Chapter 1 — The Thermometer

It was eleven-thirty at night in our apartment in San Diego, and I was holding my daughter against my chest when I felt how hot she was.

Not the ordinary warmth of a sleeping baby, the drowsy heat that any parent knows and does not fear.

This was different.

This was a small body burning against mine, radiating a heat that made my own skin prickle, and the moment I felt it a cold thread of alarm ran straight down through me.

My daughter’s name is Hazel, and she was four months old that night, four months of round cheeks and unfocused smiles and the particular new-baby smell that I could not get enough of.

I laid my lips against her forehead the way mothers have done since the beginning of time, that first crude thermometer, and her skin was so hot against my mouth that I pulled back and went at once for the real one, the digital thermometer we kept in the drawer by the changing table, my hands already unsteady.

I took her temperature once, and the number that flashed up was bad enough that I did not trust it, told myself the thing must have misread, that I had done it wrong.

So I did it again, more carefully, and the second reading was worse than the first.

One hundred and four point one.

I stood there in the dim light of the nursery holding my burning, trembling daughter and staring at that number, and I felt my heart drop straight through the floor, because I did not need to be a doctor to know that a fever like that, in a baby that small, was not something you waited out.

Hazel was crying against my shoulder, a thin exhausted crying, and I could feel her little body shivering even in all that heat, and I reached for my phone with a hand that would not stay still.

There is a particular terror that belongs only to the parent of a very small, very sick child, and I met it fully for the first time that night.

It is the terror of absolute helplessness married to absolute responsibility.

Hazel could not tell me what was wrong.

She could not point to where it hurt or describe how she felt or understand a single word of comfort I offered her.

She could only burn, and cry, and trust, in the wordless way of infants, that the enormous warm person holding her would somehow make it stop.

And I did not know how to make it stop.