Alan Moore
REAlan Moore is Tabitha Moore’s father and Shannon Moore’s husband, a working parent whose plain, practical manner conceals a complicated mixture of protectiveness, exhaustion, denial, and attachment to family convention. He is capable of sudden, intimidating anger when Tabitha is physically endangered, but he is far less capable of recognizing the deeper structures of bullying, abuse, addiction, and abandonment surrounding her. His importance lies in that contradiction: he wants to keep Tabitha safe, yet repeatedly asks her to accept the very family arrangements that make her unsafe.
Identity and Family Position
Alan first appears in the aftermath of the prototype MRI incident at Emsie St. Juarez Children's Hospital. Tabitha, having been displaced from 2045 into her thirteen-year-old body, sees the worried face of the man who resembles her late father and faints. When she wakes, she recognizes that the supposedly familiar adult is a younger Alan Moore, and his concern becomes one of the first emotional anchors in a reality she cannot yet understand. He is not merely a parent in the scene: he is the living proof that Tabitha has returned to an earlier point in her family history.
Alan’s ordinary domestic role is established through small acts of routine and uncertainty. After work, he comes through the door and is immediately told by Shannon that Tabitha has been speaking strangely and behaving unlike herself. Later, he notices the bitterness in his daughter’s manner and warns her not to grow up too quickly. The warning is intended as parental reassurance, but it lands with particular irony because Tabitha possesses an adult consciousness and memories of a future life. Her promise that she will not grow up too fast carries a bitterness that Alan cannot read.
Protective Instinct and Practical Care
Alan responds decisively when Tabitha is hurt at Springton High. After learning that she has been injured, he swears that he is taking her to the hospital and demands answers from the school. His quiet voice contains an unusual, unrestrained fury, frightening Tabitha because it suggests violence beneath the ordinarily unassuming father she knows. The episode shows that Alan’s protective impulse is real, even if it is expressed through threats and anger rather than patient advocacy.
He also begins to understand that Tabitha’s trampoline injury was not an innocent fall. He tells her that one of the Taylor girls pushed her and connects that assault to the bullying and other injuries she has endured. His disclosure prompts Tabitha to recover memories of Erica Taylor and Brittney Taylor abusing both her and Ashlee Taylor, while also remembering the younger Ashlee as someone kind. Alan therefore becomes an unwitting catalyst for a crucial act of recognition: by refusing to preserve the secret of the trampoline incident, he helps expose the violence that Tabitha’s traumatized mind had walled off.
Alan’s care is also visible in less dramatic family scenes. At a gathering at Grandma Laurie’s apartment, he prompts his chubby daughter to wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving. At home, he notices the extensive work Tabitha has done during the previous half-year. The sparse yard and the house have become orderly, and her questions suggest that she may soon attempt electrical and plumbing repairs. As a handyman and general contractor, Alan recognizes both her competence and the irony that he has left so many basic maintenance tasks undone because work leaves him too exhausted to continue working at home. His appreciation of her labor is genuine, but it also reveals how easily Tabitha has been allowed to assume responsibilities beyond those expected of a thirteen-year-old.
Denial, Loyalty, and Moral Blindness
Alan’s greatest weakness emerges in his response to Lisa Moore. At Thanksgiving, he intervenes when Tabitha confronts Lisa, putting down his fork and attempting to stop the argument. He then tells Tabitha that Lisa is still family, treating kinship as a reason for restraint even after Lisa has struck one of her children and abandoned her sons. Tabitha rejects that logic, arguing that Lisa’s abandonment disqualifies her from claiming authority as a mother. Alan, however, regards Lisa’s conduct as an unpleasant but understandable form of discipline and insists that she loves her children.
His refusal to believe Tabitha becomes more serious when she identifies Lisa’s heroin use. Tabitha calls Lisa a drug addict and says that Lisa has heroin in her purse and puncture marks inside her arm. Alan denies that Lisa is using drugs, dismissing Tabitha’s accusation as something she has imagined in an emotional state. The denial is not based on evidence gathered against Tabitha’s claim; it is grounded in his prior commitment to seeing Lisa as a troubled family member who deserves help. His loyalty therefore becomes a mechanism of disbelief.
Alan’s treatment of money exposes the same pattern. He argues that the family is about to receive more money than it knows what to do with and that Lisa needs some of it to get back on her feet. He proposes that only a small amount be left for Tabitha while the remainder is placed in a college fund or trust. To Alan, redirecting the money is responsible stewardship: a thirteen-year-old cannot be trusted with an unexpected fortune, and Lisa is family. Yet Tabitha has already been managing household repairs and planning expenses with unusual competence. Alan’s judgment consequently mistakes age for irresponsibility and familial need for moral entitlement.
The contrast between his financial anxiety and his practical knowledge is especially revealing. Alan knows that Tabitha has been repairing and improving the household, and he recognizes the labor involved, but he still accepts the premise that Lisa’s return should take precedence over Tabitha’s judgment. The future knowledge and competence that make Tabitha seem unusually capable to the reader instead appear to Alan as evidence that she is acting strangely or growing beyond her place.
Conflict with Tabitha and Departure
After Tabitha leaves the house during the Thanksgiving crisis, Alan is relieved when she returns safely, but his first response is reprimand. He tells her that leaving at that hour without informing anyone was unacceptable and emphasizes how worried he and Shannon were. His concern is sincere, yet he frames the immediate act of escape as the central wrong rather than asking why Tabitha felt compelled to flee.
When Tabitha announces that she will stay somewhere else for a while, Alan refuses to accept the decision. He orders her back to her room and says that the family will discuss the matter later. Even after Sandra MacIntire urges him to let Tabitha speak, Alan insists that she has already spoken enough and that her speech created the crisis. He again defends Lisa as a mother and explains that Tabitha will understand when she is grown up.
That phrase becomes the decisive emotional rupture. Tabitha’s visible anger and confusion abruptly disappear when Alan tells her that adulthood will eventually make Lisa’s behavior understandable. To Sandra MacIntire, the effect is so severe that she resolves to get Tabitha away from the family. Alan believes he is restoring order, but his appeal to future maturity erases the authority of Tabitha’s present testimony. The father who once threatened the school over her injury now treats her account of domestic danger as childish imagination.
Narrative Role and Significance
Alan is a rounded parental figure because his tenderness and failure coexist without canceling one another. He can recognize danger, demand medical care, welcome friends, appreciate Tabitha’s labor, and remain emotionally attached to his daughter. He can also excuse corporal punishment, reject evidence of heroin use, prioritize Lisa’s needs, and interpret Tabitha’s resistance as immaturity. The character’s tragedy is not simple indifference; it is the way ordinary concern becomes ineffective when it is subordinated to denial and family loyalty.
Within the novel’s time-displacement structure, Alan also embodies the limits of returning to the past. Tabitha’s second chance cannot simply restore an ideal father-daughter relationship, because the earlier household contains the same poverty, silence, abuse, and inherited loyalties that helped shape her future suffering. Alan’s presence makes the past emotionally tangible, but it also prevents nostalgia from becoming a solution. He is the father Tabitha has lost and recovered, the protective adult she needs, and the authority figure who ultimately cannot hear what she is telling him.
His final importance lies in the consequence of that failure. Tabitha does not leave because she lacks affection for Alan; she leaves because his definition of family requires her to remain silent about harm. Alan’s insistence that Lisa is family, that money should support Lisa, and that Tabitha will understand when grown up converts paternal protection into confinement. The relationship therefore becomes one of the book’s clearest studies of the difference between loving a child and believing her.
