Page 13 of The Invisible Hour

She clapped her hands, and the echo startled the dog, who took off into the dark. When she walked on, there was nothing to weigh her down. She was camouflaged by the night, and she felt protected by the vast empty landscape. She didn’t even own enough to pack a suitcase, but she had her backpack and she’d taken the painting and the book with her. She scrambled over the fence, then took off down the road, staying in the shadows in case anyone should drive by. There were the huge oak trees, and the gate to the cow pasture that always swung open and stuck. The crickets were calling so fast the echo made Mia’s pulse race. As she walked to town, she did her best to forget everything about her past.

WHEN SHE REACHED THE back door of the library, Mia used the key Sarah Mott had given her. She didn’t dare to turn on any lights but instead made her way to the desk in the dark. There was moonlight streaming through the window when she grasped the phone. She had memorized the number the librarian had given her.

It was late and Sarah was asleep when the phone rang.

“Can you come to the library?” Mia said. “I’m hiding behind the desk.”

Sarah threw on her clothes and walked over. She lived in the cottage behind the town founder’s house, where there was a garden that grew only red flowers and red vegetables, tomatoes and peppers and chard. The lights in the library were off, so Sarah walked to the desk in the dark. When she saw Mia sitting there, her legs pulled up to her chest, her backpack beside her, Sarah Mott sat down beside her. The library felt hushed and safe, but now they found themselves whispering.

“Are you all right?” Mrs. Mott asked.

Mia’s brilliant hair had been cut choppily at chin length, but she still looked as if she had walked out of another time and place in her gray overalls. Usually, Mia avoided eye contact, but on this day she seemed different. Her pulse was fast. It had been ever since she’d walked away from the Last Look River. If she was wrong, if she couldn’t trust Mrs. Mott and the librarian told Joel where she was, Mia didn’t want to think about what would happen. But Mrs. Mott was listening, and it might well be Mia’s last chance. “I need to get out of Blackwell. They punish people for reading at the farm. They burned my books.”

No one else from the community had ever visited the library. Sarah now thought of the other children she’d seen at the farm stand in their ill-fitting clothes. The women who shopped at the grocery for staples like flour and cornmeal with their hair braided and coiled into knots, and the men loitering outside the hardware store, grim and untalkative. Every time she saw anyone from the Community, Mrs. Mott saw trouble before her. She saw trouble right now set within the fear in Mia’s eyes.

“What do they intend to do?” she asked.

“They intend to ruin my life.”

Sarah looked at the girl closely, her dark eyes, her grim expression.

“What would you like me to do? Call over to the police?”

Mia looked even more panicky. “No. Please. Don’t do that. They might send me back. Do you think you could find me someplace to live?” By now her voice was breaking. “I don’t care where I go as long as it’s far from Blackwell. Do you think you can help me?”

Sarah Mott knew what the consequences might be for helping a minor run away, she might even be charged with kidnapping. All the same, she was matter-of-fact, the sort of person who rarely used superlatives. “I’d bet my life on it,” she said.

They stopped at a gas station on the Mass Pike so that Mia could use the restroom. Sarah had thought to bring her a change of clothes, jeans, a slate-blue shirt, and a pale yellow sweater. Once she’d slipped them on, Mia tossed her old clothes into the trash can. When she saw her reflection in the car window, she thought that she looked like someone brand new, with her chin-length hair and her store-bought clothing. There she was, a stranger. So much the better. That was the way it should be.

Mrs. Mott was waiting behind the wheel, drinking a coffee in a to-go cup. “All set?” she asked. It wasn’t yet 5:00 a.m.

“Definitely,” Mia answered. She had already decided. She would never be back.

THE FRIEND MRS. MOTT had alerted about Mia’s situation was Constance Allen. She and Sarah had been involved since college and lived together in the summer and on holidays, waiting for the time when Sarah could retire and move in permanently. “I would trust her with my life,” Sarah told Mia as they drove east toward Concord.

Sarah and Constance had been in love ever since they met, even though Sarah had been married once; that had been a mistake. Her love for Constance, however, was something she would never regret. As they headed east, Sarah thought of the first time they’d seen each other, outside the library at Simmons. Constance was an elegant blonde from a wealthy family in Glen Cove, Long Island, while Sarah hailed from a working-class family in New Hampshire, just outside of Nashua. They had nothing in common, and Sarah already had her group of friends, fun-loving, smart girls, but none of them interested her the way that Constance did.

One bright afternoon, Constance came up to her in the dining hall. “You keep staring at me,” she said. “Is there something you wish to say?”

There was, but Sarah had been unable to say it, or, perhaps, she hadn’t truly understood all she wanted to say to Constance until after she had been married and moved to Western Massachusetts. Constance had been one of the bridesmaids at Sarah’s wedding, and the night before the ceremony she had suddenly taken Sarah’s hand. “You’ve talked about Josh so often, but you have never once said you loved him.”

Sarah had laughed. What was her friend suggesting? That Sarah walk away? The tent was set up in Josh’s parents’ backyard and the caterers from the Jack Straw Tavern would soon be arriving, and Josh’s friends had thrown a bachelor party the night before that had lasted till dawn. But all at once Sarah knew what she had wanted to say all those years ago in the dining hall at school, that she didn’t think she could survive if Constance wasn’t in her life. It took her several years of a doomed marriage until she could drive out to Concord one Sunday. When Constance had opened the door in the early morning light, surprised and still in her nightgown, Sarah had said, “I’m finally here,” and that was all it took for everything to be settled between them.

THROUGHOUT THE DRIVE MIA had been terrified that they were being followed and that Joel would somehow find her and bring her back. He was the sort of man who didn’t let things go. Don’t test him, Ivy always said. Don’t pick a fight with him unless you’re willing to lose.

Mia looked out the rear window of the car even when there was no one else on the road.

“You’ll be safe here,” Mrs. Mott assured her when they arrived at Constance’s house. The street jogged along the Concord River. In the fields there were dozens of bluebird houses, little wooden boxes painted by children at the local school.

When Mia got out of the car she inhaled deeply. The air was fresh and gleamed with green light. It was noon, and the day was bright. Constance Allen opened the door of her little white house and waved. There were purple asters growing along the brick walkway on tall, thin stems. Constance was forty-five; and although she seemed ancient to the children who came to story time at the library, today, in her wrap sweater and jeans, she looked young.

“What are you waiting for?” she called cheerfully, and because it made no sense to be standing on the sidewalk like strangers, they went inside, and Mia began her new life.

MISS ALLEN INFORMED HER friends and co-workers that an orphaned niece had come to stay. Tragedies happened, and when they did Miss Allen was a good person to have on your side. Mia was promptly enrolled at the public high school under the name Maria Allen. A birth certificate was drawn up by a friend of Constance’s carpenter, who knew a place where it was possible to obtain false documents. Mia was a good student, always handing in work for extra credit. She loved the classes, but she stayed to herself, ill at ease with other people her age. She adored her room in Miss Allen’s house, however, which was lined with bookshelves and had a huge window overlooking a willow tree. Beyond that was the Concord River, and in the morning geese on their way south would call and the peepers would sing their last songs of the year.

Miss Allen gave Mia time to settle in, and on weekends Mia would spend afternoons at the library, reading, while Miss Allen was at work. She visited the houses of the great writers who had lived in Concord, Emerson and the Alcotts and Thoreau, but most often she went to the Old Manse, where Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife, Sophia Peabody, had lived after their marriage, paying a hundred dollars a year for rent. Mia had read up on their history and knew that Sophia had been a painter who’d spent most of her life bedridden until meeting Hawthorne. She had given up painting at the age of thirty-four, and soon after becoming a mother for the first time she had written in the window glass with her diamond ring as she gazed out at a world of snow and ice. The trees were all glass chandeliers.

Mia had spent hours standing in the grassy yard of the Old Manse, hidden behind the lilac bushes, reading the words both the bride and groom had etched into the glass with the diamond ring, a declaration of true love. She knew the message by heart and could recite it as if it were an incantation.