Page 7 of The Invisible Hour

“You know.” Ivy gave Mia a little nudge. “The castle?”

“You said there are no castles in real life,” Mia said cheerfully.

Ivy gave her a look. “Be careful.”

“I will be,” Mia assured her.

“I mean it,” Ivy said, before breaking away to speak to some of the women who always said she never gave them the time of day. She had to be careful, too, and she knew it.

From then on, all that Mia knew about the world, she learned from books. She knew what heather looked like and what damage a typhoon at sea might do. She memorized names of streets in Paris and San Francisco and New York. She discovered the Lost Boys and a world in the future in which firemen burned books and people memorized entire novels to make certain they would never die. She read Shakespeare’s plays and came to understand that transformations were always possible. The person she was becoming could not be seen by anyone at the Community and she often thought of her favorite line from Henry IV, Part I. We have the receipt of fern-seed, we walk invisible. Her real self was hidden with the books she kept in the sheep barn. Whenever Mia could get away unnoticed, she hiked into the forest to read her most recent novel on the bank of the Last Look River. The birds took flight when she turned the pages, the leaves were shaken from the trees. If there be magic, Mia whispered there in the forest, let it be mine.

IN THE COMMUNITY, STUDENTS stopped attending school after the age of fifteen. There was no graduation and no ceremony, they simply traded one set of chores for another. Joel believed that work was more valuable to young minds and occasionally, Mia worked in the office alongside Ivy, filing and sending out the mail. That was how Evangeline had found them, mother and daughter together at the desk going over the figures from the farm stand.

“Is she supposed to be here?” Evangeline asked Ivy when she spied Mia. “Wouldn’t it be better for her to be working outside, getting more exercise?”

Children belong to everyone. Love is everywhere. There is only one family, and it is us.

“Why don’t you ask Joel?” Ivy was always civil to Evangeline, because she knew the older woman’s opinion mattered. She took the risk of speaking up to her now only because Joel was in the doorway. From the look he’d given her, Ivy knew what he would want from her when they were alone, and so she felt she had some leverage. “Mia is learning some business skills,” Ivy said to her husband.

“Good for her.” Joel nodded his approval. “Be smart, but not too smart,” he advised Mia. “No one likes a girl who’s too smart for her own good.”

Mia flinched and lowered her eyes as she always did when she was in her father’s presence. He was said to have the ability to see right through a person. Members of the Community swore that he could tell who was a liar in five minutes flat, and who was a thief in under a minute. That was why Mia was nervous. She happened to be both.

“Mia is quite enterprising,” Evangeline commented, as if it were a bad thing.

“She’s dutiful,” Ivy responded. She lifted her eyes to her husband. She knew him better than most. Better than Evangeline. After all, she spent every night in his bed. “As am I,” she said, looking directly at him and no one else.

When Joel left, Evangeline went into the attached kitchenette to make a cup of tea. Mia was done for the day and about to close the file drawer when she spied something stuffed into the very back, clearly ignored for years. She pulled it out and when she unfolded the paper she discovered a small, delicate watercolor painting of Hightop Mountain. There were the yellow fields and the ferns in the marshlands near Last Look River. It was a rendering of the land before the Community came to settle here. For the first time Mia saw how beautiful Berkshire County was. The little watercolor was a treasure, the first thing she had ever wanted for her own. There was some scrawled writing on the back of the paper, in red ink, likely made of mulberries, faded and pale. Mia could barely read it, and the words meant nothing to her. It was the beautiful little painting that held her attention. Art was not allowed in the Community, and Mia had never been to a museum; she could not recall ever seeing a painting or drawing.

Evangeline walked in with her steaming cup of English breakfast tea. She always said it was the one thing she couldn’t live without, and she kept the tea leaves in a jar hidden in a cupboard in the little kitchen because Joel always said having to indulge in something every day was an addiction, whether it was heroin or coffee or tea.

“What’s that?” she asked Mia when she saw the girl fumbling with some paper.

“Nothing,” Mia said, even though she knew it was the wrong answer.

“It’s a painting,” Ivy said as Evangeline peered at it. It looked harmless enough to Ivy, and she didn’t care for the way Evangeline bossed her daughter around. “Mia wants to create a mural for the little ones at the school and she’s going to copy this.”

Mia was grateful that her mother had stepped in. She quickly folded the artwork into her pocket. She didn’t pay attention to the writing on the back, but she’d noticed the signature. Carrie Oldenfield Starr, the name of Joel’s first wife. Carrie wasn’t spoken of much, although every year a bouquet of wildflowers was left at her grave on the day she had died. Ivy had told her that all they had was due to Carrie, and Mia had always wondered why this woman who was their benefactor was never thanked at Sunday meetings. Now she thought perhaps it was because she had been a painter.

“Art?” Evangeline said. “Would Joel be pleased with that?”

“His first wife was an artist. I think he would approve,” Ivy assured her. She was his second wife, after all, and should have some say in the matter.

Evangeline stared for a while before she broke the silence. “Fine. Take it,” she said to Mia. Evangeline wasn’t going to argue the point, and it was true that the school could use some brightening up. “Just make sure you paint landscape. No vain depictions of human forms.”

The mural wasn’t perfect, and working on it ate up most of Mia’s free time for the next few weeks, so that she had to skip reading, but she actually enjoyed herself. Tim, the building manager, allowed her some leftover paint, cans of blue and yellow and green, and if you were a small child and had never seen a mural before, you might stare at the painted wall in a state of awe when you recognized Hightop Mountain and the fields where the corn grew in neat rows. Even Evangeline had to admit that Mia had done a decent job. The little watercolor by Carrie Oldenfield Starr was forgotten by everyone but Mia, who kept it hidden in the barn along with her library card. She often took it out to look at it, imagining the land where they lived as the painter had presented it, back when there was only a single white farmhouse alongside a small barn, before the Community had been built. Mia wished she was in that place right now, in the field where sunflowers grew, where it might be possible to be who you wished to be and you could read books all day long and no one would say a word about it. A place where no one would punish you for being who you were.

TAKE ONE RISK AND you’ll soon take more. It’s an addiction or it’s bravery, it’s foolishness or it’s desperation. Mia went beyond the confines of the gate at the end of their long dirt driveway more and more often. She wondered what would happen if she were to travel west on Route 17. Would she reach the moon? Would she find city streets where there were bookstores and coffeehouses where she could be invisible and do as she pleased?

The best time to break the rules was during contemplation hours, Saturdays between four and six, when people were supposed to meditate and look inward, then get down on their knees, wherever they were, and be thankful for all that they had and all the Community had given them. That was usually Mia’s reading time, but after searching for the original book, the one with her name in it, she had become restless, and that was when the wandering began. She went down to the athletic fields and watched a soccer match played by local children, excited for the winning team, even though she didn’t understand the rules. She went into the bakery and stared at the gorgeous three-tiered cakes named after the deadly sins, including Gluttony, Envy, and Wrath. She sat outside the police station on a wooden bench. “Everything okay?” an officer coming out of the building asked her, a puzzled look on his face. People in the Community never approached the police, not for any reason. “You have a good view from here,” Mia said. The building was directly across the green from the library. “I guess we do,” the officer said. Mia took off quickly, not wanting to draw any more attention to herself. I need help, she’d wanted to say. I need to find a way out.

One afternoon while out hiking Mia found herself at the Jack Straw Tavern. People from the Community were not allowed to frequent the bar; consuming alcohol and mingling with townspeople were both forbidden. Still, Mia found the nerve to peer through the window. A handsome young man bringing out the trash spied her lingering there.

“I don’t think you’re old enough to drink,” the bartender teased. He could tell Mia was one of the commune kids, they all had a wild, underfed look, and he pitied anyone who lived out on that run-down farm where he’d heard everything was regulated, what you ate, how many hours you slept, who you could speak to. “How about some French fries?” the bartender asked.

Mia had never heard of them, but she said, “Sure,” and followed him inside. The tavern was dark and comforting, with booths that had leather seats.

“Coming right up,” the bartender told Mia.