“He’s dead, but he’s not continuously dead”

Alba’s declaration that her father is dead but not continuously dead condenses the novel’s impossible family reality into a phrase a child can explain more readily than an adult. When her teacher insists that Henry is dead, Alba neither denies the fact nor treats his presence as a mistake: she makes room for both truths at once.

The classroom exchange

Henry identifies himself to the teacher as Alba’s father, and Alba insists that he is her daddy. The teacher answers that Alba’s father is dead. Faced with this contradiction, Henry is speechless, while Alba understands the situation well enough to explain it. Her words do not erase death; they qualify its apparent finality.

Meaning and narrative function

The phrase translates time displacement into a compact paradox: Henry is dead, yet death does not describe every moment in which Alba encounters him. Its plain wording makes an extraordinary condition intelligible without making it ordinary. The teacher’s sympathetic response suggests that Alba’s explanation communicates something even Henry struggles to explain, and Alba squeezes his hand as if urging him to speak. The line therefore joins fact and relationship: Henry’s intermittent presence is not merely a puzzle but a form of fatherhood Alba recognizes and claims.