Alba

Alba is the daughter of Henry DeTamble and Clare Abshire, and her life brings the family’s private hopes into contact with the uncertainty of inherited time travel. Before she is born, Henry worries that she might inherit his condition and be left to face its dangers without him. After his death, Alba’s presence sustains a connection between Clare and the husband she has lost, even as Alba begins asking what his absence means and whether she can visit her mother in the future.

Before Alba’s Birth

In Spring 1996, about two years into their marriage, Henry and Clare decide to try to have a child. Clare is absorbed by the possibility of a baby and imagines the ordinary details of caring for one. She also avoids confronting two fears: that Henry may already have seen a future without a child, and that his difficulties with time travel could be hereditary or otherwise affect a pregnancy. The possibility of parenthood is therefore joyful but shadowed by knowledge neither spouse can settle.

By June 2000, Henry has decided to have a vasectomy, a choice he makes without Clare’s knowledge. The episode is dated both to that morning and to November 1986 in Henry’s personal chronology, an instance of the novel’s divided timekeeping. He is waiting at a medical office on Sheridan Road, imagining himself among other men who have come to end their ability to father children. His choice does not prevent a later pregnancy: when Clare tells him she is pregnant, he recognizes that the conception occurred during a night that lies years in his past but only weeks in hers. They had been trying to conceive in 1996, and the mismatch between their timelines has made that earlier attempt newly consequential.

The birth is presented through an urgent medical scene in which Henry holds Clare’s hand as staff attend to her. Clare receives an epidural, and the doctor reports that the baby’s heartbeat is very fast and that she is frightened. Alba enters the story not as an abstract answer to her parents’ longing but as a vulnerable child whose arrival requires them to meet immediate risks together.

A Child with Her Parents

A domestic scene in Alba’s childhood shows her at the center of the family’s everyday intimacy. She is awake in bed among her stuffed animals and calls for Henry. He carefully gets out of bed and joins her; she pats his head, arranges toys around him, and offers him Blue Teddy, who wants marshmallows. Their play is unceremonious and reciprocal: Alba directs the game, and Henry answers within it. The scene establishes a father-daughter bond through small acts of welcome and shared make-believe.

Clare is part of this intimate routine too. When she prepares breakfast, she jokes with Alba about her cooking, and Alba whispers that Henry is crying. Clare turns the moment into a joke, and Henry laughs. His emotion is not explained away; it sits alongside the family’s ordinary humor. Henry watches Clare and Alba together and thinks of the years he wants to share with them, including the versions of Alba he imagines at ten, fifteen, and twenty. He fears his time with them is insufficient, while the scene’s warmth makes the threatened future palpable without resolving it.

The Future Henry Fears for Her

Henry’s concern for Alba becomes explicit when he argues that she may one day need help with her inherited condition. He acknowledges that she may love time travel and never encounter danger, but he also imagines that she might not want to live as a time traveler and might face situations in which she is lost, hungry, or threatened. He asks Clare to let him leave their daughter a safeguard. Clare weeps but agrees; Henry describes what he is trying to do as a safety net. The exchange makes his decision an act of parental preparation under uncertainty: he cannot determine what Alba’s future will be, but he wants her to have some protection if she needs it.

Alba After Henry’s Death

After Henry’s death, Clare’s grief becomes severe enough that she withdraws from ordinary contact. When Alba comes home from school, Kimy asks Clare to let her in. Alba climbs into bed beside her mother, puts Clare’s arm around her, and pretends to sleep. Clare opens her eyes and sees Henry’s resemblance in Alba; the likeness is almost more than she can bear. Alba’s presence offers closeness, but it also makes the absence unmistakable. Once Alba has fallen asleep, Clare later gets up, eats with her and Kimy, and begins reading bundles of letters and papers from Henry’s desk.

Alba’s understanding of her father is not the same as Clare’s. While sharing a milkshake with Clare and Charisse, she asks when Daddy is coming home. Clare gives her a date, and Charisse responds with a look of reproach; later, in the car, Charisse asks whether Alba knows Henry is dead. The exchange reveals the strain involved in answering a child’s longing while the adults live with a loss whose finality Alba may not fully grasp. Alba’s question is simple, but its answer belongs to the difficult boundary between a child’s expectation and a parent’s bereavement.

On the beach, Alba asks Clare why she never visits Mama in the future. Clare answers that she would go if she could. Alba then disappears, leaving Clare with her damp nightgown and her footprints in the sand. The moment turns the family’s time-displacement condition into a direct separation between mother and daughter: Alba can vanish from the present, while Clare cannot follow her. Her question suggests that the future is not only a destination associated with Henry’s visits, but also a place Alba understands as a possible way of reaching her mother.

Narrative Significance

Alba’s story is assembled across dates that do not line up into a single, simple chronology. The passages move from her parents’ attempts to conceive to her childhood, then to the aftermath of Henry’s death and an encounter in which Alba herself disappears through time. This arrangement reflects the practical uncertainty surrounding her inheritance: her parents can anticipate possible outcomes, but neither can make their experience of time coincide.

Her role also joins two kinds of inheritance without equating them. Henry fears that Alba may inherit his involuntary time travel, while his death leaves her with the emotional consequences of a loss she approaches differently from Clare. In scenes of play, family jokes, unanswered longing, and sudden disappearance, Alba is both a beloved child in the present and the person around whom her parents’ hopes and fears about the future gather.