Page 5 of The Invisible Hour

“Joel?” Kayla had called. Her tone, which was usually indignant, was soft and earnest now. She stood there as the snow fell down. “If you don’t let me do it, I’ll do it myself.” Joel was at a meeting with the men on the construction team and so Ivy was alone. She had pressed herself against the wall and remained quiet, and eventually Kayla had stopping knocking.

For all she knew Kayla was a liar. She lied about being too sick to show up for work, and about needing to have her own room because she was a light sleeper. Still, Ivy reproached herself for not opening the door to her friend. She told herself she didn’t do it because the Community had taken such good care of Ivy when she arrived, and Joel hadn’t left her side during her three-day labor when she brought Mia into the world. But when she searched her soul, she knew that the real reason was that she was afraid to hear what Kayla had to say.

On the day they heard a body had been found in the woods, Joel had brought Ivy a special present, a pair of red boots she had admired at the General Store.

“Wouldn’t this be vanity?” she had asked him.

“Try them on,” Joel had told her, and when she had he’d smiled broadly. “It’s not a vanity to please your husband,” he insisted.

He’d wanted forgiveness, she could tell, or maybe what he’d really been asking for was forgetfulness; either way, Ivy had given it to him, and she had never mentioned Kayla again. Nevertheless, she thought of her every day, every time she slipped on her red boots, she wondered what would have happened that night if she’d opened the door and listened to Kayla. She wondered what might have happened if they had gone to the nursery and taken Mia and run away together.

Ivy had begun to think that life was made up of a series of accidents and drastic errors. The unexpected became the expected, you made the right turn or the wrong turn, and all of it added up to the path you were on. Happiness was there and then gone, impossible to hold on to. And here she was, in Western Massachusetts, the wife of a man who said she was his world. But sometimes she heard knocking at their door. He would be fast asleep, and she would get out of their bed and go to open the door, but no one was ever there. There was only the dark night and the sound of crickets, and it was as if Kayla had never existed at all.

Whenever it was Ivy’s turn to work at the stand that the Community set up at the farmers’ market on the town green on Saturdays, she found herself drawn to the library. It was an old brick building with a mossy slate roof and a turret with windows fashioned of old, wavy glass. Occasionally, Ivy said she was going to the public restroom at town hall, but instead she sneaked over to gaze through the library windows, and she stood there crying. There were lilacs all around, she could say she’d come to pick a few blooms for the dining hall. She looked inside, longing for the books on the shelves, but she didn’t dare go in. These were the rules she lived by now, and the vows members of the Community made were taken seriously. She wasn’t dealing with selfish, spoiled boys like Noah Brinley or uncaring men like her father. If either of them cared about her, wouldn’t they have looked for her? Not Noah, she had no expectations of him anymore, but her father, who had called her a princess, her father, who had slapped her in the hallway of their house, who had planned to send her away, who had never once listened to what she wanted, who must have heard her crying at night when he walked past her room but had merely continued down the hall.

But now it was her wedding day, and the time when she might have returned home was over, and she forced herself not to think about the life she once had. She would never see her room again, or the books on her bookshelf. She would never sit in the Athenaeum reading on a rainy day, full of hope for the future. She was a married woman with responsibilities now. Her heart belonged to her husband, and her life belonged to him as well.

At the end of the day, when the sky was turning pink, everyone finally sat down at the rough-hewn tables for the wedding feast. New marriages here had to be approved by Joel, and because they were rare, it was all the more reason to celebrate. The women had been cooking all day, and there were fresh loaves of bread and vegetable stews. Cake was a luxury, and usually forbidden, but some of the women had made a three-tiered vanilla cake, sweetened with the honey from the farm’s hives. No alcohol was allowed, except for the hard cider made from their own apples, Look-No-Furthers, which had a kick that could get a person drunk in no time at all; this was the alcoholic beverage that was said to be favored by Johnny Appleseed himself.

Children were at last let loose, galloping into the fields to catch fireflies, directed not to disrespect their elders with unruly shouts of joy. Ivy went to find Evangeline. She had been overcome with the notion that her child had been stolen, as they often were in fairy tales, and that she’d never see her again, but there was Mia dozing in Evangeline’s arms.

“I can take her,” Ivy blurted. She was constantly caught off guard by how fiercely she could love someone. She knew that the children belonged to everyone here in the Community, but as far as Ivy was concerned, Mia was hers and hers alone. Her darling child, with red hair and dark eyes, quiet, yet full of life, an endearing changeling born in a forest.

Evangeline kept hold of the baby. “You’re the bride. Go enjoy yourself.”

Joel had noticed that Ivy was missing, and he waved his arms when he spied her, gesturing for her to come back to him. The cake was about to be served and he wanted to feed it to her. The shadows of the yew hedges behind him were so darkly green the leaves appeared black. Ivy couldn’t tell whether or not he was smiling as he signaled to her.

“Bye, baby,” Ivy said to Mia. She bit her lip and told herself it was her night, her celebration, the start of their future, but as she walked back to Joel, a chill settled over her and she felt hollow inside. She thought about Kayla alone in the woods, searching for a way to claim her fate and her own body. The darkness was falling in shifting patches of blue. Before long the forest and the meadows would turn pitch black. There were bunches of wild phlox, shining like stars, and the voices of the children rose up, filled with joy as they raced through the tall grass, even though tomorrow they would be denied dinner as punishment for being too wild at the celebration. It was a perfect night, a heavenly night, a night that could convince you that miracles were possible, if you still had faith, if you loved one person above all others, if you told yourself you hadn’t made a terrible mistake.

CHAPTER TWO ALL THAT I NEED

At fifteen, Mia Davis was tall, with long red hair and dark eyes and a wide mouth that was her best feature. She would be beautiful one day, but she would have never believed anyone who told her so, for she was awkward and shy, with a lost expression, and she had been taught that to think well of yourself was a vanity. She’d never been any farther than the town of Blackwell, six miles down the road, and then only on Saturdays to work at the Community’s vegetable stand at the farmers’ market.

When she was younger there was no reason for her to believe that life was different anywhere else than it was on the farm, but after working at the farmers’ market, she noticed that people in town seemed to have more of everything. They had houses and cars and clothes that weren’t so worn; they went to the public school and had soccer meets at the playing fields near the Last Look River on Saturdays while Mia began working at dawn. Was that the reason these people appeared to be happy, while Mia had a gnawing sense of melancholy? She’d always assumed the cause of her unhappiness was based on her own failures. Perhaps she wasn’t working hard enough, so, she worked harder. Perhaps she was selfish, so, she gave all that she had away, including her portion of fruit after dinner, as sweets weren’t allowed. She turned from greed and vanity and had worn the same boots for over a year, even though her feet had grown, and she hadn’t asked for a new coat, though hers had holes in the pockets. The other girls her age didn’t complain, and they didn’t seem to wish for anything more than they had, so Mia tried to do the same, even though she felt the stone of unhappiness inside her, rattling around, keeping her awake at night in the girls’ dormitory. She did what she could to be true to the rules they lived by, believing that she always would, until the day when everything changed, a day she’d been waiting for, even though she didn’t know it, when at last her eyes were opened and she knew what she had been missing.

They were in town at the market, setting up the tables for their stand. Ivy and Mia were working side by side; that often happened, even though, according to the rules, you were not supposed to be closer to your biological parent than to any other adult. Mia had been raised by the Community and she owed her allegiance to every single member in equal measure, but that wasn’t the way it was. Mia and Ivy acted as if they had nothing to do with one another, speaking only when no one would notice. But they were more to each other, and they knew it, even though they hid it every day.

Ivy’s looks, combined with her cool disposition, might have been the reason she didn’t have many friends, even though she was a member of the sewing circle and attended all Community meetings. Mia had heard other women say that Ivy set herself apart, that she thought she was special because she was married to Joel. The truth was, she was not like the other women, who berated you the moment you made a mistake and told you it was for your own good when they punished you. She often seemed like she was somewhere else, in a world of her own, a world where there was possibility and hope.

This morning Ivy and Mia were loading up the tables with boxes of tomatoes. Mia remembered Ivy had told her that in old folklore tomatoes were thought to be poisonous, for they belonged to the belladonna family. Some people believed that a tomato could make a person fall in love, a tale so widely believed that the French called a tomato pomme d’amour, apple of love. At the Community, people were instructed to live in the present; they were taught not to read nonsense or tell tall tales, and Mia couldn’t help but wonder how her mother knew so much about folklore. When she was younger and she’d walked through the woods with her mother looking for mushrooms, Ivy had recited folk tales and fairy tales that she knew by heart. Ssh, she would say, don’t tell anyone. That was the way her stories always began. She said she had lived in stories, once upon a time, and read a book a day.

Mia had once overheard Joel scolding her mother, saying Are you here with me, darling? when Ivy appeared to be distracted as they headed to Sunday meeting. Mia had been following with a group of children, all of whom considered Joel to be their father, for it was his word that mattered and his values they lived by. Mia always felt cold when he was near, chilled to her bones. He was her father, but he didn’t seem very interested in her. He acted as if he thought she was a bother. On this occasion, when she was eavesdropping, Ivy had taken his hand and said, Of course I’m here. Where else would I be?

Back there in the before, Joel had said, wary, his face filled with concern.

Ivy had laughed. She had a beautiful laugh that reminded Mia of birdsong. That place doesn’t even exist anymore, Ivy had assured him. It’s gone.

Now, as they worked at the farm stand, Mia found herself thinking about all of the books her mother had read. “I was just wondering,” she blurted, but she quickly stopped herself from saying more.

Ivy looked up from a huge wicker basket filled with tomatoes. Some were yellow, others were green, or a coral color, or a deep maroon that appeared to be black. There were several varieties, Black Krim and Green Zebra, Early Girl and Better Boy. “What do you wonder?”

Mia shook her head and resumed setting up their display. They charged a ridiculous price, but people said they grew the best tomatoes in the Commonwealth, and they sold out every time. “Never mind,” Mia said.

Her fingernails were rimmed with dirt and there were blisters on her hands. She wore her hair braided and pinned up, as all the girls at the farm did, and so the back of her neck was sunburned. Maybe that was why she felt flushed. Maybe that was why she had a nagging feeling that there was too much she didn’t know. It was the best time of year, late summer, when the evenings lasted so long, and Mia and Ivy often sneaked off into the woods. Once, they’d gone swimming in the Last Look River with no clothes on. Luckily no one had noticed their hair was wet when they returned at suppertime, although Joel had called Ivy to him and had looked at her darkly until she leaned in to whisper to him; then he had laughed at whatever she told him. Ivy had looked back at Mia when no one was looking, and she’d stuck out her tongue, which had made Mia laugh out loud. But often there were times when Ivy couldn’t work her magic, and Mia had seen the edge of a brand on her mother’s arm, although she had never made out what letter it was because Ivy always wore long sleeves.

“Cat got your tongue?” Ivy asked now at the farmers’ market when Mia clammed up.

“I was just wondering where you came from.”