground and Henry is in front of me, Henry left me and Henry came back, Henry is gone and Henry is here with me at last.
"Clare, Clare," he says, when I have finally quieted down enough to hear either of us speak. "Clare, it's all right. It's me. I'm here. It's okay."
Eventually, I am able to stop crying, enough to say, "It's November 13, 2052."
Ever since I was a little girl, I've always known the date, so I can tell Henry. At first, I memorized it consciously every morning, reciting it over and over in my head until it was time for bed, followed by morning and a new date to remember. By the time I was ten, it was automatic. I have spent seventy-six years holding the date for Henry (and then Alba and her sons and their children in turn; I have had so many visitors in time, and the date is the first thing any of them would ask if I did not tell them first). I have spent forty-six years waiting to tell Henry again.
"I thought so," Henry says. He's still here, still naked. He still seems so young, this version of himself who seemed so ancient and wise when I was six years old.
He kisses me, a touch almost as tender as the expression on his face. I have not kissed Henry in nearly half a century, a knowledge that is nearly enough to have me weeping again. He takes my hand, leads me down the hall, and I go willingly, thinking, I am holding Henry's hand, another thing that had not happened for nearly fifty years.
I do not expect, even when he leads me to my bedroom, for him to make love to me. I am eighty-two, and he is a forty-three year old man. We may have gone to bed together in my wilder fantasies, but although Henry's letter did not specify whether we did or whether we didn't, I have always known there will be reality to consider.
That it's unexpected makes it all the more beautiful that it happens. Henry is as gentle with me at eighty-two as he was on my eighteenth birthday. It is as if he already knows how to touch me, all the ways my body and my reactions have changed. It is as if, too, he knows how hungry I've been for him, how much I've missed this—not even so much the pleasure, but the closeness we share. I have almost forgotten the softness in the way post-coital Henry looks at me. I have never forgotten the way he seems to slow down in the afterglow: my husband, always running, but always willing to pause, to let himself be with me for these few moments.
It is November, and chilly. Afterward, I put on my robe. As for Henry, he goes to the closet, where I keep a dozen different outfits in his size. He glances back at me, then pulls out a man's robe, the twin to mine. After he ties it closed, he comes back to bed, bringing a scratch-pad and pen from the top of the dresser with him.
"I'm not going to be here much longer," he says.
"—No," I cry out. Another sob, worse than before. This can't be it, can it? This can't be all the time we have together, not even an hour—
"Clare," Henry says. He wraps his arm around my shoulder, kisses my cheek as tenderly as ever before. "Clare, it's all right. I promise. But I need you to do something for me, okay? It's really important."
I breathe in and out. Henry needs me to do something. It's important. He's going to be gone again soon, he's going to be gone forever, but for now he's still here. I will not grieve for him while he is still here. "Okay."
He hands me the scratch pad, the pen. I take them, sit up straight, waiting to see what happens next, what can be so important. For a moment, I could be six years old and we could be in the Meadow together, and what I wrote down then, as Henry dictated them to me, was—
"March 3, 2053."
—dates. One after the other, Henry gives them to me. When I was a girl, there were 152 of them. This time, there are fourteen, filling up two-thirds of a page. Beside three of them, he has me write (Alba). Beside two others, (Alba & family). Beside the second-to-last, (the Meadow).
The dates are all at least three months apart. The last is June 11, 2056, and there are no parentheses. I wonder if Henry has been there yet. I wonder if he thinks I do not know the date of my own death.
I do not ask either of these things. I do not dwell on them for more than a moment. Instead, I think of how he guessed today's date before I told him; how he led me to the bedroom of a house he has never been without guidance, without retracing his steps; how he found the clothes I've kept for him without even having to ask. Henry has been here before, in this house, in my future. Henry, in my past, never told me.
"Why didn't you say something?" I ask. I can't help it, even though I know the answer—the maddening, terrible answer that all time travelers think is their own personal absolution.
"I couldn't tell you because I didn't," he says. "And, oh, Clare, you have to believe me—I wanted to, so badly."
The way he's looking at me now, I can tell he's going, that even now, he's slipping, that he won't be here for more than a few moments longer.
"We're not done talking about this," I say, and I am so angry at him, and I miss him so badly already.
Henry smiles at me, lighting up the world. "Oh, I know it. We're going to have a hell of a fight about it next March."
He's barely finished saying March, and then he's gone. Before I can embrace him again, kiss him, tell him how much I love him, how much I have always loved him when he is here, how much I still do now that he is gone. Henry was here with me a moment ago, and now he is gone again.
I have spent so long waiting for Henry, but I have never dared to think about this moment, the one that comes afterward. Now, I see how empty I would have been, knowing that now, finally, I would never see him again; now, too, I feel full, light, as if this lifetime of waiting is what has brought Henry back to me, not for the last time, but for the first of fifteen.
The robe Henry wore is still warm. I wrap myself in it, and I stare at the dates on the scratch-pad, until I know them as well as I ever knew the 152, until they're as much a part of me as the waiting has been.
I turn to the next page of the scratch-pad, and after a moment, I begin to sketch Henry. Not Henry as he is, as he was when he was here just a few moments ago. No, this is Henry as he might have been today, if he had lived to grow old with me. Henry as he might have been, if he'd laughed and grieved and loved alongside me. Henry with deep lines in his face, hair not just peppered but fully white. Henry, ninety years old and so, so beautiful. I have rarely allowed myself to dwell on the life we could have had together. It always hurt too much. Now, it still hurts, a beautiful ache, and I know I will show this sketch to Henry the next time he comes. I do not think it will be cruel to either of us, now that I know we will be spending our last years together, in a way. In our way. I do not know how I ever thought it could be otherwise. I do not know how this wasn't obvious to me, to both of us from the beginning.
When the sketch is finished, I am weeping again. Or maybe I have been, the entire time. I put on my slippers, and I go back in the living room, to sit at my table. I stare out the window for a long time, the scratch pad still in my hands.
I have grown old waiting for Henry, and now I wait for him still.