Page 42 of The Invisible Hour

“If you love once, you can love again,” Mia told him. “I know you will love her.” Nathaniel covered his ears so he couldn’t hear more, but Mia laughed and pulled his large, beautiful hands away so that he would listen. “I promise, you’ll be happy. I’ve seen your future.”

“What about you?” he asked, unsure of what he wished the answer to be. He wanted to be missed; he wanted her for himself. Mia ran a hand through his hair. Elizabeth was right; if she told him the truth, he would never let her go. She would name their daughter after his sister, and she would bring her to visit libraries, just as Constance had brought her to do the same. Herein are a thousand different doors, and a thousand different lives. Turn the page and you open the door.

“I’ll be happy, too.”

By the time Nathaniel fell asleep, it was almost morning. The sky was still dark when Mia left the bed to dress. She spied Nathaniel’s notebook on the bureau. He’d made lists of words, a page of colors, another of trees, another with her name written a hundred times, as if she herself were an incantation. Magic was possible, especially once he began to write. She looked until she came upon a page with a single line. She had not known the weight until she felt the freedom. It was the line that had disappeared from the book. It was no longer invisible. It was all coming back. Mia knew that every story contained the same things. A beginning, a middle, and an end. What she hadn’t known was that the end came before you knew it, it came so fast that all you could do was breathe.

She left Ivy’s letter on the desk. Her greatest treasure would be her greatest gift. He had the words but not the story, so she gave it to him. That was why she had recognized herself in The Scarlet Letter. The story would begin with a woman who was not allowed to control her own body or her own fate. It happened all the time. It happened above the burying hill in Salem, a place men knew nothing of, and it happened now in Mia’s time. In the story, there would be a man who didn’t have the courage to declare himself, and another man who didn’t care if he brought a woman to ruin, but there was also a love that couldn’t be broken, the love was never invisible, the heart of the story, the love of a mother for her child.

NATHANIEL KNEW SHE WAS gone before he opened his eyes. The bed was small, and because he was alone, he had taken up all the space. He wondered how she had ever fit there beside him. He wondered how it had been possible for him not to have heard her leave. Some things were meant to be, that was what his sister always told him, and some were not.

The bedsheets held Mia’s scent, a grassy fragrance that made him long for her. There was the letter she’d left for him on the bureau. She’d written a single line on the envelope. I love you enough to let you go.

He imagined the future that awaited him. A wife and three children. A life he was meant to have. Love once, and you can love again. Open your heart, open your eyes, be grateful for what you’ve had. Nothing was promised in this world, nothing lasted, yet what truly mattered always remained. What was eternal could not be captured, yet it flickered in the dark there beside you, the memory of all that had been.

Nathaniel remembered staring out the window when he was nine. He felt much the same today as he had then, for he was part of the world and still he remained separate from it. That was what it meant to be a writer. He gazed out into the light rising above the treetops. He might have pursued Mia, but he knew it was impossible. He still had the apple core on his desk, with the marks of her small bites.

It would be morning in a matter of moments. The world would fill with daylight, and he would be there to record it. He leaned against the metal bedposts and read the letter, and as soon as he did, he knew it was the story he’d been searching for. A young woman who had been turned away from those closest to her, who only wished to make her own decisions. He imagined the Community to be not unlike the Puritans, the society his own family had sprung from, who believed that it was God’s will for women to be subordinate, insisting that Eve’s sin was carried by every woman, a burden she would always have to bear, one that spoke of a woman’s moral weakness. Nathaniel thought of cruelty and of love; he thought of the choices women make and the choices forced upon them. It was Ivy’s letter he read, but it was more than that to him. It was the book he would write.

He closed his eyes so that he might imagine Mia asleep in the grass the first time he saw her. He heard the birds outside his window, swifts and swallows and sparrows, all nesting in the eaves of the Jack Straw Tavern. Nathaniel would think about the novel for years, and then he would write in earnest. He would compose The Scarlet Letter like a man possessed, finishing in only a few months. Following the novel’s publication, on March 16, 1850, after having been overlooked and thought to be a minor writer, he would be the author of an instant bestseller. One critic said the novel was a fable of a guilty heart, and perhaps this was true. It was his burden and his apology all in one. He would take the first copy that was published, come to the library in Blackwell, and sit at the long table to inscribe his dedication before setting the book high up on the shelf.

To Mia, If it was a dream, it was ours alone and you were mine.

Now he dressed and sat on a wooden chair by the desk. The end of one story is the beginning of another. He had always known that to be true. Soon enough the sky was brightening and the birds in the bushes outside his window began to call as dawn opened across the horizon. It was the next day, the start of the future. He turned away from the window. The whole world was out there, but it was also here in this room. The world was at his fingertips. That was when he began to write.

MIA NAVIGATED THROUGH THE woods, a forest she knew by heart. There were blackberry bushes that were thick with fruit, in the very same place when she was a girl. The women used to pick the berries to make pies, which they sold at the farmers’ market. The children always begged for a taste, but Joel hadn’t believed in sweets, or in spoiling children, or in playing favorites. He’d only believed in himself.

When Mia walked out of the woods she saw the grand vista that matched the scene in the painting she had folded into her skirt pocket. The watercolor had been handed down through the generations and was a perfect rendering of the mountain and the untouched land that surrounded the peak. Mia went into the old barn, built by the first settlers, used to store hay. It was the same barn where she used to go to read, and she knew all of its hiding places; she tucked the painting beneath a loose board. Then she went outside and waited. She knew he’d appear in his own good time. He’d make her wait, and that was fine. She had been waiting for quite a while.

Joel came up the hill as the light was breaking the sky open. He had the book, but he also carried a rifle under his arm, bought at the back of the grocery store in town. “Just in case,” he said when he showed her the gun. “You’d be stupid to trust me, but I’d also be stupid to trust you. You’ve done something to the book.” He tossed it to her. “You’ve put some sort of spell on it. It’s disappearing. Will it still take us back?”

When Mia opened it, half of the words were gone. “The words will return when I leave.”

“When we leave,” Joel reminded her. “I’m not staying here. I’m going back to my farm.” He pointed at the ground with the rifle. “Get down, because you’re not going anywhere if I don’t have the painting.”

Mia knelt before him in the grass. This was what he’d done on the day he burned her books, when he locked her in the barn, when he cut off her mother’s long black hair.

Sparrows winged overhead. A low whistle sounded, not a bird singing, but a man calling to his dog on a nearby farm. The collie had wandered and now began to trot toward them through the tall grass. He came up to Joel, barking like mad. There were dogs such as these all over the Berkshires, known for their fierce loyalty. This one had taken an immediate dislike to Joel, who raised the gun.

Mia rose to her feet and grabbed the dog by its collar, which was little more than a rope. “Stay here, boy,” she said. She wanted nothing to interfere with her plan. She had left her gold earrings, as well as a silver inkwell from the inn, hidden beside the painting. She wanted to make certain when the sheriff came, he would be catching a thief. The note she’d left would likely have been read by now, and it was quite possible Joel would be arrested by the end of the day.

Find him where I have left him in the barn and you will find what this thief has stolen. Be careful. He is dangerous.

“We don’t have much time,” she told Joel. “The painting is in the barn.”

“Don’t play with me. Where in the barn?”

“Beneath the loose board at the rear. Where I hid my books.”

“Do not move,” he warned her.

But once Joel had gone after the painting, Mia let go of the dog, and she ran to the barn door. He’d been wrong to trust her, to think she was still a girl who would do as she was told. She slid the wooden lock shut, shifting her weight against it to fasten it. It was a strong lock, far newer than it had been when Mia escaped. From inside the barn she could hear Joel’s shouts. He was so loud and fierce he frightened the blackbirds from the trees. He called out what he would do to her when he escaped, but after she walked down the hill Mia couldn’t hear him anymore. She didn’t have to listen to him. No one did.

In the year when she was fifteen, she might have drowned, her body dragged back to shore by the same men who had carried her mother’s body across the lawn; she might have been invisible, buried behind the wire fence, but that was a lifetime ago. She would have the life she chose, just as her mother had intended for her, just as she intended for her own child.

Mia lifted her eyes to the mountain. The wind had picked up and clouds were moving across the sky. How was it possible for her to have never noticed how beautiful it was here? Years from now Carrie would discover the painting left in an old barn she inherited, and she would become a painter, insisting that she must have already been an artist in another time. The Community would come to be, and Ivy Jacob would find herself there one night when she didn’t know where else to go, and Mia would live the first part of her life here and she would always remember that she was loved by someone from the very start. The best thing that ever happened to me was you, Ivy had whispered to her that night in the woods when they walked invisible.

Mia wished that her mother could see how beautiful this place had been before it was ruined by shoddy buildings and barns, with wire fencing to keep local people out and the members of the Community in. She wished she could thank Ivy for allowing her to go to the library, for telling her stories in the woods, for wanting more for her. Now Mia wanted her own daughter to know a world where she could go to school, and travel on her own by train, and walk down a city street on a summer evening, and read any book she chose from the shelves of a library.

In no time it would be autumn, the season when Mia always scanned the trees, in search of the first red leaves. At last, she came to the site where the cemetery would be. For now, it was simply a patch of land overrun with mulberries and yarrow, hyssop and wild chives, along with the first of the ferns that would someday take over the area. The fields all around were filled with sunflowers, and the sound of bees was all that Mia could hear. She was grateful for the shade of the huge beech tree, and she leaned her back against its trunk as she sat in the bank of ferns. She thought about the day that she’d believed would be her last day on earth. How lucky she’d been to have walked into a library. How grateful she was to hold the book in her hands.

The world was waking, slowly and then all at once. Birdsongs, the whir of beetles, the wind in the trees. Mia could hear the horses on a nearby farm. The collie dog was racing through the field on his way back home, but when he spotted her, he came toward Mia, a flash of black and white. He was the same breed that could always be found in Blackwell, the kind that had been at the farm, smart, reliable dogs that didn’t need much attention and were always loyal. The night she ran away, none of the dogs had barked. They had allowed her to be invisible, and she had started her life over. This would be the third life, the one she would keep, the one she was meant to have.

“Hello there,” Mia said when the collie came to greet her.

The dog sniffed, curious, but when he heard his owner whistling on the nearby acreage, he took off through the grass. Mia could see how her mother might have thought she had arrived at a place that was west of the moon. West of the moon was where you journeyed to meet the person you loved, the one you would never forget. Mia wanted to remember everything when she left here. How cold the water was in the river, how long his kisses lasted, how quick the crickets’ song was, until it wasn’t a song at all, just one great chime of summer’s ending. She would always be thankful that she had reached for Nathaniel’s book in the library and read it in the barn and that she had stepped into the world he had created out of paper and ink. Luck can be many things, and she carried her luck with her, she carried it in a book.

Once upon a time, she would tell her daughter, I loved you more than anything. I loved you more than life itself. I loved you enough to find whatever awaits us, no matter what it might be, no matter where. We can go as far as we need to, even if it’s west of the moon. Sometimes walking away is the bravest thing you can do. When you get there, you’ll know where you are.