Almost immediately the O’Tooles’ bedroom door creaked open and Lydia could hear Mr. O’Toole grunting with confusion and then she could hear someone’s back crashing full-force into the dresser, the door, the doorjamb. She could hear knickknacks knocked from a shelf and drywall caving in and she could hear man-screams as the eggs began to drop, one at a time, all upon the bedroom carpet.
With the blanket fort limp against her shoulder, Lydia could hear whimpering in the darkness. She thought it was just herself making the noise until she realized that her cries had been joined by other cries down the hall: Mrs. O’Toole, whimpering, then pleading, then shrieking. Lydia heard the box spring squeak as someone lunged over the mattress. She heard the mattress sigh and then she heard eggs dropping all over in there.
In that moment, something rare happened inside Lydia: she stopped herself from knowing. She made a choice not to know, and by doing so she was allowed to unfreeze. Nothing was happening down the hall. Nothing was happening, so why not slip out from under this blanket and make her way over the carpet to the kitchen, through the kitchen to the back door, out the back door and into the snowy night? She found her hands and knees and the blanket sagged over her back and then was gone. As she crawled full speed ahead she looked through the darkness at the orange glow of snow in the back-door window. She swished across the living room, burning her knees on the carpet, and she moved faster now, gaining speed with each slide, and then her forehead thudded straight into the corner of the coffee table and the darkness sparkled with pain. Her face grew wet with blood that dripped into her mouth, but she kept crawling. Her eyes were wet. Her nose and lips and chin were wet. The carpet dropped into the kitchen’s cold linoleum and a cereal flake crunched beneath her palm, and then her other palm squished a puddle of melting snow tracked in on the Hammerman’s boots. The back door was only a few feet away and the snow out there seemed to uplift through a trance of streetlight but she heard the Hammerman’s heavy footsteps coming closer, closer, and before she gave it a thought she was cutting a sharp left and holding a cabinet handle in her fingers and then she was underneath the kitchen sink, squeezing next to buckets and cleaning products and pulling the cabinet door closed and pressing her cheek into the cold silver pipes.
Silence beneath the sink. Nothing was happening out there but he had to have seen her. He had to have heard her. She didn’t move, she didn’t breathe, and in her silence she thought she heard spilling: a gallon of milk tilted on the hallway carpet, glug-glug-glug, mixing with broken eggs like a recipe for her dad’s birthday cake.
Minutes passed and the darkness grew wet and heavy on her face. She found a withered sponge beneath her foot so she pressed it against her forehead and it stuck to her skin. She squeezed her knees and rested her elbow on a bucket rim. One of her socks, thick and pink, was missing. On the living room floor. Inside the blanket fort. Just outside this cabinet door. Maybe she would never know.
She heard the approach of boot steps, then a smudge of brightness lit the slit between the cabinet doors: a flashlight, its faint orb erasing the world around it. As he approached the sink his boot steps stopped and his shadow darkened everything. She could hear him breathing and her muscles tightened and the garbage disposal felt like a rock propped atop her shoulder. Inches away she could sense the pressure of his knees against the cabinet door.
Ke-tick. But the door didn’t open. It didn’t open.
Instead the Hammerman dropped his hammer into the sink and Lydia heard it perfectly next to her ear, steel striking steel. He dropped the flashlight and turned on the water, scalding hot, and she felt the drainage pipe warm against her cheek. Even when it began to burn she didn’t pull away. A wave of mildew tickled her nose. The Hammerman rinsed his hands and swiped his fingers through the splash—a drumming-fingertip sound, as if he were pressing spaghetti through the garbage disposal’s black baffle. Then he turned on the disposal and its rage of blades chattered Lydia’s teeth. This moment—this gurgle of blood and hair and splintered bone whirring inside her mind—this was the only moment in Lydia’s life.
This was, some would say, her defining moment.
That night Denver glowed with snow. Plows went out. People slept in.
And late in the morning, Tomas had a defining moment all his own—one that came after Lydia and Carol didn’t show up at the library to help him with Saturday-morning story time. As planned.
He read Where the Wild Things Are to a few toddlers chewing mittens, and once they bundled up and left he phoned the O’Tooles. No answer. On the radio yesterday Tomas had heard that the state should brace for another stock show snowstorm, the annual January cold snap that coincided with the country’s largest livestock fair, but he hadn’t expected it to blow like this. This was something else. Finally the snowfall was slowing but the wind was icy and relentless, carving drifts in the barren white. No cars were out. No one was in the library but him. The morning was empty and frozen and Tomas was exhausted. Lately he’d been just beside himself and last night’s lonely excursion to the mountains had made it all the worse. He’d taken the last ski bus out of Breckenridge and didn’t get dropped off downtown until almost midnight, and then with the storm it took him forever to find a cab home. Now he was on his third cup of coffee and still could barely keep his eyes open. Again he stared out the window. The snow out there, a good fourteen inches of shifting drifts, was deeper than he’d realized. Deep enough to call it quits.
With a feeling of gratitude he hung a sign on the door and locked the library and walked over to the O’Tooles’ home, ten blocks that felt like twenty as his feet struggled through the billows.
As he walked he could see places where a few brave neighborhood kids had made angels in the drifts or tried to roll a snowman, but none had lasted very long. When Tomas finally reached the O’Tooles’ single-story home he found not a soul out front and no footprints anywhere. It made sense enough: it was Saturday morning and Carol was definitely the cartoon-watching type. He whistled through the white driveway and was surprised that Bart O’Toole, with the way he worked, hadn’t already been out to shovel a path.
Tomas shuffled up the porch steps and peeked through the little door window. His vision blurred and his breath stopped cold when he saw, on the white wall of the hallway, just below a plastic light switch, a smeared handprint of blood.