Page 14 of The Invisible Hour

Man’s accidents are God’s purposes.

Sophia A Hawthorne 1843

Nath’l Hawthorne

This is his study

1843

The smallest twig

leans clear against the sky

Composed by my wife,

and written with her dia-

mond.

Inscribed by my

husband at sunset

April 3d 1843

On the gold light S A H

Sunlight splashed against the windows as Mia observed the study where Hawthorne had worked, and she could spy the green divan where he’d rested while imagining his stories. She had searched out his grave in the old cemetery, up on Authors Ridge, the burying place of Concord’s great writers, where people often left tokens of respect, flowers and pencils and pens all set down to honor Hawthorne’s memory. Once or twice, she’d seen a crumpled note left for the author, who had been gone for more than a hundred and fifty years. She understood that when a book spoke to you, you wanted to speak back. For all this time, she had been holding one-sided conversations with the author, although sometimes she imagined the words he said in return.

She dreamed of Hawthorne, and when she walked through the cemetery, she imagined that he walked beside her. She supposed she had fallen in love with him, he took up so much space inside her head. She was so focused on her vision of Hawthorne she didn’t notice when funerals streamed by, with mourners doing their best to step around her. Once she fell asleep beside his grave, and when she woke with grass threaded through her hair, she could not shake off her dream that the author had come to her, and that they belonged to one another. She felt closer to him than she did to anyone else, and often took out the book she had stolen from the library to read the inscription. Other girls her age were dating, having mad crushes on boys at school, crying in the corridors when they were dumped, starting all over again with someone new, but Mia had no interest in any of that nonsense. What she wanted was impossible, but she was convinced there was magic in the world and if she waited long enough, if she really wished for it, he would be hers. Love in the real world must exist, otherwise why would it be written about so often? But what it was, and how it felt, was a mystery to her; it could not be what she had witnessed growing up, hiding with her mother in the forest just so they could speak freely.

AFTER MIA HAD LEFT the farm, Joel Davis stormed into the police station to report that his daughter was an underage runaway. After a search of the town and the woods, the police informed him there was nothing more they could do. It was evident that they believed whoever ran away from the Community likely had good cause, and after so many antagonistic years, they didn’t feel obliged to go out of their way to help Davis.

One morning, when Sarah was replacing books on the shelves, she looked up and there he was in the reading room. She kept working even when Joel Davis approached the desk. She told herself she had nothing to fear and there was no reason for her hands to shake as they did.

“Are you the one who gave her all those books?” Joel asked. He had a hard look on his face and he hadn’t bothered to kick the mud off his boots. He’d walked in as if he owned the place. “I’ll bet you did. I’ll bet you like to have people think just like you and fill their minds with trash.”

“Are you a member of this library?” Sarah said.

“It’s open to the public, and that’s me. I’m the public.” There was no debate over that. “If you know where my daughter is, and you fail to tell me, you’ll likely wind up in jail.”

There was still a tremor in Sarah’s hands, but she narrowed her eyes. She’d be damned if she would back down. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“But you don’t deny giving her those books, do you?” When Sarah didn’t answer, Joel nodded. “That’s what I thought. I can always spot a liar.” He put down a leaf on the desk. “Give her this and she’ll know who she belongs to. Her mother didn’t leave me, and she’s not going to either.”

He walked out without another word and Sarah immediately called to tell Constance. She didn’t think she should visit Concord for a while, just in case Joel Davis got it into his head to follow her. Once she’d heard that Davis had confronted Sarah, Constance felt she owed it to Mia to tell her what had happened.

“What exactly did he say?” Mia wanted to know.

“All nonsense. And he left some sort of leaf.”

An apple tree leaf to remind her of her mother, to let her know she had a father and he had rights to her. Although she appeared calm, that night Mia slept fitfully. She had never spoken about her life at the Community, but Sarah had explained to Constance that Mia had run off after the tragic death of her mother. Constance’s own mother had died young, and she knew what it was like to feel alone when you were much too young to experience that sort of abandonment. She heard Mia get out of bed sometime past midnight, and when Constance came out of her room she found Mia in the parlor, staring into the dark yard, keeping watch. Constance would never understand if Mia told her that Joel knew what you were thinking. He could spot a liar and a thief. He knew what you would do before you yourself did.

“You don’t have to worry about him. He doesn’t know where you are and he is never getting you back,” Constance assured Mia. “Sarah and I wouldn’t allow it. If we need to, we’ll hire a lawyer and have you declared an emancipated minor.”

Mia was grateful, and after that she told Constance she was able to sleep, but it wasn’t the truth. Sometimes, when she was in bed trying to fall asleep, she thought she heard him rattling the windows in her bedroom, a goblin from the past who wouldn’t leave her alone. Once she went out to the garden, and there on the iron table was a perfect apple tree leaf. It might have been coincidence, it might have drifted over from a tree in a neighbor’s yard, all the same, after that Mia always got out of bed to make sure the locks on the door were bolted.

Some things could break you once you brought them back to life. Some things were best forgotten. Mia did her best not to think of the past, but it did no good. The days were fine, but once night fell, she remembered it all. Her mother laughing in the dark woods. The cemetery ringed with ferns and the mountain beyond. The rocks in her backpack on the bank of the Last Look River. The smell of books when they were burned on a bonfire. The inscription in the book written in blue ink. Running past the dogs to the gate with her heart pounding. The promise she had made herself that she would never go back.