Page 20 of The Librarians

Sixteen years ago

Sophie’s phone rings. It’s Jo-Ann. Again.

What is wrong with that woman?

Sophie sets the phone on silent. But the device buzzes like a frustrated bee.

She gets in her car and starts the engine—don’t want to let the good people of Newark Public Library see her lose her temper right there in their parking lot, not when she’s just answered every interview question with the calm, helpful demeanor befitting a future public librarian.

But dear God, Jo-Ann makes her want to take a drill to the phone.

A year ago, things were going so well between them, when Jo-Ann suddenly got it in her head that they should have a baby.

She brought it up on a Saturday evening, after first serving Sophie a Jamaican chicken curry on the balcony of their Hoboken apartment.

There were candles and a vase of flaming amaryllises on the table, with Manhattan in the distance, draped in sunset.

Sophie was feeling a rare bout of effervescence—it was summer, her first year in grad school had gone well, and she was with someone who managed to make an uptight girl like herself laugh every single day.

Jo-Ann’s proposition punctured her bubble instantly.

“No,” she said. “I’m not ready.”

She was only twenty-five and had a year left in her master of library and information science program. She didn’t want to have a baby while she was still in school, nor did she want to become a mother immediately after getting a job.

Jo-Ann, across from her, smiled indulgently. Her skin, the color of myrrh, glowed in the candlelight. “I didn’t say you have to give birth. I have a perfectly good uterus, too.”

Sophie threw up her hands. “Right. And you’ll then quit your high-power-attorney job to look after this kid.”

“Neither of us has to give up our work. Together we’ll make enough to hire a nanny.”

Sophie would be lucky if she made a quarter as much as Jo-Ann. She’d feel terrifically impoverished if she had to contribute a half share toward the cost of a nanny. But she might feel even worse if she contributed only 20 percent, as if she had only a 20 percent stake in this child.

“And what if the nanny doesn’t work out for some reason? What if the nanny gets sick or has to leave for a while to look after her own family? Then who looks after this baby?”

“Then we get another babysitter. They have services now that’ll have vetted, experienced childcare providers in people’s homes in the blink of an eye,” said Jo-Ann breezily.

Her confidence was one of Jo-Ann’s most attractive qualities.

That same damn-the-torpedoes-full-speed-ahead attitude was also, at times, her most exasperating trait.

Sophie was not a damn-the-torpedoes kind of person.

She needed to carefully map out the locations of all the pitfalls, then engineer a path to avoid every single one.

Jo-Ann’s blitheness struck her now as not only inappropriate but wildly irresponsible.

Fine, never mind the money—in a relationship like theirs, with a personality like Sophie’s, it might always be a bit of a sore point that she couldn’t be an equal financial contributor.

But this was about a lot more than their domestic arrangement.

They were talking about a baby in a world hostile to same-sex parents.

“You’re a lawyer. Have you taken a proper look at current law—and the legislations that are brewing everywhere in this country? What if something happens to you? I will have no rights to make any decisions for this child.”

“Not after you adopt the child.”

“But that is not an instantaneous process. What if something happens in the meanwhile? It’ll be your mom who becomes the kid’s legal guardian.”

At last some of Jo-Ann’s cheerfulness drained away. Night was falling. The wind picked up. The candles flickered and cast shadows across her face.

Time magazine had published an article only a few months ago, asking if Jamaica was the most homophobic place on earth.

Jo-Ann had pooh-poohed the clickbait-y hypothesis, but she had not disputed her homeland’s entrenched homophobia.

And Jo-Ann’s mom was the most homophobic person Jo-Ann had ever met.

“Nothing will happen to me,” Jo-Ann declared, but she sounded a little shaken.

“You don’t know the future,” Sophie pointed out, pushing away her still half-full plate.

“Don’t you see?” Jo-Ann reached across the glass table and took Sophie’s hand in hers. “That’s why it would be better for you to have the child. Then my mother will never be able to take it away from us.”

Sophie had always loved the warmth and care of Jo-Ann’s touch. But she was annoyed enough to pull her hand away. “Aha! Now we come back to that. And I already told you I am not ready to have a baby.”

“And are you ever going to be ready to have a baby?”

The sadness on Jo-Ann’s face made it impossible for Sophie to be sincerely angry. It was true: Sophie might never be ready to have a baby.

Maybe someday her biological clock would tick like a B-movie nuclear bomb with a flashing countdown. But even so, would it ever out-glare her internal chaos meter, which always judged the world as too threatening, too unstable, and too inherently untrustworthy?

“I’m thirty-four, Sophie, and every day I get older,” pleaded Jo-Ann. “I mean, I don’t feel older, but I also don’t want to be having my first biological kid at forty, for both my own sake and the kid’s.”

Jo-Ann’s drive to have everything right here right now accounted for much of her success, but it was also the reason Sophie held her own plans close to the chest: They’d just moved in together and she was already talking about a baby next year.

Of course Jo-Ann had wanted to move in together by the end of their second date, but Sophie held out. And she believed that a good five years should elapse before a relationship passed the durability test to undertake the addition of a baby.

At which time she, though not naturally inclined to having kids, would be much more open to persuasion.

But not now. Not when she hadn’t finished school, found a good job, or reassured herself that she and Jo-Ann would be able to stick it out through thick and thin.

“Can we please not discuss this any further today?” Her head was beginning to throb.

Jo-Ann rubbed her own arms, as if she felt cold. “Is this going to be one of those things that no matter when I bring it up, it will always be the wrong time?”

Can you not just wait five years? Sophie wanted to shout.

She was crazy about Jo-Ann, she who had almost decided that a spinster life would, in fact, suit her just fine.

She loved Jo-Ann’s expansive love of life, she loved how kind and deeply decent Jo-Ann was, and she had never known how wonderful it felt for everything she wanted to do to sit absolutely right with someone.

But Jo-Ann was a force of nature and it was all Sophie could do to hang on to her own plans and her own self. If Jo-Ann learned that she might be persuadable in five years, she was going to be hell-bent on cajoling Sophie to do it in four, three, two years. Hell, right now!

And Sophie could not allow that.

“You’re right. It’s always going to be the wrong time, at least until I’m out of school.”

She considered it a perfectly reasonable answer. And what did she get for her honesty and transparency? An out-of-left-field request for them to take a break three months later!

“What is this, Friends ? Real people don’t take breaks. We’re either together or we’re over!”

Sophie rarely raised her voice, but doing so on this occasion did not make any difference. Jo-Ann was possessed. If Sophie would not agree to a baby then they had to take a break from each other.

The break has not been kind to Sophie. She does not like changes and does not make changes lightly. Going back to being single after she finally became accustomed to thinking of her future not in “I” but in “we” was like being locked out of the house cold, wet, and shivering.

Their mutual friends, unable to believe that they won’t get back together any moment now, keep bringing her Jo-Ann’s news.

Did you know she bought a house? Did you know she nailed a huge deal for her firm?

Did you know she managed to negotiate four months of leave for pro bono work?

That’s Jo-Ann for you, always giving back to the community.

Now Sophie is finally—reluctantly and still somewhat resentfully—getting used to being on her own again. It sucks, having no one to text during the day, no one to meet after school, and no one to hug her when her mom issues another strong disapproval of her “lifestyle.”

But hey, no one to break her heart and crush her dreams either. That’s gotta be worth something, right?

And she doesn’t believe that she’ll hear from Jo-Ann at the end of the “break” either, unless it’s to tell her that Jo-Ann has already found the perfect baby mama and would be welcoming that prized child very soon.

So why is Jo-Ann calling today, all of a sudden?

Her phone buzzes throughout the drive home. As Sophie walks into her tiny apartment, she jabs the red phone button yet again—and belatedly notices that there are fourteen voice mails.

They can’t be from Jo-Ann, can they? Jo-Ann likes to talk on the phone but never cares to leave voice messages. Instead she prefers to send a text if she can’t reach Sophie by calling, the reason Sophie had to switch to a plan with unlimited texts.

The voice mails are from Jo-Ann. The first few sound almost identical. “Hi, Sophie, sweetheart. It’s me, Jo-Ann. I know I’ve been an asshole but please call me. This is important. Super important. I love you, okay? I never stopped loving you for a second.”

Sophie sneers. Right.

But as message after message plays, the iteration begins to get to her, especially as Jo-Ann’s voice becomes more earnest, more urgent.