Clare’s sixth pregnancy and miscarriage

Clare’s sixth pregnancy and miscarriage is a devastating turn in her and Henry’s effort to have a child: after years of hoping and repeated losses, a pregnancy that neither expected to continue ends with the death of their prematurely born son. Its course is bound to the novel’s fractured chronology. Henry has undergone a vasectomy in the past from which he arrives, but Clare is already pregnant by the time that decision reaches her present; the pregnancy thus comes as both a surprise and a return to a hope she has never relinquished.

The wish for a child

About two years into their marriage, Clare and Henry decide to see whether they can have a baby. Clare remembers being consumed by the prospect: she imagines a child resembling Henry, dreams of babies, and finds herself noticing infants everywhere. Her hope is also shadowed by questions she avoids. Henry is not optimistic about their chances, and Clare fears that his time-travel condition might be hereditary or could affect a child. She does not ask what Henry may know of their future; for the moment, she wants the possibility of a baby more than she wants an answer.

The wish develops against the history of Clare’s pregnancies and losses. In 1996, when she and Henry are trying desperately to conceive, Henry remembers a moment in which she is barely awake. That moment later matters because he experiences it years out of sequence: what is in his past becomes an earlier point in Clare’s reproductive history. The couple’s attempt to make a family is therefore shaped not only by uncertainty about conception, but by the difference between their personal timelines.

A decision that arrives out of order

In June 2000, Henry sits in a doctor’s waiting room to have a vasectomy, a choice he makes without Clare knowing he is there. He regards the operation as a way to prevent another pregnancy after their repeated losses. Yet the chronology of his life does not match Clare’s. Before the procedure, he encounters Clare in the past, in the cold orchard, and they make love without worrying about the consequences. He has caught the cold she had sixteen years earlier; four weeks later, in the sequence Clare experiences, Henry has had the vasectomy and she discovers she is pregnant for the sixth time.

For Clare, the news is not an abstract contradiction but a fact she must bring to Henry. In December 2000, she comes close to him and tells him she is pregnant. Henry initially begins to ask how this could be, then remembers the earlier encounter that explains it from his own perspective. He recognizes that what was years ago for him was only weeks ago for Clare. His response, a wry acknowledgement of the surprise, cannot remove the underlying mismatch: the pregnancy has begun before the operation’s intended finality, yet Henry encounters its conception from a different point in time.

The loss

On September 27, Clare experiences the birth as an emergency. The baby, a boy, arrives too early; the medical circumstances are grave, and Henry is present with her. Clare holds her son briefly, but he dies. The scene ends with her waking in the hospital and learning that the baby is dead. The outcome makes the pregnancy another loss in the pattern that has already made parenthood feel precarious to both of them.

The account keeps the emotional center on Clare’s experience of the loss and on the couple’s presence at its edges. The pregnancy’s earlier promise—so vivid that Clare had imagined the ordinary life of a baby—does not protect her from its sudden end. Nor does Henry’s foreknowledge of some events offer a way to change this one. The contrast between imagining a child and facing the fact of his death gives the episode its force without turning grief into an explanation or resolution.

Consequences and significance

The sixth pregnancy intensifies the conflict between the couple’s longing for a child and the risks they cannot reliably measure. Henry’s vasectomy is an attempt to prevent further pregnancy after repeated miscarriages, but time displacement unsettles the order in which that protection can take effect. Their situation is not simply a decision followed by a predictable result: Henry’s past and Clare’s present overlap, leaving the couple to respond to a pregnancy that is unexpected for him but already real for her.

The loss also belongs to a larger family history in which grief returns across time. Henry describes his mother’s death as the pivotal event around which everything else seems to move, and he repeatedly travels back to the accident and its aftermath. That history does not make Clare’s miscarriage equivalent to his mother’s death, but it gives the novel a recurring structure of intimate loss that cannot be undone by revisiting it. Here, the longing for a child, the decision to prevent another pregnancy, and the death of the baby remain bound together without yielding control over what comes next.