Page 9 of The Invisible Hour

Mia looked at her mother. She had no idea what that meant.

“That’s your birthday,” Ivy informed her. “In case you wanted to know.”

Mia had very much wanted to know, but birthdays at the farm were thought to be a vanity and were never celebrated; children born into the Community were never told their birthday so that the day would be like any other and they wouldn’t fall victim to pride. Knowing the date made Mia feel as if she could finally claim herself. The night itself was magic. She could feel it. Here they were, just like a mother and daughter, invisible to all others, free to do and say as they pleased. Mia wished they could go on walking all through the night. They wouldn’t stop until they reached California, until they were anywhere that was west of the moon.

“It was a good play, wasn’t it?” Ivy said.

Mia said, “It was.” She had nothing to compare it with, having never seen one before, but she knew she couldn’t look away from the stage once the play had begun. Oh, sister, the Apparition had said, look for me on starless nights.

“There are no such thing as ghosts,” Ivy said with assurance. “You know that, right? It’s all made up. There are no spirits and no heroes, and nothing is a fairy tale. The stories I told you were stories. Nothing more.”

“I guess,” Mia said, and then she added, “Maybe it would be better if those things existed.”

“It wouldn’t be,” Ivy told her. “We make our own mistakes, and spirits and stories can’t make it right.”

“Stories might,” Mia said.

“I thought you were smarter than that.” Ivy stopped short so suddenly that Mia almost crashed into her. They were nearly to the gate and the Community loomed before them in the dark, the grass and fields all turned pitch black. Ivy would have to come up with a good excuse for why Joel hadn’t found her in bed. She sometimes said she sleepwalked and found herself in the meadow, and he seemed to believe her, so all she could do was hope he would believe her again. Everyone else was asleep. Everyone was dreaming. But here she and Mia were, together. “At least I hope you are.” Ivy spoke in a soft voice. It was the voice of a person who loved someone more than anything in the world. “I hope you’re smarter than me.”

THEY WEREN’T PUNISHED THEN, but their luck soon turned. Not long afterward, a forbidden book was found in the barn. Mia had been reading, and, suddenly realizing she was late to work in the garden, she’d left the book under a pile of straw in Dottie’s pen instead of hiding it away behind the wooden planks. It was Pride and Prejudice. Mia had chosen it from the library without knowing anything about Jane Austen; she’d never heard the author’s name before, but the title had made her think of people in the Community. “You’ll love that one,” Sarah Mott had told her when she checked it out. “You’ll want to read the five other novels she wrote.”

At the Sunday evening meeting Joel held up the contraband book one of the men had found while pitching hay. There was a deep hush in the room. Pride and Prejudice.

“Who will admit their pride tonight?” Joel called out. When there was no answer, he began to pace, as he did when he was agitated. “There is a reason we have no books here. They will divide us. They’ll make us think the world outside can teach you more than you can learn right here. Some writer doesn’t know you better than I do. They can’t tell you how to live your life.”

Mia was in the back row on a hard wooden chair. Her heart was pounding against her chest, and she feared that Evangeline, who was sitting nearby, could hear its wild beat. She was afraid that if no one came forward, Joel might go to the library and question Mrs. Mott, maybe even threaten her, and then he would discover that Mia was a frequent visitor. Or maybe he’d already been there and had written Mia’s name in random volumes to remind her that she belonged to him. She was in a panic, half thinking she might just run out the door into the woods, when Ivy suddenly stood up at the front of the room. Her mother looked small from where Mia sat.

“It’s mine,” Ivy said. “I found it in a trash bin in town on market day. I started reading it, but I didn’t finish. It made no sense to me.”

There was a low murmur as people wondered what would happen next. Ivy was Joel’s wife, his favorite, yet the rules were the rules. You had to pay for breaking them, no matter who you were. Mia overheard bits and pieces of what people were saying to one another, that Ivy was spoiled and deserved whatever punishment she got, that she’d probably read the whole book and lied about it and she’d likely read others as well. Joel gestured for Ivy to come forward, as if they were the only two people in the room. She didn’t look at anyone else as she walked up to the podium.

Let’s run, Mia thought. Let’s be invisible. Let’s do it right now.

“Bow down,” Joel told Ivy.

Ivy’s eyes flicked over him, but she did as she was told. She did so in a manner that made people even more annoyed with her, for she kept her dignity, and she didn’t seem the least bit apologetic.

Joel called for a pair of scissors, which were quickly brought to him. Mia covered her eyes. She simply couldn’t look at what was to come next, and when at last she lifted her eyes, she saw that all of Ivy’s beautiful black hair had been shorn down to her scalp. Strands covered the floor like the feathers of a blackbird.

“This is for pride.” Joel spoke softly, which made things worse. It was as if he was being generous to a sinner, and the person being punished should be grateful to him. Ivy was known for her beautiful black hair, and Joel had loved the look and feel of it. His expression was fervent, that of a believer put to the test of his own rules. “This hurts me more than you can know,” he claimed.

Ivy went back to her chair and sat down as if nothing had happened. Her posture was straight, and her expression concealed her emotions. From where Mia sat, she saw pride in her mother’s face. Ivy looked even more beautiful without her hair, like Joan of Arc or a witch in Salem who was about to be burned.

As soon as they were dismissed, Mia ran into the woods, vanishing among the trees. It was her fault that the wrong person had been made to pay for her pride. One man can ruin a good woman’s life, she remembered Carrie Oldenfield’s cousin saying at the bar of the Jack Straw Tavern. Mia yearned for dark magic, something to save them, a spell that would destroy this place so that every one of the houses would burn to ash. Shakespeare had conjured magic in his plays, and Mia wished she could recite words that would pierce through Joel Davis as if they were knives. If it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge. This was the hour that she decided she would never fall in love. Love tied you down, it made you pay, it demanded all you had to give and repaid you with despair. She would never get close to anyone and would remain invisible, a girl without a heart. She would be hidden even when she was in plain sight.

Mia was intending to cut her arm with a stick and let her blood sink into the ground, as if she were a witch herself, as if she had power, when in fact she had none. She held the stick and merely sobbed, like an ordinary girl. There, in the dark woods, someone had managed to spy her. A hand on her arm pulled her back. There was only moonlight, but Mia could see her mother quite clearly. Ivy looked fierce with her nearly bald head.

“Next time don’t leave your book in the barn,” Ivy said. “Understand me?”

Mia’s eyes widened, and Ivy responded with a low, dark laugh.

“Do you think I don’t know you’ve been going to the library?” she said. “I used to be a reader when I was your age. I took your punishment because I let you visit the library and you probably inherited the reading trait from me, so I take what you’ve done to be my fault. I read and read and what good did it do me?”

“It’s not a trait, it’s a choice,” Mia said, not knowing how to feel. She was grateful and angry at the very same time.

“Whatever it is, be more careful,” Ivy urged her.

“We could leave here,” Mia said in a sure, quiet voice. “I have a plan.”