Henry proposes adopting a child

Henry’s proposal to adopt a child comes amid a long struggle to have a family with Clare, shaped by repeated pregnancy losses, uncertainty about his inherited time-travel condition, and the danger Clare may face in pregnancy. He sees adoption as a route to parenthood that might spare Clare further harm. But the suggestion opens a deeper disagreement: Henry calls it a real way to become parents, while Clare fears it would mean pretending their losses and their unusual life are acceptable. The conversation ends not with a decision, but with Henry leaving the house and confronting his own exhaustion alone.

Background: The wish for a child

About two years into their marriage, in spring 1996, Henry and Clare decided to see whether they could have a baby. Clare recalls being so absorbed by the possibility of a child that she avoided asking why Henry was pessimistic about their chances. She feared that he might have seen a future without a baby, and did not want to consider whether his time-travel difficulties could be hereditary or disrupt a pregnancy. Her hopes took the form of vivid, recurring dreams and an attention to babies she encountered in ordinary places. The desire was not an abstract wish for parenthood: she imagined a particular child, and her growing awareness of babies made the possibility feel close and urgently present.

By July 1999, the couple had endured what Henry calls their reproductive misadventures. In bed after a long and fruitless discussion of them, he turns to Clare and says he has been thinking about adoption for weeks or months. He frames it as an escape from the danger and uncertainty surrounding pregnancy: they could have a baby, the child could be healthy, Clare could be healthy, and they could be happy. His proposal is practical in its intended consequences, but it also carries the weight of their accumulated losses and of his desire to find a way forward.

The proposal and the argument

Clare answers that adoption would be fake, a pretense. Henry objects that an adopted child would be real and would be theirs; he insists that he is tired of pretending. For him, adoption offers a genuine family relationship and a possible end to the repeated risks of trying to conceive. Clare’s objection is not that an adopted child would be unreal. Rather, the word fake expresses her fear that this alternative would make them act as though the rest of their lives were normal and the losses did not matter.

She makes that underlying conflict explicit. She says they pretend to be normal people with normal lives: she acts as if Henry’s repeated disappearances are acceptable, and as if it does not matter when their babies die; Henry acts as if everything is fine even when he has nearly been killed and Dr. Kendrick does not know how to help him. The adoption proposal thus becomes a test of what the couple can acknowledge together. Henry is trying to find a route to parenthood; Clare’s anguish reveals that any route must contend with grief and with the exhausting performance of normality.

Henry’s departure and private doubts

As Clare sobs, Henry feels helpless before her distress and reaches toward her, but she pushes him away. He gets dressed, takes Clare’s keys, and leaves, slamming the door. He initially considers sleeping in the car, then decides to drive to the beach despite knowing that he is tired and upset. His drive north takes him past Rosehill Cemetery and toward the lake; music, open windows, and the repeated streetlights and stoplights calm him. At the pier, looking back toward Chicago, he admits to himself how tired he is of thinking about death, of sex organized around the goal of having a child, and of fearing where their attempts may end. He also wonders how much pressure he can bear from Clare.

The lake scene clarifies that Henry’s proposal is not a simple rejection of biological parenthood. He questions what their embryos and fetuses mean to them, and whether the hope of a child is worth risking Clare’s life and coloring each day with despair. He interprets their repeated losses as a sign that nature is telling them to stop, and says he is ready to accept that possibility. He has never seen himself in the future with a child, despite having spent time with his younger self and with Clare as a child. A future version of himself from 2004, whom he encountered in the Newberry stacks, only smiled and shrugged when Henry asked whether they would ever have a baby. That unanswered encounter reinforces his uncertainty rather than settling it.

The larger course of parenthood

The adoption argument sits within a story in which the couple’s attempts to avoid one reproductive risk do not resolve the problem. In June 2000, Henry decides to get a vasectomy without Clare knowing. Yet he later comes home to find her frightened and pleading: she is pregnant. The pregnancy is possible because, from Henry’s perspective, he has returned from 1996, when they were desperately trying to conceive; the same encounter is much more recent for Clare. The revelation makes their divergent experience of time directly consequential to their efforts to control whether they become parents.

When Clare is in labor, she asks Henry not to leave her alone. He stays close and supports the medical care she receives, including an epidural after the fetal heartbeat is found to be very fast. The scene gives practical form to the stakes behind the adoption proposal: pregnancy is not merely an abstract risk, but an experience in which Clare needs reassurance and medical attention. Later, when Henry considers research that might help Alba navigate her inherited condition, he explains his aim as leaving her a safety net. That later concern echoes the earlier desire to protect a child, while underscoring how little either parent can know in advance about what their child will need.

Significance

Henry’s proposal is a turning point in the couple’s debate over whether the desire for a child can be separated from the danger and grief attached to conception. He tries to imagine adoption as a real, healthy, and hopeful alternative. Clare hears in the proposal the risk of covering over what they have endured. Neither response cancels the other: his plan offers a possible way to protect Clare and become parents, while her protest demands that their losses and the strain of their life together be spoken of honestly.

The scene also makes their different relationships to the future visible. Clare has long invested hope in a child, while Henry has never seen himself as a father in the future and has received no clear answer from his older self. His proposal is therefore both an attempt to act and an admission that the path they have been pursuing may be untenable. His departure leaves the immediate decision unresolved; the conversation matters because it brings the couple’s unspoken fears into the open, not because it supplies an easy solution.