“West of the moon,” Ivy answered. She should have said nothing, she should have changed the subject, but the response that Ivy always had before she came here spilled out. You had to search west of the moon and east of the sun if you wanted to find your true love. “It’s a place in a fairy tale,” she explained when Mia looked baffled. Mia could almost believe that Ivy had come from an enchanted place. She thought she remembered a line from a story her mother had told her. You have traveled far, but the hardest part of a journey is always the next step. “I grew up in Boston,” Ivy admitted. “And it wasn’t a fairy tale. At least not for me. Someone offered to help me, but instead, I came here. I thought the farm was west of the moon, but I don’t know if there is such a place anymore.”
They realized they were being watched by Evangeline, who was known to be a tattletale, so Ivy fell silent. But as soon as Evangeline looked away, Mia was emboldened to ask another question. Her mother had answered one, perhaps she would answer another. Mia had always been curious about the brick building with turrets and green windows on the far side of the green. “Is that a castle?” she asked.
Ivy laughed. “You are too funny.” Then she realized Mia was serious. Ivy had believed the Community’s position that keeping their children away from the rest of society was a way to protect them from the cruelties of the world, but on this day, she wasn’t so certain. “It’s a library, Mia.” When Mia still looked blank, Ivy shook her head, distraught. “You know what a library is. You have one at school.”
The Community School library was a closet where printed materials were stored. Evangeline vetted them all to ensure that nothing controversial was included. Some of the pamphlets concerned math, some focused on handwriting and spelling. There were guides about hunting and fishing and harvesting crops. The history pamphlets had entire paragraphs blocked out with black ink. Mia had read them all and she hadn’t found anything interesting yet.
“The library that I went to was called the Athenaeum,” Ivy said in a dreamy tone. “On rainy days I’d stay there all day long.”
Mia had such a wistful expression on her face when she heard about the library that Ivy made a snap decision. She looked over her shoulder and saw that no one from the Community was paying any attention to them. The men were busy unloading the trucks and Evangeline had driven back to the farm for more supplies. “Go on if you want to see it,” Ivy told her daughter. “This one time. If anyone asks, say you’re there to use the restroom. But be quick about it, understand?”
Mia nodded, then ran across the green, and quick as she could she dodged inside the cool entrance of the library. She stopped right there, breathless. She would not have believed so many books could exist in the world. There were long tables, and easy chairs by the windows, and when Mia wandered a bit farther, she came upon a children’s room decorated with a mural of a boy dressed in green and a girl who held his hand and seemed to be flying. Here were shelves of fairy tales and folk tales. Mia found West of the Moon and began to read it, her eyes hot and tearing.
“Look, that girl is crying,” a little boy said to his mother.
Mia left the room, and when she turned the corner, she found herself in the section where novels were kept. She reached up and took the first book she found. It didn’t look like much, an old, somewhat moth-eaten edition with a brown cover and gold letters. But when the book fell open, she spied an inscription scrawled in blue ink.
To Mia, If it was a dream, it was ours alone and you were mine.
Mia returned the book to the shelf. She could feel her heart beating hard. It must be a trick. Joel must have set a trap for her. Mia looked over her shoulder, to see if she’d been followed, but the only one there was the librarian, at work behind the desk. And yet it seemed someone had known she would be here. Mia raced off as fast as she could, breaking into a run, half expecting Joel to appear and grab her, not daring to draw a breath until she was once again outside. She looked across to the farm stand. She could feel her heart beating hard. There was her mother, who had come from beyond the moon with her beautiful silvery eyes. Was it possible that they had both been enchanted? Ivy caught sight of her daughter and lifted her hand to give Mia the okay to run back.
“What did you think?” Ivy asked in a whisper when Mia returned to stand beside her.
“There’s magic inside,” Mia said.
“You know better than that. There is no magic.” Ivy scowled. “Would we be here if there was magic?”
“Are you sure?” Mia said. “I think I saw something in a book.”
“What kind of something?”
“I think it was a book that was written for me.”
“Magic is a made-up concept that gives you the idea that you can control something you have no control over.”
“Like our lives?” Mia said bitterly.
“Mia, I did what I could.”
Mia was surprised to see that her mother was near tears. She might have asked why, but the truck had pulled up with more produce and Evangeline and Tim were getting out. There were boxes and boxes of heirloom tomatoes, some of which hadn’t been cultivated in over a hundred years.
“Just remember,” Ivy told her daughter before she went to help unload the truck. “You can’t live in a castle.”
But now that she’d been inside the library, Mia wondered whether or not that was true. Her mother didn’t know everything. She didn’t know how to be happy after all. Every night Mia dreamed she had run away, and each morning when she went to the window, she was disappointed to find that all she could see were the fields and the oak trees, and beyond them, Hightop Mountain, where at least once a year someone who’d gone out hiking became lost and was never seen again. Now, each time Mia went to town, she sneaked over to the library. She looked for the brown book with her name in it but couldn’t quite remember where she’d found it. Maybe she’d read it wrong. Maybe she’d been mistaken. She’d read whatever she could manage to get her hands on then, and sneaked random volumes into her backpack. Having no frame of reference for what might be best, she went alphabetically, beginning with Alcott. She read Little Women in the barn, and that was it, she was hooked. Mia didn’t stop until she was spotted by the librarian.
Sarah Mott, in her early forties, had come to Western Massachusetts after receiving her master’s in library science at Simmons in Boston. Sarah wasn’t a local, and she wasn’t one to judge; she always tried to keep an open mind, but she had a bad feeling about the Community. There had been a little commune in Blackwell in the sixties that people talked about, but that had been about peace and love, a reaction to an unjust and unpopular war. The Community seemed far darker, run by secret rules. Sarah could tell that Mia lived up at the farm because of her braided hair and her clothing, modest gray garments and black work boots. She’d heard that books weren’t allowed inside the farm, and didn’t that say just about everything? In a place where books were banned there could be no personal freedom, no hope, and no dreams for the future. Sarah was glad the red-haired girl visited the library, even if she was stealing books. Turn someone into a reader and you turn the world around. But she was so obvious in her actions and so clueless that Sarah really felt she had no choice but to confront the girl in the best way she knew how, by welcoming her.