Page 25 of The Invisible Hour

“Can you swim?” Nathaniel asked, for he knew that many ladies didn’t.

“Of course.” Mia knelt to remove her boots, which she left beside her book in the tall grass. Blackbirds swooped across the sky as she walked over the marshy ground, not seeming to mind the muck. Halfway there she called back over her shoulder, “Do you?”

Nathaniel removed his boots and shirt and followed her, naked to the waist. Mia was already standing in the reedy shallows. It was the most beautiful day, there could not be one finer, and she refused to think of how her presence might wreck both their lives. She would not think of herself as a butterfly, there to create chaos, but as a woman who had finally arrived exactly where she wanted to be. She looked up and counted the blackbirds overhead. Fifteen. The age she had been when she read his book.

“Won’t you ruin your dress?” she heard Nathaniel ask. He stood with his feet in the mud and watched her wade deeper.

The water was ice, but she wouldn’t think of going back to shore. “I don’t mind.” Mia made her way through the reeds until the pond was deep enough to plunge in. It was heavenly, though shockingly cold. Diving in woke every part of her and made her feel even more alive. Dragonflies skimmed over the surface of the water; the air was filled with them so that the sky turned a luminous blue. Mia faced the shore and saw that Nathaniel was staring. She looked like a nixie, a mythological creature surrounded by water flowers.

“Are you afraid of drowning?” Mia called.

In fact, he was. Up in Maine, he’d heard so many stories of people who had drowned, and had written the tales of some of them, and then had nearly drowned himself when he was sleepwalking. Now, though, despite his nagging fear, he dove into the green water and swam to her. Mia laughed and applauded his bravery, for it was so early in the season few would dare to swim here. The water lilies on their green pads were not yet blooming.

“Promise we won’t drown,” Nathaniel said, gasping in the cold.

“We won’t,” Mia vowed. She laughed to think of all she might have missed if she had left the black stones in her pockets, if she’d failed to read the book that had fallen open in the grass. If she only had a few hours here, it would be enough. It would be a dream that could last a lifetime.

They floated together past the reeds and Mia’s dress spread out all around her like a black lily, and when she drifted too far, Nathaniel seized her arm. She could feel the heat from his touch go through her, right to the center of her chest.

“You’re floating away,” he said, concerned. It was so cold, it was freezing, and yet he was overheated.

His hand was at her waist, though she certainly didn’t need rescuing. “I’ve already told you,” Mia said. “I can swim.”

“What else can you do?” Nathaniel asked, puzzled by her every word and action. To say she came from another time, and knew what others did not, was madness, surely, and yet she seemed perfectly sane.

“I can tell you that you will be a great writer,” Mia told him. “And your book will mean everything to me.”

“I doubt that,” Nathaniel said, embarrassed and flattered at the same time.

Mia thought of how one person could save another’s life or ruin it without even meaning to. She had already said too much, and now she swam away from him, back to shore. She slipped on her boots and thought of the day when she went to the library and found his book. She’d grabbed the first volume she could reach so that Sarah would not be suspicious, for Mia always took out at least one book. She thought of standing at the river with the pile of black stones. She had read somewhere that every person who had tried to end their lives and had survived vowed they had regretted their attempt the moment they’d leapt from the bridge or swallowed the pills or dove into the rushing waters. She’d regretted it before she even tried, all because of him.

Nathaniel followed Mia through the mud. He was chilled to the bone, but he was also in a state of wonder. He felt as if he had wandered into one of his own tales. A woman arrives in a field and changes everything; she has secrets she won’t tell, she has a history that is the heart of the story.

“Will I see you again?” Nathaniel asked as he came up behind Mia. She was wringing water out of her long red hair. There was a green puddle below her on the ground.

“If you find me,” Mia said. Now that she was standing there, drenched, she knew that she had opened the door, and that she was about to walk through it.

“I will,” Nathaniel said. “If you don’t run away.”

“Tomorrow then,” Mia said. If she were wise, she would leave him and immediately go back before she changed the world without meaning to. Instead, she walked on. This was madness, she knew; she had no home, no food, no other clothes, yet she had no desire to leave. She wandered farther into the woods, thinking she would make a camp of some sort beneath a tree, but then she spied a low roof under the branches of an old oak. Thinking it was a cow barn, Mia went on to discover that it was a small ramshackle cottage. She pulled away the canopy of vines growing over the door and stepped inside. The place smelled like wet earth and had clearly been abandoned for some time, but inside there was a small bed and bureau and a spinning wheel. Someone had lived here once, and had cherished the place, and Mia gave her thanks to whoever the previous occupant might have been.

She spied a cradle in the back of the tiny house, covered by sumac that had grown up through the floor. There were cups, as well as two small bowls. She wished that Ivy could have lived in a cottage like this, that the vines would have covered the roof, that flowers would have grown up through the dirt floor, and they could have kept Dottie the sheep here and spun her wool on the tall wooden spinning wheel. Ivy had always insisted they had no choice, that Joel would find them wherever they went, but what if she had never gone to the Community and had made them a home in the forest as someone had clearly once done here? What if they had been invisible and had lived cut off from the rest of the world?

Exhausted, Mia climbed into the small iron bed. The mattress was stuffed with straw and still smelled sweet. She fell asleep in no time and dreamed she was in the apple orchard with her mother. In her dream, she grabbed on to Ivy’s arm and made her run as fast as she could, and when the truck slipped down the hill the only damage it did was to knock down one of the old, twisted apple trees, a cutting from the one Johnny Appleseed had left behind on his travels through Blackwell.

There were holes in the roof of the cottage, and when Mia’s dream of the orchard woke her in the middle of the night, she could see the stars shining. It took her a moment to remember where she was, in a time before The Scarlet Letter had been written, in the year when Nathaniel was a man who thought he would fail at everything, on a night when he was already awake in his cluttered room on Herbert Street in Salem, waiting for the moment when he could see her again.

THEY MET EACH MORNING at the pond. Nathaniel told no one, but the secret of where he went each day burned inside him, making it impossible to talk to his sisters, for he was not a liar and never had been, and at this stage of his life it was unlikely that he would have so radical a change in his character. A single untruth seared his tongue, and he began to avoid his family. A secret life is one that can only be shared by two, especially when love was involved, for that is what this seemed to be. He could not stop thinking of Mia. Whether she was an angel or a witch or simply a woman didn’t matter, for she was all he thought of. He ignored his desk and had stopped writing. The real world called to him, perhaps for the first time since he was a boy and came alive in the Maine woods, connected to nature and to the secret life he had back then as well. A lone wanderer, someone who was more attached to trees and leaves and stars than he was to other human beings, a watcher in the window who had become a watcher in the woods.

HE BEGAN TO PILFER food from the kitchen to bring to Mia, and though he meant to keep his actions secret, he was no better a thief than he was a liar. In time his sisters noticed. Loaves of bread and cheese and leftover supper all disappeared.

“Perhaps he’s feeding the poor down at the harbor,” Louisa guessed.

“Perhaps,” Elizabeth said, but she believed something else was at play. She knew her brother better than anyone, and she understood what it meant when he stopped writing. The cause was either a gloom that couldn’t be lifted or a woman.

“Have you had a good day?” Elizabeth asked him when he returned that afternoon. His hair was wet, and he’d pushed it back; there was mud on his boots. She wondered where he’d been traipsing during the hours when he’d been gone. She noticed there was a smile on his face for no reason whatsoever. The weather was humid and he wasn’t writing, and ordinarily these were factors that would make him miserable.

“Excellent,” Nathaniel answered, which was not at all like him, for how does a writer have a good day when he hasn’t written a word? And how does a man who has always believed himself to be cursed take the stairs two at a time so that he might sit upon the roof and study the stars?