Page 8 of The Invisible Hour

There was an old gentleman at the bar, having an afternoon beer. He was Max Starr, from an old Blackwell family, and he could never figure out why his cousin Carrie had given away such a large portion of their land. He gathered this young girl was one of the squatters who’d taken over the farm. She had her hair braided in an old-fashioned style and was dressed plainly. Still, she was a pretty girl, and she smiled at him when she caught him staring.

“My cousin owned land where you live,” he told Mia. “It was in the family for close to three hundred years.”

“Carrie Oldenfield,” Mia said. “She was a painter.”

The old man sat back in his chair, surprised by the girl’s knowledge and charm. She didn’t look blank the way most of the Community kids did. “That’s right. She went to the Museum School in Boston, and she studied in Paris, for all the good it did her.”

“Why didn’t it do her any good?” Mia wanted to know.

Max Starr snorted, disgusted. “Because she married him.”

“I’m sorry she died,” Mia said, feeling guilty for reasons she didn’t quite understand.

“Everybody dies,” Max Starr said. “It was the way she wound up living that was the problem. Lovely girl,” he said. “Second cousin once removed.” He shook his head. “Just goes to show, one man can ruin a good woman’s life.”

Mia wondered what her mother’s life might have been like if she hadn’t married Joel Davis. She might be west of the moon, someplace where she didn’t have to make herself so plain. At the last Sunday meeting, there had been a complaint about Ivy from the other women in the sewing circle and she had been made to apologize for her misdeeds. Ivy’s crime was to have recited an Emily Dickinson line while they were working on a quilt. I am out with lanterns, looking for myself. Ivy had to walk up to her husband, in front of a gathering of the entire Community, so he could tie a badge on a rope around her neck. It was the letter V, for vanity, to be worn for seven days. As far as Mia was concerned, it hadn’t made Ivy any less beautiful. It just made her hate her father more than she already did.

When the bartender brought over a plate of fries, along with a bottle of catsup, Mia sat down and proceeded to eat like a starving person. The food was heaven.

“Slow down there,” Max Starr said as he watched Mia wolfing down the fries. “Don’t they let you eat at that farm?”

“Boiled potatoes,” Mia said between ravenous bites. “We absolutely don’t have this.”

“Are they crazy out there?” the old man said.

“Maybe,” Mia said. She’d never thought of the Community that way before, but now that Max Starr had suggested it, she stopped to consider the way they lived. “I think so.”

“Well, you don’t seem like one of them,” Max decided, having taken a liking to the girl.

“What do I seem like?” Mia asked, truly interested in what his answer might be. This was the longest conversation she had ever had with an outsider.

Max carefully thought over her question before answering. “You seem like a girl who likes French fries.”

Mia grinned. That’s what she was. An ordinary girl who asked for a second helping and was granted her wish on this one day when she broke the rules and was just like anyone else in town.

That was when Mia began to think about the other life she might have if she ran away. She thought about it while she weeded the gardens, and in the laundry, where she steam-ironed clothes; and at the preschool, where she worked in the afternoons; and in the office, when she filed bills. She thought about it in the vegetable garden and every time she collected Look-No-Furthers in the orchard. She had begun to plot her getaway, and every time she saw her mother, across a room or on the other side of the field, she would think, Let’s do it together. When the night is dark, when no one can hear us, we will run down the road, we will stop the first car we see, we will never even look back, not once, not for a minute, and before you know it we’ll be west of the moon. Let us walk invisible and disappear.

AT THE END OF the summer, a group of women stumbled upon Mia in the garden. It was the sewing circle hour, and she’d thought she’d be safe, but as it turned out there was a huge crop of tomatoes that had to be picked, and the sewing circle had been canceled. Mia’s heart dropped when she saw them. She had begun to write out an escape plan on a scrap of paper. Go at night. Climb out the window. Travel light. Don’t look back. Take only what you need most of all. Ask Sarah Mott the librarian for money for bus tickets. Meet Ivy in the woods. Run as fast as you can.

The scent of the tomatoes was fiery and sharp, and the sun was beating down on Mia’s shoulders. When the women from the sewing circle burst through the gate, Mia had already torn up the list to bury in the dark soil. Only one scrap was left, clutched tight in her hand. Mia felt sick to her stomach thinking of what would happen if she were to be found out. She had only faced her father’s wrath once, when she was eight years old and had jumped into a muddy puddle, and she had never misbehaved again. She had been banished to a dark cellar where they kept canned fruits and jam. She’d pounded on the locked door and wailed so terribly for over an hour that at last Ivy had persuaded Joel to forgo any further punishment, vowing that Mia had learned her lesson. But she was older now, and what she’d done was far worse.

As the women came near, Ivy’s cool gray eyes found Mia. She could tell as soon as she saw her daughter. Something was wrong.

“Look who’s come to weed even when she isn’t on the schedule,” Evangeline said. Her voice was warm, but she looked at Mia through narrowed eyes. “I always said you were enterprising.”

Mia did her best to appear calm. She sat with her hands behind her back as the women found their places between the rows of tomatoes, eager to begin harvesting the last of the ripening fruit. She was imagining her punishment when she was caught, the lashes in the field, the locked, dark isolation, the extra work hours, when something brushed against her back. Without glancing at Mia, Ivy took her daughter’s hand and pried it open, then got hold of the last bit of Mia’s list. Run as fast as you can. That was all that was left. Ivy and Mia looked at each other, and as they did, Ivy had a half smile on her face as she popped the scrap into her mouth and swallowed it. Mia had to stop herself from laughing out loud. It seemed that her desire to break the rules had come from somewhere.

“What’s that?” Evangeline said, noticing that Ivy was chewing, suspicious.

The sky was cobalt blue; it was such a beautiful day, whether they were here or a thousand miles away.

“A fly,” Ivy said smartly. “It must have taken me for a frog.”

SARAH MOTT TAUGHT MIA how to use the computer at the library. Usually, the young people showed her tricks, but Mia knew nothing about technology and Sarah began with the basics. Mia thanked her for the instruction, and then when Sarah had left her to her own devices, Mia began to look through Blackwell obituaries. She was searching for Carrie Oldenfield Starr, but there was no mention of Carrie. It was as if the painter had led an invisible life. In her search, Mia discovered that several people had drowned in both the Last Look River and the neighboring Eel River. The one that interested her most was a little girl who was said to haunt the river and was called the Apparition. Every August at the Blackwell’s Founders’ Day Festival a play was presented about her drowning and her reappearance as a ghostly being who haunted the Eel River. Mia had seen posters about Founders’ Day, but she’d never attended. Now she decided that this summer she would see the play no matter what. Luckily, on that evening, most of the adults had gathered at the Community Center for a meeting concerning next year’s crops. Mia sneaked out her window, ran to the gate, and made her way along Route 17. She watched the performance from the edge of the mossy woods.

It was the end of a day full of festivities celebrating the founding of the town by a few families who’d come from Boston into what was then the wilderness. Paper lanterns had been strung across the town green and there were stands selling hot dogs and ice cream and blueberry pie. The stage had been built that morning, and most of the town watched as if spellbound. Mia was entranced as well. This was magic, the whole world changing before your eyes. A boy and a girl held lanterns as they searched for their missing sister. Mia could feel her heart beating faster. She was transported, but before she knew it, the play was ending, the Apparition was calling out to her sister that it was too late for her to be rescued but she could forever be seen near the river where she had perished. When the actors left the stage, Mia felt as if she’d woken from a dream. She turned to walk back to the farm and there was Ivy watching her.

“Do you know what will happen if they catch you?” Ivy whispered. She’d seen her daughter dart across the field and had followed her to town. Ivy meant to grab her daughter and bring her home, but by the time she’d caught up to her the play had begun and Ivy became as engaged as Mia was, as if she, too, had fallen under a spell. Now they walked back together through the dark, quickly, a scrim of fear intensifying as they considered what would happen if they were caught. The mood was gloomy, but all at once Ivy had smiled. She thought of how lucky she was not to have lost her daughter, to have a real live girl before her and not an apparition. “You know what the best day is for me?” Prowling around in the night had caused Ivy to feel that she was free to speak more openly. She felt as if she was the person she used to be, who sneaked out her window at night. “March sixteenth.”