“Mia, come away,” Evangeline called as Mia stood looking out.

  But Mia stayed where she was, transfixed. She recognized Ivy’s gray shift and the red boots she always wore.

  Let’s do it tonight. Let’s be invisible, Mia had said that morning as they were picking apples. They had climbed a tree together and they might as well have been alone in the world, hidden by branches. Ivy had smiled at her daughter’s suggestion. Her hair had begun to grow back, and to Mia she looked like a princess in a fairy tale, one who might consider escape, but then Ivy shook her head. He’d find us, she said. And, anyway, where would we go? She said that once upon a time, a girl at the farm tried to leave and take control of her own body and her own life and that the rules had killed her. We’re not birds, she told Mia. We can’t fly away.

  Now they were delivering her from the orchard. Ivy’s hair looked like black feathers in the bright sunlight. Her boots fell off as they carried her to the Community Center. They lay there in the grass, and no one seemed to notice. This was what the end was like, quiet and aching. We never got to run away, Mia thought. We might have been birds and flown so far we’d be west of the moon right now.

  The sun was beating down on Mia’s back and she didn’t even know she was crying until a sob escaped from her throat. She knew the men who were carrying the body, she knew their names, and their wives and children, but they looked like strangers to her now. Joel came out to meet them, rushing over to embrace the body of his wife. People said you could hear his howl of grief in the farthest field. He didn’t care who saw him weeping. If he noticed Mia in the play yard, it didn’t matter. He couldn’t have cared less. What was over was over, what was done was done, this was a world of love, and those who had been here would be loved evermore. Joel wiped his eyes and stood tall. He would have the women bathe the body and then they would bury Ivy in the small fenced-in cemetery that faced Hightop Mountain.

  The service was the following day, in the graveyard where Joel’s first wife, Carrie, was buried. The mountain was shrouded in clouds, and only renegade bands of light came through. The women were all dressed in black or dark gray and wore scarves to cover their hair. The children were gathered in a circle, all holding late-blooming purple asters. The girls Mia’s age sang a song Evangeline had taught them about a blackbird in honor of the departed soul.

  Ivy was wrapped in a white sheet and lowered into the ground. Coffins weren’t used, as the Community believed it was best for the departed to return to the earth from which they came. Everyone could hear Mia sobbing. She’d been sitting up all night outside the Community Center, where the body had been kept, and when the women tending to Ivy, washing her feet and readying her for the world to come, came to chase her away, Mia couldn’t be driven off. Finally, Joel had said, “Leave her be.”

  But now, as the grave was being filled in with dark, rocky soil, Mia flung herself upon it, shouting out that her mother didn’t belong there. She belonged in California, far away from here. She pointed a finger at Joel, as if calling down a curse. “You ruined her,” Mia cried. “It’s all because of you.”

  Joel instructed two of the men to take Mia away. “Do it now,” he said, with disapproval. He had always warned that too much emotion was unhealthy, and wasn’t the girl’s behavior proof enough of that? He watched as the men struggled with Mia, for she wasn’t in the least remorseful for her behavior and she held on to the ferns around the grave, doing her best not to leave. When the men managed to pull her away, she was still clutching on to the ferns, now torn from the earth. We have the receipt of fern-seed, we walk invisible.

  Mia watched the rest of the service from the woods, her face hot and streaked with tears. The love she and her mother shared was invisible, and it always had been. No one else knew the truth. Mia did not belong to any of the rest of them, no matter what they said. After the service, Mia went to the barn, where she sank down beside her favorite of the sheep, old Dottie. This world was over, she knew that much. The world in which she had dreamed that her mother would come to her one night and whisper, Let’s run away. Let’s do it together. Let’s be invisible at last.

  * * *

  A WEEK AFTER THE funeral, Mia still refused to get out of bed. She could be found there even when suppertime neared, and she refused to get dressed or tend to her chores. The women from the sewing circle came to get her up and dress her, but she refused. Evangeline swore that Mia had tried to bite her. At last Joel came to speak to her, even though it was unheard of for him to go to the girls’ dormitory. The other girls left as soon as they saw him, then they huddled around the door outside wondering what sort of punishment was in store for Mia.

  “Stand up,” Joel told Mia. When she defied him, he grabbed her arm roughly. She twisted away, but it did no good, and later an inky blue bruise would form on her arm. Joel’s actions on this day were just proof of who he was. Mia couldn’t bring herself to look at him, because if she did, she would be unable to resist the urge to curse him to his face. She wondered if other people felt the way that she did when confronted by their fathers, distant and fearful of punishment, never daring to speak the truth.

  “You’re mine, but I won’t play favorites,” Joel told her.

  No, he wouldn’t. He never had. Children belong to everyone. Love is everywhere. There is only one family, and it is us.

  “There’s a price to pay for staying in bed and not meeting your responsibilities.”

  He found the scissors on the girls’ sewing table, where they worked in the evenings before bed, then he told Mia to unpin her braid, which fell to her waist. She kept her eyes closed as he cut the braid off at the base of her neck with quick, deliberate motions. She couldn’t bear to have him stand so close. When he was done, she stood there, her neck shivery. The braid of hair was on the floor, coiled like a snake. Joel usually made certain that the hair of a girl who had misbehaved was shorn to the scalp, but in fact he did play favorites on this day.

  “My daughter,” he said sadly.

  In honor of Ivy, Joel left Mia’s hair cut to just above her chin. He thought he was offering her kindness, but Mia hated him more than ever, more than she had thought possible.

  “Do you think I don’t miss her?” Joel said in a softer tone. “Do you think I don’t grieve every night and every day? I feel as you do, but that doesn’t give you the right to be disobedient.” He seemed done, but just when Mia thought he would leave her in peace, he spied something under her bed.

  “What’s that?” Joel asked in a harsh voice.

  Mia had found her mother’s boots on the trash pile after Ivy’s belongings were cleared out. Everything else that had belonged to Ivy was gone. Her worn clothes, her jacket, her hairbrush. Possessions were evil, Joel had told them, and hiding them away warranted punishment, but Mia no longer cared about Joel’s false philosophy or his rules.

  “Are those hers?” Joel asked.

  “They’re just boots,” Mia stammered.

  Joel thought it over, then he bent down and took the boots and cradled them for a moment before handing them to Mia. His uncommon generosity caused her to be suspicious; all the same, Mia clutched the boots to her chest. She’d take what she could get. She had learned that by now. The boots smelled of grass and earth and of the woods where she and Ivy had walked in the evenings, often in the moonlight, as if they’d reached the place where they longed to go and had already escaped.

  “We keep our grief to ourselves and go on,” Joel told her. “I expect you to do as you’re told from now on. Do you understand?”

  Mia saw how dark his eyes were, how he looked inside you for his own benefit, how the lines on his face told a story he kept to himself. She didn’t really know him, and she never would, but she understood what he was telling her. He wanted things done his way, and if they were not, someone would pay.

  “I do,” Mia told him. She understood that her mother should have left him a long time ago, and that he couldn’t accept anyone who said no to him, and that he had created his own world in order to control it, and that she didn’t want any part of it. Joel reached into his pocket and took out the leaf from an apple tree, green but edged with yellow. Mia recognized it as one of their own, from the orchard of Look-No-Furthers, and she vowed, then and there, that she would never eat an apple again.

  * * *

  MIA DID AS SHE was told, but that didn’t mean she didn’t have a plan in mind. It didn’t mean that the farm was her home, or that Joel was her father, or that anyone knew her, or that she’d continue to follow the rules. Two weeks later, she was scheduled to work at the farm stand in town. It was exactly what she was waiting for, and Mia lowered her eyes when Evangeline told her the news, trying her best not to give herself away. This was her chance, and she knew it might not come again. Her mother was gone, and nothing was left. But even if Mia had nowhere to go, she did not intend to let Joel decide her fate. She would become invisible and disappear completely. Her life was in her own hands, to do with as she pleased, the one thing that belonged to her, the only thing she could claim for herself.

  That day at the market, Mia was working alongside a new member of the Community, Tom Miller, and she considered being paired with him good luck. Tom was a plodding fellow who had never been able to keep a job out in the real world, and he was so new he didn’t know the rules. When Mia told him she had to run over to the library because she was desperate to use the restroom, Tom nodded and waved her on.

  “Go ahead,” he said as he set out the baskets of squash and zucchini and the last of the tomatoes. “I’m not your keeper.”

  He was, but he didn’t know it yet, and Mia ran across the town green. Her plan was to leave this earth and allow her spirit to rise up like a blackbird. She could escape by going out the back door of the library, which led directly into the woods. She didn’t want to call attention to herself by going in and out of the library too quickly, so she did what she always did and made her way to the fiction department, where she tried her best to steady her nerves. She had decided this was to be her last day on earth, and everything seemed intensified. The whispers of patrons, the creaks of the old wooden floor. Mia grabbed a novel without bothering to look at the title or author. She planned to take the path into the woods after she checked out the book so that fool Tom wouldn’t spy her.

  “Your choice is excellent,” Mrs. Mott said when Mia approached the desk. “Nathaniel Hawthorne is one of my favorites.”

  It was the book that had been inscribed to her, with the brown and gold cover. Mia’s hands were shaking, and she hoped the librarian wouldn’t notice, but, of course, Sarah did. She always worried about this girl, trekking back and forth on Route 17, where the traffic was tricky, and it was difficult to see around turns when dusk fell. The Community was miles from town, then up a dirt road that local people were barred from using. There used to be wild blueberries growing there, and banks of cinnamon-scented ferns. Sarah was so busy thinking about the Community that she didn’t notice the book Mia was checking out was a first edition, which wasn’t meant to be circulated, for it had been printed in Boston by Ticknor, Reed and Fields in 1850.

  “Did you know Hawthorne lived in a place like your community called Brook Farm, which was a complete disaster. There was also a failed experiment called Fruitlands, started by Louisa May Alcott’s father, a totally disastrous undertaking.”

  “I’ve read Little Women,” Mia blurted, though she knew she really shouldn’t say anything at all to an outsider.

  “Well, Louisa might have never written it, and the Alcott children might have perished from a lack of nutrition out in Fruitlands if nearby neighbors had not brought them fruit and eggs. There’s nothing like that going on where you are, is there?” Sarah Mott asked, concerned.

  “We have eggs,” Mia assured her.

  Mia had tucked the book into her backpack and if Sarah wasn’t mistaken, the girl’s hands were shaking. “Would you like a ride back home?” Sarah Mott said. “It would be no problem. I could drop you off at the gate.”

  “I’m fine,” Mia insisted. “I’m good.”

  She certainly didn’t sound it. On impulse, Sarah wrote down her phone number and passed the note to Mia. “In case you ever need anything.”

  Mia smiled faintly. “Thanks, but I don’t have a phone. I couldn’t call you.”

  Sarah opened the desk drawer, then handed Mia a key to the library. “Call me from here.”

  “You shouldn’t trust me,” Mia said. “You don’t even know me.”

  “I know what you like to read.” Sarah shrugged. “That’s good enough for me.”

  Mia remembered that Ivy had once said she’d been given a key she’d never used and she seemed to regret it, so Mia took the key. She didn’t wish to be rude, but she had to hurry. If someone from the Community thought to ask where she was, Tom Miller might figure out that he’d best come to look for her. “Thanks for the offer,” Mia told Mrs. Mott.

  When Mia slipped out the rear door, the sunlight was blinding, but as soon as she stepped into the woods it was dark. Instead of heading toward the dirt road that curved up into the mountain, as she usually did to reach the Community, Mia cut through a field rife with wild thimbleberry, low-growing plants filled with tiny snow-white blooms. There were two rivers nearby, the Eel River, said to be haunted by the Apparition, and the Last Look River, which had taken the lives of several boys who leapt into the water without looking and were swept away by the rising spring flow. Mia was approaching the Last Look River. There were wild ox-eye daisies attracting masses of bees, and when Mia lay down in the grass, the sound of their droning filled her head. The Last Look River was running fast after a series of thunderstorms and the water was nearly overflowing its banks. Mia was a good swimmer, but she intended to load stones into her backpack, which she would then slip over her shoulders to weigh her down. If they had left the night before the accident, none of it would have happened. They might be in California right now, looking at the Pacific Ocean, three thousand miles from here.

  Mia held up a hand to shield her eyes so she could look around one last time. Gazing down, she noticed that when she’d flung herself onto the ground, the library book had tumbled into the grass, and when it fell open, there was the inscription. She hadn’t imagined it.

  To Mia, If it was a dream, it was ours alone and you were mine.

  The cloth cover was frayed at the edges and the title was a tarnished gold. It looked like a book that mattered, one that might have belonged in the rare books collection. The Scarlet Letter. Was it meant for her, or for someone else? Mia thumbed through the pages.

  She had not known the weight until she felt the freedom.

  Here was the story of a young woman who had a child out of wedlock, shamed and judged by those closest to her, married to a man who was evil, and in love with one who was weak, forced to wear a badge with the letter A for adultery. It was the story of a woman who loved her daughter more than anything, more than life itself.

  Mia paged through the book, then stopped and read again.

  We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep.

  She felt her heart hitting against her chest. She had been a sleepwalker, and now, on this afternoon when she meant to do away with herself, she had awakened with a start. Whether or not the inscription was directed to her, she felt as if the author knew her, and was speaking directly to her, for the tale he told of the Puritans and the story of life in the Community were so alike. In that moment, she felt closer to him than she had ever felt to anyone. The lemon-colored afternoon light was filtering through the branches above her. The peepers in the shallows were calling, a soft watery song. The rocks were gray shale, an ancient mix of mud and clay, and it was possible to find plant fossils, along with fossils of tubeworms and primordial insects. Mia was a born reader, just as her mother had been, and once she had begun, she couldn’t stop.

  She lay on her stomach, propped up on one elbow, quickly turning the pages, falling in love with both the author and the book. By the time the lilac-colored dusk clouded the sky, Mia was halfway through the novel. She had forgotten about gathering rocks, and drowning seemed a foolish waste of a life. She’d thought her only choice was to leave this world, but now she had discovered how terribly alive she was. She’d had a tingling feeling, as if she’d been stung by bees. This was how it felt to want more than being invisible.

  As the dark pitched down in splotches, Mia shoved on her boots and raced to the farm, where, luckily, no one had missed her. When she saw that newcomer Tom Miller unloading the truck, she explained that she’d had female problems and had to run home. “Please don’t tell anyone,” she begged, and because he was embarrassed by the topic of conversation, he was willing to oblige.

  That night Mia left the book in the barn beneath some old boards. She had books hidden all over the barn, nearly two dozen volumes that were extras Mrs. Mott had given her. She finished The Scarlet Letter when she returned the next day in the pale morning light, sitting in the musty barn, her back against the splintered wood. She felt the book inside her heart, for the story so reminded her of the life she and Ivy had been leading. When Mia was done reading, she hid the book in her special place alongside her beloved painting, up in the hayloft behind a board she had pried off the wall.

  At the end of the day, Mia went up the hill to the cemetery. The last of the sunlight was so bright, the air was so soft, and her pulse created such a steady rhythm in her head. She began to weed around her mother’s grave, leaving the ferns she had planted there. She had been reminded of all there was to look forward to—books, sunlight, stories, the scent of the ferns. She wished that Ivy could see the sky and the clouds over Hightop Mountain. Oh, glorious world. Oh, day that would never come again. How could she have ever thought of leaving it behind?