They’d spent the next few months rutting like feral cats. Twice she feared pregnancy and sweated her period, wondering what her mother would say, until it eventually arrived and she was able to breathe normally again. Jared had been clumsy in bed but Shawna found the trait surprisingly endearing, and it soon erased all doubt about whether the stories she’d heard about him back in high school—about his sexual deviance—were true. He’d gotten her flowers and candy for her birthday—rather uninspired, but appreciated nonetheless—and this Christmas would have marked their one-year anniversary. She had been looking forward to it. (Back in her bedroom on Fairmont Street, in the top drawer of her dresser and wrapped in a tube sock, was a Timex watch with a silver band and their initials engraved on the back—a Christmas gift that had cost her four months’ salary, meticulously saved.)
But then earlier this week, all that had changed.
It started at the high school. During a fresh snowfall, a group of kids sledding down the steep hill behind the school had never returned home. Frantic parents had donned hats and gloves and poured out into the streets. At this time, Jared had come to pick Shawna up after her shift at the Ben Franklin—it was his day off, something they were unable to coordinate because of a lack of employees at the store—and he’d filled her in on the mystery of the disappearing children with the excitement of someone who’d just come from seeing a kick-ass rock concert.
“Where’d they all go?” she’d asked.
“Don’t know,” he’d said simply, jerking his shoulders up to his ears. “But that’s not the weird part. Just as I was leaving, I heard from Mr. Dormer across the street, who was outside talking with some of the neighbors. They were talking about the sheriff being called out to the school, too, and that some of the parents had come running back into town, saying stuff about the snow rising up off the ground and covering people.” His grin had looked fiendish in the glow of the Subaru’s dashboard lights. “Like, the snow fucking came up in a wave and swallowed them whole.”
“Are they okay?”
“You don’t get it, ’Na. They’re fucking gone.”
She scowled, searching through her purse for her lipstick. “What do you mean, they’re gone?”
“Gone. Vanished. Disappeared. Snow swallowed ’em up. They can’t find them.”
“That’s bullshit. That’s Dormer fucking with your head.”
“You wouldn’t say that if you were there. Mr. Dormer looked scared enough to shit bricks. I could hear the cop cars racing through the snow from the house.”
“They’re probably just out looking for the kids.”
“They won’t find them, either.”
“Why’s that?”
“Snow got ’em,” he’d said, as if this were the most logical thing in the world. “Swallowed ’em up like popcorn.”
Upon arriving back at her house, her mother was quick to usher her inside. As she watched Jared drive off through the snowy streets, Shawna felt an awful premonitory pang resonate in the center of her chest. Her mother, a frail woman encumbered with a perpetual scowl, rushed her to the kitchen before Shawna could even take her coat off, her sneakers squeaking wetly on the linoleum.
In the kitchen, all the lights were off. Shawna went to flip them on but her mother slapped her hand away. “Ouch! Mother, what’s going on?”
“Be quiet!” her mother chastised. She grabbed Shawna’s wrist in a pincerlike grip and dragged her over to the bank of windows that overlooked the backyard. The rear porch lights were off, too, but orange-pink sodium light from the nearby streetlamps filtered through the bare branches of the surrounding trees.
Shawna leaned closer to the window. There was someone out in the yard. Just standing there in the snow, staring at the house.
“Is that Mr. Kopeck?” Shawna asked her mother.
“He’s been there for over an hour now. I shut the lights and locked the doors but he hasn’t moved.”
“But what’s he doing?”
“Waiting,” said her mother.
“Waiting for what?”
“I don’t know. But it can’t be good.” Her mother pointed past their yard to their neighbors’, the Samjakes. “Look.”
Someone was standing in the Samjakes’ backyard, too. The distance was too great to know for certain, but Shawna thought it looked like plump old Delia Overmeyer from over on Port Avenue. Just like Tim Kopeck, Delia Overmeyer was standing up to her shins in the snow, staring at the back of the Samjakes’ house.
“What’s going on out there?” Shawna murmured, her breath blossoming on the glass.
“I got a phone call from Lizzie MacDonald about twenty minutes ago,” said her mother. “She said George Lee Wilson is in her yard, too. Just standing there, staring up at her house, just the same way, Shawna. She said her dog Brutus was out there barking his head off. She called to the dog but he wouldn’t come. He ran out into the yard and disappeared into the shadows. Then she said she didn’t hear him no more.”
A twinge of icy terror rippled through Shawna’s body. “Jared said some kids disappeared down at the school tonight. Said their parents went looking for them but some of them disappeared, too.”
No, that’s a lie, she thought immediately afterward. That’s not exactly what Jared said. He said they were eaten up by the snow. Eaten up like popcorn.
But she couldn’t tell this to her mother. The poor woman already looked on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
Shawna leaned over the counter and pulled the telephone to her ear.
“There’s no answer at Joe’s,” said her mother. Joe Farnsworth was the sheriff.
Shawna dialed the number anyway. It was printed on the phone’s handset in her mother’s spidery handwriting.
Her mother finally let go of Shawna’s wrist. The woman gripped the sill of the window with both hands, her face very close to the windowpane. Her breath was fogging it up, but she was still able to keep an eye on Tim Kopeck out in the yard. Tim Kopeck, who had undoubtedly lost his frigging mind…along with Delia Overmeyer…along with George Lee Wilson…
No. That’s impossible.
The telephone at the other end of the line kept ringing, ringing, ringing. Shawna caught her mother’s worried stare. “No one’s going to answer, Shawnie. Poor Joe’s probably got his hands full tonight.” There was moisture glittering in the corners of her mother’s eyes. “Don’t tie up the line. Lizzie’s been calling every few minutes.”
Shawna hung up the telephone while chewing on her lower lip. “I don’t understand,” she said after a time. “What does this mean?”
“It means—” began her mother, but then the words dried up in her mouth. The older woman’s eyes were locked back on the window. “He’s gone,” she said in a low utterance.
Shawna practically pressed her face up against the windowpane. Her mother was right: Tim Kopeck was no longer standing in their backyard.
Shawna cast her eyes over to the Samjakes’ yard and saw that Delia Overmeyer—or whoever that had been—was also gone.
“Where’d he go?” said her mother. Her voice was paper thin.
“There’s no footprints,” Shawna said. “Look in the yard.”
“What are you talking about? That’s impossible.” But her mother looked and could say no more. It was obvious—there were no footprints in the snow, save for the two divots where, only a moment ago, Tim Kopeck had been standing. It was as if the man had simply vanished into thin air.