Jamie Brought Her Books

Sarah Lahey let her grandmother guide her across to the couch and curled up against her the way she had been curling up against her since the age of nine — knees drawn in, head in Jane's lap, the detective tucked away in whatever interior drawer Sarah kept her in when she finally allowed herself to stop being one. Jane's hand found her hair. The evening classical programme carried on unhurried. The old knitted blanket in dusky rose and ivory — repaired in so many places the repairs were now older than the original stitching — lay across Jane's lap and across the weight of her granddaughter against it.

Jane had been holding something all day. She had held it through an afternoon containing more than it had been meant to contain, through the kitchen disaster, and through the word she had finally let herself say at the dinner table. Now, with her granddaughter warm against her ribs and a silence that had done some good work, she decided the moment had arrived to spend a small quantity of what she had been holding.

She asked when she was going to meet him.

Sarah's meet who? arrived too quickly, which told Jane everything the next beat needed. She allowed the hand in her granddaughter's hair a single pause. Then she named the man from the dream she had diagnosed across the room in the blue hour before dawn — the one who had been making her granddaughter moan in Patrick's old recliner at six in the morning. The colour that arrived in Sarah's face was hot enough to reach Jane's lap without requiring confirmation by sight.

The protest came out in a single mortified syllable. Jane waited. Then, after a small battle across Sarah's features between embarrassment and the weight of the evening's earlier words, the name arrived at last, set down carefully and plainly on the quiet between them. Karl. Just Karl. Jane did not press. She had spent the better part of nine decades learning the precise difference between a silence that wanted to be opened and one that wanted to be respected, and the particular quality of the two small words her granddaughter had set down told her everything she needed to know about the complications Sarah was not prepared to unpack tonight. Jane rested her hand on her granddaughter's shoulder and left Karl where Sarah had put him.

Then Sarah changed the subject.

The change was casual on its surface, and Jane's hand continued through her granddaughter's hair at the exact same pace it had been travelling before. Sarah asked whether Jane knew the Jeffries family.

The name arrived in the room and Jane received it the way a practised card player receives a card that has already been marked. She had spent a considerable part of her afternoon across a small table from a woman who had spent sixty-three years as a Jeffries. She had known the Jeffries family for the better part of her adult life. Every secret the sandstone manor at Granton had learned to keep, Jane knew, and a handful of the ones the house did not know it kept, she knew too.

She let her brow furrow. She sifted, visibly, through the accumulated decades of acquaintances and neighbours and school parents and community members that populated a long life in a small city. She told her granddaughter the name rang no bells. It was a performance Jane had been refining across some decades of her life, and she gave it the full treatment — the blankness, the lips moving silently through the candidates, the small flicker of recognition when her granddaughter supplied Louise's first name, then the delicate correction: Louise Greyson before marriage.

And then the real gift. As though the memory were assembling itself idly rather than with precision, Jane let herself recall that Sarah's mother had been close friends with Louise's mother before the accident in the Swiss Alps. That Sarah's father had worked with Louise's father in some capacity Jane was content not to specify further. The threads pulling very gently through her granddaughter's chest told Jane the information had landed.

She kept the hand in her hair moving.

And then, with the casual air of something she had only just remembered, she dropped the last small weight into the room.

Come to think of it. Jamie comes to visit me, you know. Every few months or so.

Sarah's head came off her lap.

Jane did not alter the pace of her hand. She spoke in the warm tone she used for visitors she genuinely enjoyed, and for which she did not need to manufacture the warmth, because she did enjoy Jamie Greyson across every visit he had paid her over several years, regardless of anything else she knew about him that her granddaughter currently did not. She told Sarah that Jamie was a lovely young man. That he brought her books. That they talked about music, mostly, and that his knowledge of the Baroque period was considerable.

Sarah lay very still against her lap with her detective's instincts fully awake inside a room where she had decided to leave them at the door. Jane felt the questions begin gathering in the quality of her granddaughter's stillness, and she felt her hold them back.

Sarah was not going to ask tonight. Jane had counted on it. There were a finite number of evenings left between them, and her granddaughter had an unerring instinct for which ones belonged to the work and which ones did not. Jane was going to be grateful for that instinct, and she was going to use it, and both things were going to be true at once.

She added nothing further about Jamie Greyson. She said nothing about Luke, and nothing about Thelma, and nothing about the afternoon that had preceded the evening. The most dangerous thing a person could do in a conversation was fill a silence that was doing perfectly good work on its own, and Jane had not survived ninety-two years by being careless in rooms.

The timer in the kitchen went off.

Bedtime pills. Routine. The evening folding itself up for the night in the way it always did. Jane shifted. Her granddaughter was already rising to help her, the detective tucked back into whatever drawer she had been in all evening, and the scene passed on toward the next practical thing.