“Ariel, please, we’re so cold.”
The voice was barely a whisper, a fragile sound scraping against the heavy wood of my apartment door, but it jolted me from sleep like a plunge into a frozen lake. I blindly slapped at my nightstand, my fingers closing around my phone. The screen flared to life in the pitch black, burning 3:17 a.m. into my retinas. My heart was already hammering against my ribs as I threw off the covers and scrambled across the living room, my shin colliding hard with the sharp corner of the coffee table. I barely felt the sting.
I pressed my eye to the peephole. Out in the dim, yellow wash of the hallway light, three tiny figures huddled together in a trembling mass. I threw the deadbolt and yanked the door open so violently it slammed against the drywall.
“Nathan, what on earth?”
My twelve-year-old nephew stood on the threshold, his slender frame vibrating with violent shivers. Despite the biting February draft seeping into the corridor, his thin pajama shirt clung to his chest, dark with a cold, desperate sweat. Tucked behind him, trying to make herself as small as possible, was nine-year-old Sophia.
Her knuckles were bone-white from gripping her six-year-old brother Owen’s hands. I looked down, and the breath completely left my lungs. They wore no winter coats. They had no shoes. There was nothing protecting their feet from the brutal elements except thin cotton socks patterned with cartoon characters, now shredded into filthy, gray rags from the asphalt.
“Where are your parents?” The words snapped out of my mouth, far sharper and louder than I intended. “It’s the middle of the night.”
“They locked us out.” Nathan’s voice fractured on the last syllable. He squared his thin shoulders, trying desperately to be the brave man of the house, but I could see the absolute terror pooling in his eyes. “We didn’t know where else to go, Aunt Ariel. We walked. It took… it took a really long time.”
A cold dread pooled in the pit of my stomach. “You walked? Nathan, it is eighteen degrees outside. How far did you walk?”
“From our house.” Sophia finally spoke, her jaw trembling so violently that her teeth clicked together in a terrifying rhythm. “We walked from our house.”
Four miles. They had navigated four miles of darkened, freezing suburban sidewalks in the dead of winter, dressed only in pajamas. I reached out, grabbed the kids by their freezing arms, and hauled them into the entryway. My hands were visibly shaking as I shoved the hallway door shut and lunged for the wall, cranking the digital thermostat straight up to seventy-five degrees. The heat kicked on with a low rumble.
In the sudden brightness of my living room, the reality of their condition was horrifying. Nathan’s lips carried a sickening bluish tint. Little Owen wasn’t shedding a single tear; he just stood motionless on the rug, staring straight ahead with a hollow, haunted expression that no six-year-old child should ever possess.
“Blankets,” I muttered to myself, turning on my heel and sprinting toward my bedroom closet. “I need blankets and… God, your feet.”