Henry’s visit with Alba at Lighthouse Beach

Henry’s visit with Alba at Lighthouse Beach is an intimate scene of family life made fragile by involuntary time travel. On a warm evening, Henry and his ten-year-old daughter swim, build a sand castle, and eat hot dogs and fries before she asks for a story about her mother as a little girl. The story gives Alba a version of her parents’ beginning, but her question about why Henry cannot visit her mother in the future exposes the separation that neither story nor affection can repair. Alba disappears from the beach, and Henry is left holding the nightgown she had been wearing.

A Father and Daughter Out of Time

The scene is dated Sunday, July 29, 1979, and Henry describes himself as forty-two while Alba is ten. Both are time traveling. Their ages and the date therefore do not establish an ordinary shared present: the visit is one brief meeting assembled from different temporal paths, subject to the same sudden departures that mark Henry’s life elsewhere in the novel.

They have arrived without ordinary beach provisions and have made do with what they could find. Henry wears jeans and a white T-shirt stolen from a mansion in North Evanston; Alba wears a pink nightgown taken from an old woman’s clothesline, tied up at the knees because it is too long. They have no blanket or towels. After swimming, building a sand castle, and buying hot dogs and fries from a vendor in the parking lot, they sit sandy, damp, and pleasantly tired, watching children run through the waves and dogs chase after them. The improvised clothes and outing mark them as unusual to other beachgoers, but the simple sequence of play, food, and rest lets them inhabit an ordinary parent-and-child closeness for a while.

A Story About Her Mother

Alba leans against Henry and asks him to tell a good story about himself and her mother when her mother was young. Henry begins with the large house beside a meadow and the clearing where the little girl used to play. In the clearing, he says, she met a man who had no clothes. The child interrupts to supply that detail, and Henry continues: her mother gave the stranger a beach towel, and he explained that he was a time traveler. The anecdote turns an event from the parents’ past into a story Alba can enter and question. Her familiarity with the tale also makes the family’s unusual history sound, for a moment, like a shared origin rather than a mystery belonging only to the adults.

The exchange draws on a contrast built into the novel’s chronology. Henry recounts an encounter already lived by him and by the younger version of Alba’s mother, while the child listening is herself moving through time. The story brings those separate temporal positions into one conversation, but it cannot make them coincide permanently. Alba can hear how her parents met; she cannot use that knowledge to remain beside her father or reunite him with her mother at will.

The Question of the Future

After the story, Alba asks why Henry never visits her mother in the future. The question shifts the scene from playful recollection to the limits imposed by time travel. Henry answers that he does not know and that, if he could, he would be there. His response conveys desire without claiming control: the obstacle is not presented as a lack of love, but as a boundary he cannot overcome by choosing to travel to a particular person or moment.

The evening’s details sharpen the change in mood. As the blue deepens beyond the horizon and the tide recedes, Henry stands and offers Alba his hand. She rises, brushes sand from her nightgown, stumbles toward him, and vanishes. The sequence ends not with a farewell or a return to the house, but with Henry still on the beach, holding the damp cotton garment and looking at Alba’s slender footprints in the fading light. A shared evening has become physical evidence of an absence.

Significance in the Novel

The visit gathers the novel’s central tensions into a small domestic scene: love persists across temporal separation, but it does not give Henry mastery over when or where he can be with his family. The beach offers the appearance of a complete outing—swimming, a sand castle, dinner, a story—only for Alba’s disappearance to interrupt it. The nightgown and footprints remain where the child had been, tangible traces that cannot substitute for her presence.

The scene also gives Alba a place in the family’s account of its own beginnings. She prompts Henry to tell how her mother met a naked time traveler in the clearing, turning the parents’ first encounter into a story passed between generations. Yet her final question reaches beyond that inherited story to the future she cannot make Henry visit. The visit’s tenderness and its abrupt ending thus belong together: for these characters, closeness is real, but time can withdraw it without warning.