Page 11 of The Invisible Hour

Joel instructed two of the men to take Mia away. “Do it now,” he said, with disapproval. He had always warned that too much emotion was unhealthy, and wasn’t the girl’s behavior proof enough of that? He watched as the men struggled with Mia, for she wasn’t in the least remorseful for her behavior and she held on to the ferns around the grave, doing her best not to leave. When the men managed to pull her away, she was still clutching on to the ferns, now torn from the earth. We have the receipt of fern-seed, we walk invisible.

Mia watched the rest of the service from the woods, her face hot and streaked with tears. The love she and her mother shared was invisible, and it always had been. No one else knew the truth. Mia did not belong to any of the rest of them, no matter what they said. After the service, Mia went to the barn, where she sank down beside her favorite of the sheep, old Dottie. This world was over, she knew that much. The world in which she had dreamed that her mother would come to her one night and whisper, Let’s run away. Let’s do it together. Let’s be invisible at last.

A WEEK AFTER THE funeral, Mia still refused to get out of bed. She could be found there even when suppertime neared, and she refused to get dressed or tend to her chores. The women from the sewing circle came to get her up and dress her, but she refused. Evangeline swore that Mia had tried to bite her. At last Joel came to speak to her, even though it was unheard of for him to go to the girls’ dormitory. The other girls left as soon as they saw him, then they huddled around the door outside wondering what sort of punishment was in store for Mia.

“Stand up,” Joel told Mia. When she defied him, he grabbed her arm roughly. She twisted away, but it did no good, and later an inky blue bruise would form on her arm. Joel’s actions on this day were just proof of who he was. Mia couldn’t bring herself to look at him, because if she did, she would be unable to resist the urge to curse him to his face. She wondered if other people felt the way that she did when confronted by their fathers, distant and fearful of punishment, never daring to speak the truth.

“You’re mine, but I won’t play favorites,” Joel told her.

No, he wouldn’t. He never had. Children belong to everyone. Love is everywhere. There is only one family, and it is us.

“There’s a price to pay for staying in bed and not meeting your responsibilities.”

He found the scissors on the girls’ sewing table, where they worked in the evenings before bed, then he told Mia to unpin her braid, which fell to her waist. She kept her eyes closed as he cut the braid off at the base of her neck with quick, deliberate motions. She couldn’t bear to have him stand so close. When he was done, she stood there, her neck shivery. The braid of hair was on the floor, coiled like a snake. Joel usually made certain that the hair of a girl who had misbehaved was shorn to the scalp, but in fact he did play favorites on this day.

“My daughter,” he said sadly.

In honor of Ivy, Joel left Mia’s hair cut to just above her chin. He thought he was offering her kindness, but Mia hated him more than ever, more than she had thought possible.

“Do you think I don’t miss her?” Joel said in a softer tone. “Do you think I don’t grieve every night and every day? I feel as you do, but that doesn’t give you the right to be disobedient.” He seemed done, but just when Mia thought he would leave her in peace, he spied something under her bed.

“What’s that?” Joel asked in a harsh voice.

Mia had found her mother’s boots on the trash pile after Ivy’s belongings were cleared out. Everything else that had belonged to Ivy was gone. Her worn clothes, her jacket, her hairbrush. Possessions were evil, Joel had told them, and hiding them away warranted punishment, but Mia no longer cared about Joel’s false philosophy or his rules.

“Are those hers?” Joel asked.

“They’re just boots,” Mia stammered.

Joel thought it over, then he bent down and took the boots and cradled them for a moment before handing them to Mia. His uncommon generosity caused her to be suspicious; all the same, Mia clutched the boots to her chest. She’d take what she could get. She had learned that by now. The boots smelled of grass and earth and of the woods where she and Ivy had walked in the evenings, often in the moonlight, as if they’d reached the place where they longed to go and had already escaped.

“We keep our grief to ourselves and go on,” Joel told her. “I expect you to do as you’re told from now on. Do you understand?”

Mia saw how dark his eyes were, how he looked inside you for his own benefit, how the lines on his face told a story he kept to himself. She didn’t really know him, and she never would, but she understood what he was telling her. He wanted things done his way, and if they were not, someone would pay.

“I do,” Mia told him. She understood that her mother should have left him a long time ago, and that he couldn’t accept anyone who said no to him, and that he had created his own world in order to control it, and that she didn’t want any part of it. Joel reached into his pocket and took out the leaf from an apple tree, green but edged with yellow. Mia recognized it as one of their own, from the orchard of Look-No-Furthers, and she vowed, then and there, that she would never eat an apple again.

MIA DID AS SHE was told, but that didn’t mean she didn’t have a plan in mind. It didn’t mean that the farm was her home, or that Joel was her father, or that anyone knew her, or that she’d continue to follow the rules. Two weeks later, she was scheduled to work at the farm stand in town. It was exactly what she was waiting for, and Mia lowered her eyes when Evangeline told her the news, trying her best not to give herself away. This was her chance, and she knew it might not come again. Her mother was gone, and nothing was left. But even if Mia had nowhere to go, she did not intend to let Joel decide her fate. She would become invisible and disappear completely. Her life was in her own hands, to do with as she pleased, the one thing that belonged to her, the only thing she could claim for herself.

That day at the market, Mia was working alongside a new member of the Community, Tom Miller, and she considered being paired with him good luck. Tom was a plodding fellow who had never been able to keep a job out in the real world, and he was so new he didn’t know the rules. When Mia told him she had to run over to the library because she was desperate to use the restroom, Tom nodded and waved her on.

“Go ahead,” he said as he set out the baskets of squash and zucchini and the last of the tomatoes. “I’m not your keeper.”

He was, but he didn’t know it yet, and Mia ran across the town green. Her plan was to leave this earth and allow her spirit to rise up like a blackbird. She could escape by going out the back door of the library, which led directly into the woods. She didn’t want to call attention to herself by going in and out of the library too quickly, so she did what she always did and made her way to the fiction department, where she tried her best to steady her nerves. She had decided this was to be her last day on earth, and everything seemed intensified. The whispers of patrons, the creaks of the old wooden floor. Mia grabbed a novel without bothering to look at the title or author. She planned to take the path into the woods after she checked out the book so that fool Tom wouldn’t spy her.

“Your choice is excellent,” Mrs. Mott said when Mia approached the desk. “Nathaniel Hawthorne is one of my favorites.”

It was the book that had been inscribed to her, with the brown and gold cover. Mia’s hands were shaking, and she hoped the librarian wouldn’t notice, but, of course, Sarah did. She always worried about this girl, trekking back and forth on Route 17, where the traffic was tricky, and it was difficult to see around turns when dusk fell. The Community was miles from town, then up a dirt road that local people were barred from using. There used to be wild blueberries growing there, and banks of cinnamon-scented ferns. Sarah was so busy thinking about the Community that she didn’t notice the book Mia was checking out was a first edition, which wasn’t meant to be circulated, for it had been printed in Boston by Ticknor, Reed and Fields in 1850.

“Did you know Hawthorne lived in a place like your community called Brook Farm, which was a complete disaster. There was also a failed experiment called Fruitlands, started by Louisa May Alcott’s father, a totally disastrous undertaking.”

“I’ve read Little Women,” Mia blurted, though she knew she really shouldn’t say anything at all to an outsider.

“Well, Louisa might have never written it, and the Alcott children might have perished from a lack of nutrition out in Fruitlands if nearby neighbors had not brought them fruit and eggs. There’s nothing like that going on where you are, is there?” Sarah Mott asked, concerned.

“We have eggs,” Mia assured her.

Mia had tucked the book into her backpack and if Sarah wasn’t mistaken, the girl’s hands were shaking. “Would you like a ride back home?” Sarah Mott said. “It would be no problem. I could drop you off at the gate.”