Page 34 of The Librarians

Game Night

“Ms. Claremont, can I have a word with you?”

Sophie turns around. It’s the woman with the third eye. The sodium vapor streetlight at the edge of the library’s parking lot casts a yellow glow on her face and gives the photorealistic eye that takes up her entire forehead a sinister tinge. “Yes?”

“Great, thanks,” says the woman—and walks away to an SUV that’s even more loudly orange than the scarf on her head.

Sophie doesn’t see what the woman could have to say to her that Elise can’t hear. But she’s in a good mood and willing to indulge a patron who helped to make Game Night a success.

“I’ll be just a sec,” she says to Elise, who probably wants to spend some quality time with her phone, in any case.

Elise slides into the passenger seat of Sophie’s Mini Cooper with a cheerful “Okay!”

Sophie approaches the woman. “Can I help you?”

“Hi, I’m Jeannette.” She grins and points to the name tag on her chest, to which she affixed an Austin Public Library sticker, given out during Game Night. “It’s nice to meet you.”

She is pretty enough but Sophie is wary of the keenness in her eyes—this is someone who wants to know stuff and Sophie prefers a little less curiosity.

“Hi, Jeannette,” she says, her tone noncommittal.

“We’ve never met but I know a lot about you.” Jeannette, her left hand braced on her RAV4, leans forward. “I met Jo-Ann Barnes in an LGBTQ-friendly tabletop gaming club in Albany, New York.”

A grenade goes off inside Sophie’s head. “ You’re the one who sent me those notes?”

Jeannette holds up both hands. “I didn’t mean anything by them, I swear.”

Grenades are still going off but one thing is clear to Sophie. “I have to drop my daughter home—she has school tomorrow. But I will be back here in twenty-five minutes.”

Perhaps Sophie’s tone is too grim. Jeannette chortles awkwardly. “Actually, we can talk another time. It might be a bit dangerous for me to wait here by myself for that long.”

“You can wait somewhere else but I’ll be back here in twenty-five minutes.”

For the worst conversation of her life, Sophie realizes, as her shock turns into a frantic dread.

“At least give me your phone number, in case some axe-wielding murderer charges through here and I have to hide somewhere,” wheedles Jeannette.

Sophie would have liked to refuse, but the woman already knows where she works. And she can’t in good conscience tell a lone woman to meet her past nine thirty without giving the latter a means to contact her, not even if said woman is a potential blood leech.

Jeannette offers her phone in a slightly obsequious manner. Sophie jabs in her number, then turns and leaves.

“What does Jeannette want?” asks Elise when Sophie gets in the car and pulls on her seat belt.

“She wants to volunteer at the library and I told her to apply online,” says Sophie, trying not to sound too worked up. “There’s a whole process for it.”

Elise unscrews the cap of her large metal water bottle and takes a sip. “I didn’t get a chance to tell you but she came over and talked to me in the library on Saturday.”

“She did?” Sophie’s voice, at least in her own ears, sounds sharp enough to key cars.

“I was looking at graphic novels and she asked if I had any recommendations—you know I always have recommendations. Then she asked me for cool things to do around town. Then things like how’s school, where do I want to go to college, et cetera.

I think she might have had more questions if we hadn’t left the library at that point. ”

Sophie, already tense all over, draws as taut as a bowstring. “I hope she wasn’t being weird?”

“Not in the way it might sound. At no point did I ask myself, ‘Is this person trying to groom me?’?” Elise chortles—entirely unaware of her peril. “Just, you know, for a grown woman, she seemed more curious than she had reason to be about some rando teenager in the library.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. She didn’t try to talk to me tonight and I also didn’t make it a point to approach her.”

That’s because the damn woman already decided to target Sophie. “Let’s hope she’s just one of those people who ask too many questions because they don’t know how to end a conversation, and not because of anything else.”

After that, Elise might have talked a bit about Hazel, who is apparently cool because she’s played board games that Elise has never heard of.

Sophie listens with half an ear. When they reach home and put away the games, Sophie tells Elise that she needs to go out and get some cookies for the next morning’s running-group meeting.

Elise doesn’t doubt her. After all, Sophie has been careful all these years never to do anything to draw excess attention to herself, not even from Elise.

But after Sophie settles back behind the wheel again, she can’t simply start driving.

She’s freaking out. Two years. In less than two years Elise will be an adult and no one will be able to part them from each other.

Why couldn’t this Jeannette woman have arrived in their life a little later, when her knowledge would no longer matter?

But Elise is still only sixteen. If it gets out that Sophie is not her biological mother, will child protective services take her away and place her with strangers? And dear God, is Jo-Ann’s queer-hating mom still alive?

What is she going to do if things go badly with Jeannette, as they most likely will?

Shit. How long has she been sitting in her car, losing her mind? Now there is no way she will make it back to the library on time, and she hates it when she fails her own standards of punctuality.

Sophie swears and burns rubber. Half a mile from the library, her phone dings.

It’s looking a bit desolate here.

Will Sophie arrive to find an empty parking lot, leading her to drive herself crazy—crazier—with all the worst possibilities of what Jeannette could be up to?

But Jeannette is there when Sophie’s Cooper swerves to a stop in front of the library.

Sophie gets out of the car. “Sorry. It took a bit longer than I thought it would.”

Jeannette refashioned her scarf so that now it covers her forehead and conceals the third eye—small mercies. “No problem. I was in H-E-B getting some shampoo. Anyway, I’m sorry to alarm you, I really didn’t mean to.”

At the look on Sophie’s face, she says, “Please understand, I had the biggest crush on Jo-Ann. She was so warm and embracing—being near her was the best kind of self-care.”

That was Jo-Ann, all right. After all these years, for Sophie there is still nothing like putting her head on Jo-Ann’s shoulder. That must have been how a well-swaddled baby felt, all snug and safe.

“She loved to talk about you,” murmurs Jeannette.

“She had this sixteen-month pocket calendar that she used to pull out of her purse anytime someone new joined our group, to show off your pictures. Like, she bragged about how many books you read and I used to feel all salty about it. You were a librarian. What were you going to do? Not read?”

Sophie crosses her arms over her chest.

Jeannette again holds out her hands placatingly. “Don’t worry. My feelings were completely unrequited—Jo-Ann was all set to go back to New Jersey for your life together with the baby. I just couldn’t help falling a little more in love with her every time she found a reason to bring you up. I wish…”

She smiled rather sadly. “I wish someone would talk about me with such a glow on their face.”

The long-buried ache of everything that could have been—Sophie, Elise, and Jo-Ann…How delighted and proud Jo-Ann would have been about Elise, how tightly and protectively she would have held them to her.

Sophie’s throat tightens.

“She used to show us her sonogram pictures too—I already had presents all wrapped up for Baby Elise. When I heard that Jo-Ann died in childbirth, I couldn’t believe it.

I went to the hospital, thinking I’d find a way to pass on my gifts, but all I found out was that Jo-Ann’s sister took Baby Elise and that Baby Elise would most likely live with her grandmother in Jamaica.

“So imagine my shock on Saturday when you guys walked into the library. You haven’t aged a day from when Jo-Ann used to shove your pictures in my face, and Elise is a carbon copy of Jo-Ann.”

That she is. And she inherited Jo-Ann’s easy way with people.

“I talked a little to her,” continues Jeannette.

“I didn’t dare ask too many questions but it was pretty obvious she had no idea she was supposed to have spent her life in another country.

I became suspicious. I’m sorry if what I’m about to say sounds offensive, but I wondered if Jo-Ann had a trust settled on the kid and you erased Jo-Ann from her life in order to have total control over the money. ”

“What?!”

Jeannette scratches at the side of her cell phone case, as if embarrassed.

“I’m sorry—I worked in a retirement home for a while and saw some wild schemes to get old folks’ money, even when there wasn’t a lot of money to be had.

That’s why I passed you the notes. But tonight, when I was home changing, I got results back from the Hudson County probate record search I paid for and found out that—”

“That Jo-Ann didn’t leave a will?” Sophie can’t help a hint—or a large, dripping heap—of sarcasm.

Jeannette smiles sheepishly. “Right. Her estate had to go into probate and was then divvied up among surviving family members according to New Jersey’s succession law. Your name was nowhere to be found in the records.

“But according to the filings, there was also no mention anywhere of a child. Could it be possible? The sister they’d mentioned at the hospital, the one who took the baby, could that have been you?

I mean, theoretically that shouldn’t have happened, because Jo-Ann was Jamaican.

Why would they let an American woman take her baby?

Was it because Elise was a Black baby that no one paid attention? ”