The time traveler's wife Read Online Free PDF Page A

me
an immense, surpassingly blue butterfly, Papilio ulysses, mounted in a frame
filled with cotton. I would hold it close to my face, so close I couldn't see
anything but that blue. It would fill me with a feeling, a feeling I later
tried to duplicate with alcohol and finally found again with Clare, a feeling
of unity, oblivion, mindlessness in the best sense of the word. My parents
described the cases and cases of butterflies, hummingbirds, beetles. I was so
excited that I woke up before dawn. I put on my gym shoes and took my Papilio
ulysses and went into the backyard and down the steps to the river in my
pajamas. I sat on the landing and hatched the light come up. A family of ducks
came swimming by, and a raccoon appeared on the landing across the river and
looked at me curiously before washing its breakfast and eating it. I may have
fallen asleep. I heard Mom calling and I ran back up the stairs, which were
slippery with dew, careful not to drop the butterfly. She was annoyed with me
for going down to the landing by myself, but she didn't make a big deal about
it, it being my birthday and all. Neither of them were working that night, so
they took their time getting dressed and out the door. I was ready long before
either of them. I sat on their bed and pretended to read a score. This was
around the time my musician parents recognized that their one and only
offspring was not musically gifted. It wasn't that I wasn't trying; I just
could not hear whatever it was they heard in a piece of music. I enjoyed music,
but I could hardly carry a tune. And though I could read a newspaper when I was
four, scores were only pretty black squiggles. But my parents were still hoping
I might have some hidden musical aptitude, so when I picked up the score Mom
sat down next to me and tried to help me with it. Pretty soon Mom was singing
and I was chiming in with horrible yowling noises and snapping my fingers and
we were giggling and she was tickling me. Dad came out of the bathroom with a
towel around his waist and joined in and for a few glorious minutes they were
singing together and Dad picked me up and they were dancing around the bedroom
with me pressed between them. Then the phone rang, and the scene dissolved. Mom
went to answer it, and Dad set me on the bed and got dressed. Finally, they
were ready. My mom wore a red sleeveless dress and sandals; she had painted her
toenails and fingernails so they matched her dress. Dad was resplendent in dark
blue pants and a white short-sleeved shirt, providing a quiet background for
Mom's flamboyance. We all piled into the car. As always, I had the whole
backseat to myself, so I lay down and watched the tall buildings along Lake
Shore Drive flicking past the window.
    "Sit up, Henry" said Mom. "We're
here."
    I sat up and looked at the museum. I had spent
my childhood thus far being carted around the capital cities of Europe, so the
Field Museum satisfied my idea of "Museum," but its domed stone
facade was nothing exceptional. Because it was Sunday, we had a little trouble
finding parking, but eventually we parked and walked along the lake, past boats
and statues and other excited children. We passed between the heavy columns and
into the museum. And then I was a boy enchanted. Here all of nature was
captured, labeled, arranged according to a logic that seemed as timeless as if
ordered by God, perhaps a God who had mislaid the original paperwork on the
Creation and had requested the Field Museum staff to help Him out and keep
track of it all. For my five-year-old self, who could derive rapture from a
single butterfly, to walk through the Field Museum was to walk through Eden and
see all that passed there. We saw so much that day: the butterflies, to be
sure, cases and cases of them, from Brazil, from Madagascar, even a brother of
my blue butterfly from Down Under. The museum was dark, cold, and old, and this
heightened the sense of suspension, of