That morning there was blood. On his cheek, in the crib. It was Sunday and we were supposed to go ice skating but instead we got in the car and drove to the hospital. His breathing was heavy and he wasn’t talking too much. Our skates were in the trunk. We thought we would go afterward.

At the hospital a woman came to take my sister and me to a waiting room with toys. I used a set of coloring stencils to draw on slips of paper that felt like cash register receipts. My parents stayed with my brother. They stayed with him until he fainted, and then the doctors rushed him to another room, and they heard the nurses say, “Don’t let the mother come in.”

My parents sat together, waiting. My mother went to the bathroom and when she came out my father was standing in the hallway. “They want to talk to us,” he said, and they went into a room with a few chairs and then the doctors told them. When my father asked if I wanted to see him again I said yes, because he was my brother and I didn’t realize that he wouldn’t feel like my brother anymore. I saw him lying still on the stiff operating table, with plastic tubes coming out of his nose and mouth, and he felt gone, irretrievably gone.

The day after he died I went to school even though they told me I didn’t have to. The guidance counselor took me to her office. I don’t remember what she said but she gave me some picture books about death to read with my parents: one about a boy whose mother had died, another about a boy whose lizard had died.

That same morning my mother woke up and she weighed herself, just like she did every other morning. “One hundred and nine pounds,” she tells me later, when I am old enough to know what this means. “The day before I was 115.”

My mother had to call the babysitter. On the phone, the babysitter heard my mother say heart attack and assumed she was talking about my father. “Debbie, you keep saying Paul. You mean Karl,” she said.  “No,” my mother said. “I mean Paul.” The babysitter screamed.