Page 22 of The Librarians
Sophie turns around to see a South Asian nurse in her forties, the name Amiru J. on her badge. “She was calling you and calling you. We barely managed to take the phone from her right before the operation started.”
Guilt, sharp as teeth, sinks into Sophie at the woman’s gentle yet weary statement. “I’m sorry,” she says, her voice breaking a little. “I had a job interview today. And then I had to drive five hours to get here. Can you tell me if she’s still in 435?”
Nurse Amiru shakes her head. She turns to the young woman behind the nurse’s station. “I’ll take this one.”
Then she beckons Sophie. “Come with me.”
Sophie scampers in her wake. “Is everything okay? Is her baby okay? Last I heard, the baby was in distress and they were going to do an emergency C-section.”
“The baby is fine—I’m taking you to see her now. Her bilirubin is a bit high but that’s not uncommon for newborns. Everything else looks good and she should be strong and healthy. She’s really cute too.”
They turn the corner and come upon a nursery. Behind the large window, there are half a dozen babies in bassinets.
“There she is, second row on the left,” says Nurse Amiru.
All the babies are tiny. The nugget that is Elise seems even smaller than the rest, a barely there bundle with a scrunched-up little face. Sophie is only halfway through her breath of relief when a new worry pummels her. “She isn’t premature, is she?”
“She might be a couple of weeks short of her due date but that’s considered full-term, so no worries there. She doesn’t need to be in the NICU or anything like that.”
Sophie sets one hand on the wall next to the window. “That’s wonderful. So Jo-Ann can take her home when she’s discharged?”
Her shoulders are as tight as clenched fists from driving all tense for so many hours. Her right calf too threatens to cramp. But at least Elise is doing well. Now Sophie just needs to drop off the gifts she’s bought for the sweet little nugget and—
“I’m afraid that’s what I need to talk to you about,” says Nurse Amiru. “Ms. Barnes—your sister—she won’t be able to go home from the hospital.”
“Oh?” Sophie tears her eyes from Elise. She’s never been a baby person but she wants to cradle Elise with infinite care and gaze at her for hours—she’ll have trouble saying no to Jo-Ann if Jo-Ann wants to come over with Elise. “Were there complications from the C-section?”
“Yes, great complications.”
A prickling sensation spreads from between Sophie’s shoulder blades. She is suddenly four years old, listening to her mom tell her that her firefighter dad won’t ever come back home from work again.
“Is—is she okay?”
The nurse shakes her head. “I’m sorry.”
Jets of heat and cold zip up Sophie’s neck into her skull, spiking a pain that expands and implodes at the same time.
Were this a movie, she’d have interpreted the information Nurse Amiru is trying to impart very differently.
But this is real life. This is Jo-Ann of the infinite vitality.
Jo-Ann, unlike her exuberant personality would suggest, has never been careless with money, because she always says, somewhat jokingly but mostly meaning it, that she’s going to live to a hundred and ten and needs a large enough nest egg to be comfortable in her long golden years.
And Sophie has always believed her. When she used to plan a whole life together for them, she even experienced pangs of jealousy, imagining herself dead at sixty-five—not unusual for women of her family—and Jo-Ann living it up in her seventies with a younger, hotter new girlfriend.
Surely this isn’t what Nurse Amiru is trying to tell her. Surely it isn’t too much to expect that Jo-Ann will live at least to her eighties, ditching her pantsuits to exist free and easy in the bright plaid caftans of her island youth, a glass of tongue-scrapingly spicy ginger beer always at hand?
“You mean she isn’t okay now but she will be soon? She’s here in this great hospital”—Sophie googled the hospital earlier and it has a sterling reputation, especially its maternity ward—“and—and you’ll make her all good, right?”
Nurse Amiru, her eyes solemn, places a hand on Sophie’s arm. “I’m sorry. She passed away about an hour ago.”
Childbirth is dangerous business and Sophie is willing to consider postpartum hemorrhaging. She is willing to picture Jo-Ann weak and ashen, surrounded by beeping machines and a tangle of tubes.
Her brain refuses to understand “passed away,” yet something crashes to the floor—the bag of gifts for Elise.
“That can’t be true. You must have her confused with someone else.”
“I wish that were the case. But it’s hard to mistake her for anyone else.
When I checked on her, she took one look at my name tag and asked if I was from Kerala.
She said that she had an intern at her law firm whose mom is also a nurse from Kerala.
It was delightful to talk to her—she knew so much about my home state. ”
Sophie’s stomach twists. She knows a thing or two about the beautiful South Indian state too. The intern is now a full-fledged attorney. During their time together, Sophie and Jo-Ann had drinks with him a couple of times. They even attended a grand Christmas feast at his parents’ place.
Still she persists. “Are you sure?”
Nurse Amiru glances down—belatedly Sophie realizes that she is clutching the woman’s hands.
“She developed a pulmonary embolism after her C-section and had to be rushed into surgery on a different floor. I kept thinking about her. So on my break I went up and asked how she was doing and that was how I learned.”
When Sophie was in college and going to football games, her friends, who cared a lot more than she did about the fortunes of the home team, got tense and weepy in the final minutes of hotly contested matches.
Some even sank to their knees and prayed right before a Hail Mary pass.
Sophie used to shake her head at them. Chances are, a team going for a Hail Mary pass has already lost. Why get so worked up?
Now she too is putting all her hope into one last attempt to hold off the reality crashing toward her like a fishtailing semi.
“But she is—she was—” Dear God, does she really have to talk about Jo-Ann in the past tense? “She was so healthy. She could play racquetball for hours and then go out and dance like she was in a music video. And she was saving her money because she was going to live forever.”
Nurse Amiru envelops Sophie in a fierce hug. Sophie hears herself panting. Please don’t let go. Don’t let go of me.
But the kindly nurse eventually does. “I’m so sorry. But I have to make my rounds now. We have a chaplain on the second floor if you need to talk to someone. The baby is okay for now—she’ll be staying with us at least tonight and probably tomorrow night too.
“You go get some rest. Tomorrow you’ll have to come back as the next of kin to deal with paperwork.”
She hugs Sophie again, this time more briefly. “Take care of yourself. I’ll pray for you and the baby.”
Sophie stares at her departing back. Then she turns toward the window to Baby Elise on the other side, sleeping like a cherub, with no idea that she is now an orphan.
Sophie glances again down the corridor, but Nurse Amiru is gone; the empty passage glares back at her under a pitiless fluorescence.
Something wet falls on her. She looks down. Her hands are clamped together. A large droplet is rolling off the side of her right hand, just as another large droplet splatters onto her left hand.
Tears, from her own eyes.
Sophie doesn’t cry. By nature she is more stoic than expressive, and what little tendency to weep and fuss in the hope of receiving more care and attention was stomped out by her mother’s hard nurture.
And she isn’t even that devastated—yet. She’s in shock. Hell, she’s still in denial. So why have her eyes become leaky spigots?
Because, she realizes slowly, as teardrops continue to rain down, she’s scared, terror coursing through her like a tsunami crossing the deep ocean at five hundred miles an hour.
Her worst fear has come true—the very first objection she raised when Jo-Ann blithely declared that she could be the one to have the baby.
Jo-Ann is dead. Sophie has no blood relationship to Elise.
She and Jo-Ann weren’t in a civil partnership.
She has no eligibility to apply for any legal status that will allow her to make decisions for the baby.
Even sunny, ebullient Jo-Ann was damaged by her upbringing. Even she sometimes stood before a window and stared out into the middle distance, lost in old arguments and old hurts that never quite lost their power to wound anew.
Aubrey Claremont disapproves of Sophie’s queerness.
Yet it isn’t, for all her devotion to her church and her Savior, a line-in-the-sand condemnation.
Aubrey disapproves because Aubrey considers queerness a luxury for rich white people, just as marijuana is a luxury for rich white people, something for which they will not be punished.
But a Black woman from a family hanging on to middle-class respectability tooth and nail indulging in an alternative lifestyle?
It will not end any better than a brother caught smoking a fat one on a street corner, bothering no one in his mellowness.
Cora Barnes, however, is a real believer.
Cora Barnes regards homosexuality as a great and willful perversion, a deadly offense against God and Nature.
Cora, hardworking, enterprising, hospitable Cora, a lioness of a mother and the maker of the best goat curry in all of Kingston, Jamaica, banished Jo-Ann because Jo-Ann refused to live a lie.
I’m glad your dad is already dead , she once said to Jo-Ann, because this would have killed him, to see his baby grow into an abomination.
While they were together, Jo-Ann sent home a card one Christmas, a photocard with Sophie and Jo-Ann in front of the pyramids, from a surprise trip organized by Jo-Ann to celebrate the one-year anniversary of their first date, a rare true splurge on Jo-Ann’s part.
It was returned unopened. Jo-Ann spent a whole weekend barely speaking, as dejected as Sophie ever saw her.
Sophie replays Jo-Ann’s last message. Please, if anything happens to me, please look after the baby. Her name is Elise—I wanted something beautiful and sophisticated like yours. You know you are family to me. You are my family.
Stupid, stupid Jo-Ann. How dare she die on this beautiful baby, knowing that the girl would be raised by an old woman who considers her own wonderful child deviant and detestable?
Suddenly she wonders what death was like for Jo-Ann—and hopes with all her strength that she died on the operating table, blissfully unaware of her impending mortality.
The thought that she might have been lucid, unable to draw her next breath, unable to see Elise, unable to make any provisions for the baby’s care…
Sophie rubs her chest, but the rib-crushing pressure persists.
And then a different vision comes to her. Jo-Ann, at death’s edge but holding on to life with her last shred of strength, trying desperately to crane her neck to look up and out, waiting for Sophie’s silhouette to appear at the window, the door, anywhere. Because she knew that Sophie would come.
That Sophie would not abandon her—or Elise—at a time like this. She would not leave them to the vagaries of fate.
Sophie’s tears flow like streams. She had no idea the lacrimal gland could hold this much fluid. She is also shaking despite the jacket she always puts on to go into air-conditioned buildings.
What is she supposed to do? Oh, God, what is she supposed to do?
She already knows, doesn’t she? She’s frightened not because she doesn’t know but because she not only knows but has already decided to damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.
“You were right about me, Jo-Ann,” she murmurs to the echoing corridor. “You were right about me.”
Beware women who always follow the rules. Because when they stop, they will blow up everything in their path.