Clare and Henry decide to try to have a child

Clare and Henry’s decision to try to have a child gives their longing for a future a concrete form, while bringing the uncertainty of Henry’s time travel into their most intimate plans. For Clare, pregnancy represents the possibility of a lasting family and a part of Henry remaining with her when he is absent; for Henry, the same hope is inseparable from fear that their child may inherit his condition. Their choice therefore begins not with confidence but with desire pressed against the possibility of harm.

The Decision Takes Shape

In December 1995, Clare visits Kimy on a snowy Sunday afternoon. As they talk in Kimy’s kitchen, a chair falls over in the dining room; Clare realizes that a little boy, Henry at eight, has appeared beneath the table. The episode makes Henry’s childhood presence tangible even while he is grown elsewhere in time. Kimy describes missing him but says that when he arrives as a little boy, it is like seeing a ghost. The moment sharpens the difference between Henry’s visits and an ordinary shared life: even within the household, he can arrive at an age that belongs to another point in his life.

Their conversation turns to whether Clare and Henry will have a baby. Kimy asks, and Clare answers that she does not know whether they can. The uncertainty is not only practical. By this point Clare has wondered whether Henry has seen a future without a child, and whether his difficulty traveling through time might be hereditary, but she is afraid to ask. Kimy’s reply, that one never knows, leaves the question open rather than resolving it. Later, lying beside Henry while snow continues to fall outside, Clare tells him that she wants them to make a baby. The decision emerges in the quiet of their shared bed, after the kitchen conversation has put possibility and uncertainty in the same frame.

Hope and Foreknowledge

By spring 1996, about two years into their marriage, the couple have decided to see whether they can have a baby, without talking about the decision very much. Clare’s account makes clear how thoroughly hope occupies her imagination. She dreams of babies and begins noticing them everywhere, from children in shops and restaurants to a sleeping infant at a movie. She describes wanting to be a mother in bodily and emotional terms, but also names a deeper longing: she wants someone to love who will stay. Because Henry can disappear, she imagines that a child carrying part of him would make his absence less complete.

Henry’s perspective makes the hope more conflicted. In October 1966, while displaced to Appleton, Wisconsin, he thinks about their efforts to conceive. He wants Clare to have a baby and imagines the ordinary stages of a child’s life, as well as his father holding a grandchild. He also imagines that a child could comfort Clare when Henry is taken away from her. But this wish is shadowed by his belief that a child of his is very unlikely to be free of the condition. He fears a baby who might vanish unpredictably, and he is caught between praying for conception and hoping they will be spared its possible consequences.

Henry recognizes that Clare might not accept abandoning the possibility of a child, and he admits to himself that he cannot simply tell her that their hope is a mistake. His response is to continue hoping despite his fear. The contrast matters: Clare’s desire is vivid and increasingly consuming, while Henry’s desire is divided by foreknowledge he cannot turn into certainty or a reliable warning. Their decision is mutual, but the knowledge each brings to it is not equal.

Pregnancy Across Disordered Time

The novel’s dated, alternating accounts make the attempt to conceive unfold out of sequence. A later pregnancy is first disclosed to Henry by Clare, who tells him that she is pregnant. He immediately understands how it could have happened: the conception belongs to an encounter in 1996, when the couple were trying desperately for a child, though for Clare that encounter is only weeks in the past and for Henry it lies years behind him. The temporal mismatch turns their earlier decision into an unexpected consequence arriving at different points in each person’s experience.

The pregnancy also follows another part of Henry’s effort to prevent it. In June 2000, without Clare knowing, he goes to a doctor intending to have a vasectomy. He is trying to end the possibility of fathering a child, in part because the couple’s experience has made the risks and uncertainty impossible to ignore. Yet the scene of his decision does not erase the earlier attempt to conceive or the pregnancy that is already possible through the novel’s divided chronology. The sequence shows how a choice made at one point in Henry’s life can meet an earlier choice in Clare’s, and why their reproductive plans cannot be read as a single, steadily advancing timeline.

Stakes and Significance

The decision is a turning point because it binds a shared hope to a question neither spouse can answer: whether a child will inherit Henry’s condition. Clare’s wish for someone who will stay is also a wish to preserve a part of Henry through absence. Henry wants the child too, but fears that inheritance could mean that their child encounters the same instability and danger. Neither perspective cancels the other; their effort to become parents is at once an expression of love and a decision made without assurance of what that love may pass on.

Later, when Henry considers what might happen to their daughter, his concern becomes explicitly protective. He asks Clare to allow research using their child’s genetic material as a possible safety net, acknowledging that it may not help and that their daughter may never need or want it. Clare weeps, then agrees. This later exchange does not change the circumstances of their initial decision, but it clarifies its continuing consequence: parenthood makes Henry’s private condition a question of inheritance, and turns his fear into an attempt to leave their child some protection. The decision to try for a baby is therefore not simply a hopeful step toward family life. It is the point at which desire, temporal uncertainty, and responsibility for a possible next generation become inseparable.