Page 23 of The Invisible Hour

The morning was humid and filled with birdsong as sparrows and swifts woke in the thickets. In the first shafts of pale light, the air was thin and sweet, and perhaps that was why he was so disoriented as he walked on a familiar path. He felt the world itself had altered and that he was merely a sleepwalker, caught in a dream. He had wandered in his sleep before, most memorably in Maine while camping with his uncle. Back then, he had been standing at the edge of a dark lake when he heard Robert calling his name.

“Do not take another step,” his uncle had commanded, and those were the words that woke him. Nathaniel might have drowned, like the mermaid who was said to haunt the lake, if his uncle hadn’t clutched at his shirt, pulling him back from the muddy shallows.

“Do you not see where you are, boy?” Robert said, all but shaking him. “You need to know the difference between a dreamworld and the world that belongs to us.”

On this day, however, no one was calling for him to stop; no one grabbed his shirt and pulled him back, so he went forward. He had a tingling feeling in his fingers, as he sometimes did before he sat at his desk to write. To see what state he was in, he plucked a leaf from an oak tree. His fingers turned sticky and green with sap, and when he let the leaf go it floated down to the ground, as real as any other. This was no dream, that much was certain, and he was no sleepwalker.

There were midges flitting through the air that Nathaniel waved away, too real for his taste and extremely annoying as they swarmed around. His stories often occurred in a world where it was impossible to tell the difference between dreams and reality, and now it seemed he was watching his own writings come to life, as if he had entered a place where anything might happen, and the laws of nature didn’t apply.

As he stood with his arms folded against his chest, he saw a strange tableau before him. A woman with long red hair was asleep in the grass. There was no sound except for the calling of the crows in the pine trees, no shadows but those of the clouds sweeping past in the brilliant sky. Nathaniel ran a hand over his brow as he squinted to see her more clearly. The light was sifting through the boughs of the trees and the air was so dense he felt dizzy. Some nameless longing drew him to this woman. She was a vision, and yet he didn’t seem to be dreaming. To make certain he was in the real world he dug his nails into his skin, and indeed he felt the pain. He was alive and awake as he stood beneath the shade of a twisted pine tree, his heart pounding.

The woman was wearing a black dress and red boots and held a book in her arms, and Nathaniel couldn’t help but wonder if he had invented her, as he did his characters, out of nothing more than words and raw emotion. Perhaps she would fall apart, in a stream of ink and paper, and he would have to gather the words that had made her from between the stalks of tall grass. Then she opened her eyes and Nathaniel knew the truth. This woman was real.

CHAPTER FIVE WE WALK INVISIBLE

Mia saw the handsome man beneath a pine tree, his densely black hair too long, nearly reaching his shoulders, his face unshaven. She felt an instant attraction, as if she’d known him all her life. His eyes narrowed with mistrust as he observed her with suspicion, as if she were a changeling meant to do him harm. He wore a black coat, with the top buttons of his white shirt undone, for the day promised to be a fine one once the sun rose higher in the sky. May was the most beautiful time of the year in Salem, Massachusetts, especially after a harsh winter that consisted of endless weeks of snow and sleet with the north wind gusting off the sea. Now all the world was green again. In the woods, trout lilies and mayflowers were blooming, and the grass in the pastures was waist high. As she stood in the sweet-smelling field, with bees circling around her, Mia knew that she had done exactly what she had wished to do ever since she was a girl of fifteen. She had found the author of her beloved book.

“Are you lost?” Nathaniel called.

His voice at last, one she felt she already knew.

Nathaniel himself had felt lost on this morning, even though he walked here regularly. He tended to hike at dawn and dusk, so he would be less likely to run into anyone. He had never wanted idle conversation; he was usually caught up in a fictional world and didn’t wish to be interrupted. Nathaniel had thought he’d known all the paths that led through the fields into the forest, he thought he’d be alone as he was every day, except for the presence of passing sparrows and crows, and occasionally, if he walked quietly, a deer. But today there seemed to be a scrim of magic over the landscape, for everything he knew looked different, as if the world itself had opened to allow him to see what he’d never seen before. He was here and nowhere else, not in the midst of a story he was planning, or in the grip of an article he was to write for a journal, or plotting out a novel. He was in this field, and he could hear the bees.

The woman stared at him wide-eyed, and he wondered if perhaps she didn’t possess the ability to speak. All the same, she caught his gaze and held it and seemed unafraid. Was she one of the creatures he wrote about now come to life? Perhaps she was a ghost condemned to walk forevermore, or a woman who’d been abandoned by her husband or one who had attended a witches’ festival, a mythological creature who walked the earth. In his writings, women were often principal characters, independent, with minds of their own, often truer to their emotions and to the natural world than the men around them.

Nathaniel noticed that the woman held a book. She carried it as though it was a treasure, which, in Nathaniel’s opinion, books always were. Riches disappeared, but words lasted. “What do you have there?” he asked, always interested to discover what a person was reading, for he believed it was possible to see inside a person’s soul once you knew which books mattered to them.

“It’s my copy,” Mia said defensively, as if he were accusing her of theft. She seemed both dreamy and panicked, as if he’d woken her from a deep sleep and she was now here, undefended, in a field.

Nathaniel didn’t wish to challenge this woman in any way. “I don’t mean to quarrel with you,” he assured her.

For all he knew, she had come to curse him as his ancestors had been cursed. Perhaps her family had a history with his and a witch in her bloodline and she had intended to find him to make him pay for his great-great-grandfather’s sins. Had she been lying in wait until he stumbled by so that she could work her dark magic upon him, or was it simply fate that had led him to this field? Nathaniel often searched for the resting places of witches on his daily walk, hoping to make amends on behalf of his family by saying a prayer, or placing wildflowers on a spot that seemed likely to be an unmarked grave. He wondered who he had stumbled upon, for this woman was wearing red boots, and local folklore cited red shoes as a mark of those who practiced witchery.

“Is it a story I might know?” he asked, always most comfortable when speaking about books, for literature, he had always found, held more for him than life, which seemed a dark tunnel from which he couldn’t escape.

“You wrote it.” Mia held up the volume with a brown cover and gold letters.

Nathaniel laughed and said, “Not likely. Not if it’s any good.”

“It was good enough to have changed my life.”

“You’re surely mistaken,” Nathaniel said.

On this day, when he stood before Mia, Hawthorne was in his early thirties and he already considered himself to be a literary failure, having no idea of what he was to become. Now that she was before him, Mia wondered if it might be a mistake to tell him anything about his future. Once he learned what his work would be, it might somehow be forever changed. Mia was quiet and took the time to study him. Nathaniel was tall and lanky with eyes that appeared to change color, from gray to violet, the sort of man who had no idea of how attractive he was or how his good looks might affect a woman.

It was a strange meeting, for Nathaniel knew nothing about Mia, and she knew him so well she could easily recite the facts of his life if called upon to do so. She knew how his family history had affected his sisters, who never married or had children, as it had his mother, who barely left her room, and how Nathaniel had locked himself away for nearly a decade before their meeting here today, writing like a man on fire in what he called his owl’s nest, just as she knew that Melville would later come to idolize him, perhaps even fall in love with him, dedicating Moby-Dick to Nathaniel with extreme emotion: In Token of My Admiration for His Genius. She knew who Nathaniel would marry and the names and birth dates of his children, just as she knew the date that The Scarlet Letter would be published, March 16, her birthday, in the year 1850. Worst of all, she knew the date he would die. And now that she stood before him, she also knew she shouldn’t be here. Already there was something between them, for he looked at her as if a star had plummeted to earth to light up the field that he walked through, a place known for little more than its nesting sparrows and wildflowers, not for such unusual meetings, the sort that had made him forget that he had planned to spend most of this day at his desk, in the clutter and darkness of the home he referred to as Castle Dismal.

Mia had read most of his novels while sitting outside the Old Manse in Concord on summer days, once daring to sneak into the house after hours, making herself so at home she took a nap on the green velvet settee in what had been Hawthorne’s office. Now, she felt unbalanced in his presence, overwhelmed by all that he was and all that he would one day be, and what he would mean to her own life. His story of redemption and a mother’s endless love for her child had caused Mia to rethink everything she planned to do and had woken her from her nightmare.

Time had now shifted, and Mia had been carried backward, as if she’d stepped into a storm. She appeared so startled that for a moment Nathaniel thought she might turn and run, but then he realized she was as curious as he, for she lingered in the shade of the tall trees, her eyes so dark they were almost black. She seemed to be staring directly into his soul, and he found he could not look away.

“Shall I walk you home?” he asked. He himself wished to never go home again, for he felt utterly intrigued by this stranger.

“You cannot,” Mia quickly said. She had no home, and so perhaps the woods would have to do. Nathaniel was clearly taken aback by her response, so she added, “It’s impossible for you to do so.”

“How have you only just arrived here?” Nathaniel asked with a grin, attempting to put her at ease. “Did you arrive by magic?”

“I’m not sure. It’s possible.”