The snow had been coming down on Holloway Lane since noon, the fat, slow, unhurried kind that seemed to believe it had the whole afternoon to itself, and by half past three it had erased the sidewalks and softened every hedge into the shape of a sleeping animal. The houses stood shoulder to shoulder in their Christmas clothes. They were two-story colonials, mostly, with a split-level here and there like a cousin who had married into the family, and every one of them was wrapped in strings of colored bulbs, red and green and amber and that particular cobalt blue that existed only on Christmas lights and the dashboards of Japanese cars. There were wreaths on the doors and electric candles in the upstairs windows. A plastic Santa on the Kowalskis' porch leaned at an angle that suggested he had been into the eggnog since Thanksgiving. Somewhere down the block a window was open a crack, and through it a radio was playing a big-band Christmas song, all brass and swing, the notes flattening as they crossed the snow.
Lena Marchetti came out of number 27 at a run.
She had not meant to run. She had meant to walk down the street the way a grown woman of twenty-five walks down a street, with her chin up and her purpose firmly in hand. But she had been standing at the front window of her mother's living room, behind the tree, holding the two presents and rehearsing the cool, civil thing she would say, when she saw the tailgate of the station wagon swing up in front of the Rourke house, and a man in a long dark coat slide a cardboard box into the back of it, and something in her chest had simply let go. She was out the door before her mother could ask where she was going. She did not stop for a coat.
So she ran through the snow in a thick beige cowl-neck sweater dress that came to just above her knees and a pair of brown leather knee-high boots that had been designed by someone in Milan who had never once seen an Ohio winter. Her hair, long and dark brown and blown out that morning to a volume that had cost her forty minutes and most of a can of hairspray, lifted and fell behind her. Her face was done the way she did faces for a living: brows arched clean, a soft wing of liner at the outer corners of her eyes, rose blush high on the cheekbones, lips a dusky mauve. She had told herself the makeup was a professional habit. It was armor, and she knew it.
She hugged the presents to her chest as she ran. One was wrapped in silver foil that caught the colored lights and threw them back in little fractured sparks. The other was wrapped in deep red paper, the glossy kind that cracked at the corners if you folded it too hard. On the porch steps the gold ribbon that had tied them together had slipped, and she had clamped them against her body to keep them from separating, and now she ran with her arms locked around them and her breath going out ahead of her in white clouds.
She was halfway across the Sheas' front yard when the snowball hit her.
It struck her left shoulder with a wet, soft, enormous thump, and the cold went straight through the wool and onto her skin like a hand. She gasped and spun, nearly losing a boot heel in the drift, the presents crushed against her.
Three boys stood in a cluster by the Sheas' hedge. They were about nine years old, and they were dressed the way every nine-year-old boy in America was dressed that winter, which is to say like small astronauts preparing for a hostile planet: puffy snow jackets so thick their arms stood out from their sides, one electric blue with a white racing stripe, one red with white panels across the chest, one a shiny quilted silver. Each had a knit hat with a pom-pom on top, and each had the face of a person who had been caught and was calculating.