Page 122 of The Librarians
Is there a kind of bomb that explodes and sucks up all the sound in the vicinity? Elise’s lips are still moving, but Sophie can’t hear a thing.
How? How does Elise know? Did Detective Hagerty—or, God forbid, Jeannette Obermann—somehow get to Elise—
“—heart attack and we all thought she wasn’t going to make it? Well, she probably thought the exact same thing.”
“Wait. What?” Sophie’s voice is as thin as a needle in her own ears. “Are you talking aboutGrandma?”
“Yeah, five years ago when she had that scare. We flew up to Chicago. The next day you had to run some errands and it was just her and me in the hospital.”
“She—”
Sophie can’t believe it. Aubrey Claremont promised Sophie—swore—that she would carry her secret to the grave!
Elise grips Sophie’s hands; Sophie belatedly realizes that she is shaking again. But Elise’s hands are warm and steady, her gaze solemn and mature. “I don’t blame her, Mom. I don’t blame Grandma.”
“I do! You were eleven. You were—”
“I was becoming spoiled. And I was definitely taking you for granted. Grandma could see that I was going to drive you up a wall when I became a teenager—”
“Still!”
She’d tried so hard to give Elise the kind of upbringing Jo-Ann would have wanted for her child. And that did not include making her face the pain of being an orphan alone or instilling in her the constant fear that child protective services might show up at her door.
“It’s okay, Mom.” Elise presses the cup of chamomile tea into Sophie’s hands. “Grandma and I texted each other a lot after that—she helped mecome to grips with everything. And it was good for me to learn the truth—everything you went through—it changed my perspective forever.”
The sincerity in Elise’s eyes, the certainty in her voice—Sophie’s heart expands almost beyond what she can endure.
Elise jumps up and fetches herself a cup of iced tea from the pitcher in the fridge. When she returns to the couch, she grins from ear to ear, again the irreverent young girl Sophie can’t live without.
“Your turn, Mom. Grandma told me I could tell you that I know everything as soon as she went to a better place. But I, well, why rock the boat? I have, though, been all kinds of curious about your version of the events. The way Grandma told it, Jo-Ann was one sandwich short of a picnic.”
“I still can’t believe she told you all that. You were so little!”
Elise touches Sophie on the sleeve. “Don’t worry, Mom. I never doubted that you loved me. Not even for a minute—you loved me too much for that.”
Sophie thought she’d wrung her tear ducts dry, but now her eyes sting again, filling up.
“And now I can at least say thank you, Mom. I mean, that’s what I’ve meant every time I’ve said thank you for the past five years, but now you know, I’m not just thanking you for packing my lunch or folding my laundry but for everything. For my whole life.”
“But that’s just the thing,” Sophie manages thickly, “I don’t know that in the end I have given you a better life. You’re not queer, as far as I can tell, so you would have had a great life with your real grandmother, with aunts and uncles and a lot of cousins. You would have grown up surrounded by Black people—in a whole country of Black people.”
Sophie envied Jo-Ann lots of things—her optimism, her charm, her natural affinity for people—but none more than the fact that Jo-Ann had grown up with her psyche largely unmarred by racism. Colorism, yes; other ills of colonial vestige, of course; societal problems endemic to Jamaica, absolutely. But she’d emerged without the same discrimination-bred mistrust and self-doubt that weighed down Sophie.
“I can always go to an HBCU to immerse myself in the Black experience, if I want to,” says Elise. “And Grandma pointed me to one of Jo-Ann’s sisters on Facebook. I’ve checked in on her over the years.”
Would shocks never stop coming? Vaguely, through her stupefaction, Sophie realizes that Elise has called Jo-Ann by name three times. Obviously she’s failed to instill respect for one’s elders in the girl.
“There have been times when we’ve been at loggerheads and I have fantasized about living with her,” continues Elise, “or with Cora Barnes, when she was still alive—”
“What? She’s dead?”
“From the flu, right before the pandemic began.”
“Oh,” says Sophie, a muddle of confused emotions. For so long she was terrified of the specter of Cora Barnes, coming to snatch Elise away. Yet…“I always hoped you’d be able to meet her someday, after you turn eighteen.”
Elise shakes her head. “She suffered from dementia. Jo-Ann’s sister took care of her and wrote that she sometimes asked about Jo-Ann. She was upset when they told her Jo-Ann passed away, so in the end they took to reminding her that she banished Jo-Ann because Jo-Ann was queer, and Cora would sayGood riddanceevery time. So maybe she wouldn’t have wanted to meet me.”
This brings back Sophie’s old sadness for Jo-Ann, Jo-Ann who was so dynamic, so can-do, yet so powerless before her mother’s implacable rejection.
