Page 29 of The Invisible Hour

“If it is, then a single dream is more powerful than a thousand realities.”

There was no reason for her to swim away, so she stayed where she was, her arms around him. She was no longer that girl with black rocks in her pockets; she wasn’t invisible anymore. Right now, she had what she had always wanted, the man whose words had saved her, the story that let her know she could save herself.

Mia pulled her dress over her head, then slipped off her undergarments. She knew the stars were easier to spy in this sky, for Salem was so dark at this hour, and the air was cleaner. Each star seemed a thousand times more brilliant than the ones she’d known. Nathaniel reached to unclasp Mia’s hair so that it fell down her back. It was so quiet it was as if they could hear the beating heart of the world. Crickets whirred and frogs called from the edge of the pond. It was the last time they would walk into the water, and the dark came falling down.

They stayed in the deep water, wrapped up with one another, remaining in an embrace until they were shivering. At last, they left the pond so they might be together in the tall grass. There was a full moon, glowing a deep red color. Some people called it the Strawberry Moon, others used the name the Rose Moon; it was a night when in folklore women revealed their love for their men by tying a thread around a tree, but that was not what happened in this field, not on this night. On this night, they thought not of words, but of deeds.

When they at last drew their clothes over their wet bodies, their hair was still soaking wet, their skin chilled. By now, it was fully dark.

“Let me stay with you,” Nathaniel said.

“Not tonight.” Mia sounded rushed, as if she had somewhere else to go.

“The moon will not be like this for another year,” Nathaniel said, but still Mia could not be convinced to let him stay, even though the moon was bloodred, red as the roses that grew at the cottage.

“It’s late,” she told him, and it was. The air was so much colder now, and she couldn’t stop shivering. She kissed him once, and then again, then finally pulled away to study him. She wanted to tell him everything, she wanted to thank him a thousand times, but instead she told him good night, and walked away through the tall grass. She left him as if this was not the last time, as if tomorrow would be waiting for them.

Nathaniel breathed in the night air. He watched her, for she’d stopped on her way to the cabin and was standing in the field. The dark was falling, ashy and soft, lilac at the edges. There was something he had planned to say, but Nathaniel had forgotten to do so. Now he remembered, and he nearly ran after her, but he could no longer see her anymore. I would give you the moon if I could. I would give you anything you wanted.

He didn’t know that he already had given her what she wanted most of all, the book that she wished upon, as if it were a star. The grass was black in the night, but Mia had always been able to see in the dark. That was one of the lessons she’d learned as a girl. She’d had the habit of running away, she’d done it all her life, and now she remembered how much it hurt to do so. She remembered that you could never look back, because if you did, you would understand just how much you were about to lose.

CHAPTER SIX BROTHER SPARROW

Nathaniel spent a day searching vainly for Mia, and when at last he stopped to rest, he slept all through the night. Now he awakened to find himself in a thicket of brambles just beyond Salem. The birds were rising into the trees in the early light, chattering with song, and he knew that she was gone. She had left the cabin as they’d found it, with his sister’s dresses folded on the bed, and the quilt his mother had sewn there beside the clothing. Now that it was daylight, Nathaniel clambered to his feet. He spied the green pond, and the bank where they’d stood, and he knew he’d lost her. With no other choice, he began to walk, disoriented but following some interior map. After a while, he found himself at his own house. He stood on the pathway, so distressed he was sweating through his clothes even though he was chilled to the bone. How could you possess sheer happiness one moment, and lose it the next? He wore his white shirt open and went barefoot. He was himself, and yet he was completely changed.

Elizabeth was waiting for him on the porch. She’d told their mother and sister that he was off with his friend Franklin, though she knew he was likely with Mia. Now, she was stunned by his appearance when he came up the walk, for her brother was clearly devastated.

“Did she tell you what she planned to do?” Nathaniel asked, desperate for some information.

“Why would she tell me?” Elizabeth said, unable to meet his eyes. She knew what was best for him, but that didn’t mean he would be grateful.

“She said you were logical,” Nathaniel said.

“That’s exactly what I am. She’d have to be a fool not to know that after speaking with me for five minutes.”

“Was logic what I wanted?” He’d begun to think that sending his sister to Mia had been a bad idea.

“It’s what we all must keep in mind.”

“Is it? Logic is why I’ve lost her.”

“You’ll be fine,” Elizabeth was quick to say, although she herself was not sure.

“Will I?” Nathaniel looked at his dear Ebe, the one person who had always known his heart; he felt sure she couldn’t understand this inexpressible longing. His experience had the effect of a spell, taking him out of his ordinary relations with humanity, enclosing him in a sphere by himself, a place not even his beloved older sister could reach. “I doubt that I ever will be again.”

THREE MONTHS PASSED AND there were no changes in Nathaniel’s despair. He locked himself away and did not join his sisters for meals. He grew thin and grave, and he turned away invitations to see friends, refusing to go with his uncle to Maine. He was silent most days, and yet they heard him talking to himself at night, as if he was a madman trying to convince himself that logic did indeed matter in this world. Ebe sometimes stood outside his door; she felt responsible for his grief, but that didn’t mean she believed herself to be in the wrong. She hoped she would hear him writing, but she never did, and then she worried that he had been permanently damaged. She had heard of writers who were so affected by loss, writing became a trap rather than a joy, and the words that once came so easily to them vanished, as if they were writing with invisible ink.

The family considered Nathaniel to be ill, for he went to bed and slept for days, a gaunt figure who refused food, barely managing sips of water, dehydrated and hallucinating, only beginning to recover when Louisa spooned broth into his mouth. He was in the grip of some spiritual agony, and he hoped his younger, more sensitive sister would understand his plight better than anyone else in the family. He told Louisa he had been in love with a woman who had come from another time, when women could be artists and painters and librarians as well as train conductors, when they went to universities alongside men, and wore trousers and cut their hair however they pleased, and married whomever they liked. In the houses there were lights that flickered on at a touch, on the streets there were carts that had no need to be drawn by horses; the buildings were as tall as the sky, with chambers that went up and down to deliver you up so high you could see Massachusetts from New York City. Louisa worried for his sanity and grew distressed thinking that they might have lost him to madness.

Elizabeth, his more practical sister, thought him mad to speak of such things to anyone else. “People will not understand and will think you’ve lost your mind,” she told her brother. “If Mia has returned to where she came from, she has done so for a reason. Would you have her choose this time for herself, as well choosing to upend all the work you’re meant to do? Should she dedicate her life to you and forget she is meant to have one of her own?”

Despite Elizabeth’s warning, Nathaniel continued to express his feelings, as confused and wild as they were, and those around him worried more each day. He was livid when no one believed him, his moods turning absolutely black.

“Lock me up if you think I’m not in my right mind,” Nathaniel said soberly to both of his sisters, his feelings deeply bruised. “I might as well be in a cage.” His eyes flicked from one to the other, and he felt all the worse for how acutely they worried over him, Louisa’s face swollen with fears, Elizabeth bleary-eyed, her expression grim.

Nathaniel only left his room to walk every evening at twilight, solitary journeys to Juniper Point, making his way past the eelgrass and the piles of salty kelp deposited along the shore, distracted and in despair, as if he were a man who’d recently been ill and now simply wished to be left alone. He spoke only to himself, muttering curses and regrets. He avoided the pond and the grassy fields and the cottage in the forest. Instead, he kept to the isolation of the windswept banks, where the mudflats were teeming with shellfish. It was late summer, and there were some nights when the cold wind came off the ocean and froze hatchlings in their nests. On other evenings, when the tide was too high for him to follow the shore, Nathaniel went across the bridge into the hills north of Salem. He walked there in the gloom, and flocks of sparrows followed him as he wondered if he’d been deceived by his own powers of invention, and had imagined all he’d experienced.

The children who spied him in the falling light called him the Bird Man, and said he was a ghost who could fly and that his black coat served as his wings. They said he’d been in love with a witch and had been enchanted, and that his family had been cursed and he could never escape bad fortune. Some women who saw him said he was an angel, one that had fallen to earth and needed saving, but when they tried to talk to him, he politely turned away, insisting he had nothing to say. On particularly dark, moody nights, Nathaniel often found himself down at the wharves, where he drank too much in the taverns. When he had so much that he could barely stand, he told stories about a woman he had loved who came from another time. He didn’t seem to notice when people laughed at him as soon as his back was turned and joked that that was what came of being a writer, madness and delusion.