The Shadow Catcher

Dumb, Clara had stood for several precious moments before she’d understood that all the snow above them on the building’s slanted eaves and roof had fallen, tons of it, like a guillotine on both her parents. Break the glass she’d breathed and even before she, herself, could move, Hercules had swung a chair against the plate-glass window and was climbing through the broken shards and solid mass of snow to try to reach his mother’s fingers.

The man in the can-shaped hat had run in circles, clutching at his ears, crying out in a strange language Clara hadn’t understood — then he had made a beeline for the door, pulled it inward, open, and had faced a solid wall of ice pack from the avalanche. Instinctively, he’d run at it, leading with his shoulder but had hit it with a deadening thud as one would hit a granite mountain. The snow, so innocent and pliable in its particular, had compacted under pressure of its mass like particles of sand beneath the strictures of geology in the Mesozoic Age. Lithified, sandstone can take the form of quartz, and quartz was what the wall of snow looked like. The man in the canned hat had hit it with his fist and his fist had come back bloodied. Then the man had turned and run toward the back room of the shop, still crying in his foreign language, and soon Clara had heard his echoes through the wall of quartzy snow from the outside, distant, very distant and still unintelligible, as if arriving from another continent.

Clara had hauled Hercules, whose knees and hands were raw and bleeding, from the frozen pack of snow, across the shop floor out the back into the morning by the alley door. They’d run around the building through two feet of snow up to the corner where they’d turned to view the wreckage. Where there had been, minutes before, a recognizable storefront, its eaves, its upper stories and its roof, there now was a fresh glacier, sparkling in its novelty, a just-hatched mountain obscuring both the building’s lower stories and the sidewalk, breaching into the street it had extended like some lavish extra icing, extra scree, and Clara had seen at once the only avenue for rescue was from inside the shop. Passersby had sent a runner for police, another runner for the nearest fire brigade, and a hardy few had started gouging at the monster with their shovels.

Hercules, Clara had said. She’d knelt down and taken his hands in hers, cupping his raw knuckles, and looked him in the eyes and seen his fear as raw as his hands — he’d been so valiant in his response, so quick: in that instant a splinter of devotion had lodged inside her conscience. “Get Mr. Lodz,” she’d told him. Mr. Lodz was the widower from Poland who lived next door, the man for whom Hercules had swept the sidewalk and thinned hedges; the European gentleman whom Clara’s father had called Solomon of Minnesota. “He won’t want to come but he will once you tell him what has happened. Don’t be scared of him. Tell him we need help.”

Hercules had nodded, staring at her raptly, then he’d handed her a tied bandana from his pocket. Take this. The eight dollars, he had said. Pay someone to get them out.

He’d turned and run toward home, but not before she’d realized he still believed their parents were alive.