I climbed onto the couch and put my ear against her chest. It was too quiet. Her skin felt clammy, like the mist that rolled off the harbor. A terrifying thought, fully formed and adult in its severity, bloomed in my four-year-old brain: If I go back to sleep, she won’t wake up.

I looked at the crib in the corner. Emma. My baby sister. She was six months old, a tiny bundle of warmth in a room that was rapidly freezing.

“Mama needs me,” I whispered to the dark. “Emma needs Mama. We need to be together.”

It wasn’t a choice. It was a biological imperative. I was the man of the house—a title Mama gave me playfully when she taught me how to open a jar of pickles, but one I took with deadly seriousness.

I needed to get them to the place with the bright lights. The place where the doctors were. Downtown.

I went to the closet. The stroller was there, a tangled mess of straps and broken plastic wheels. I tugged at it, but the latch was jammed with rust. I felt tears pricking my eyes. Panic, hot and acidic, began to rise in my throat. I couldn’t fix it. I was too small.