At midnight, Lucas woke up screaming. By now, Brynn could differentiate his various cries and identify what they signified. When Lucas cried in a low-pitched moan, it usually meant that he’d woken up but was trying to go back to sleep. If it was more of a shriek, Brynn knew that he wanted to get out of his swaddle and move around. The thumping percussion cry of repeated wahs indicated hunger. She didn’t equate her understanding of his cries with some inherent motherly instinct; it had simply become a pattern that she’d learned to follow.
But this time, Lucas’s cry was all of these things, and none of them, too. He howled, like his voice was coming from the depths of his belly and burning his throat on the way out. Brynn went to him. His forehead was hot, and his skin was moist with sweat. He had been so peaceful and happy just a few hours ago, but she knew immediately that he’d spiked a fever.
She’d managed to sleep for two hours already, but it had somehow made her more tired, and she now felt delirious and weak. She took Lucas out of his swaddle to change him and take his temperature. He screamed at her, swatting her away. His entire body radiated heat, like he was a tiny egg she’d taken out of boiling water, his shell ready to burst.
“I know, I know,” she whispered to him, lifting his legs once she’d taken off his diaper. She braced herself as she inserted the thermometer and held it steady. The first time she’d tried to take his temperature, when he was just a few weeks old, Margaux had been at the house and Brynn had needed her help to do it.
“Won’t it hurt him?” she’d asked, tensing up as she watched Margaux skillfully proceed.
“No,” Margaux had said, “he won’t feel a thing.”
Now, Brynn did it just as Margaux had shown her, knowing she had to. The numbers climbed and finally stopped at 102.4. She quickly put him in a new diaper and a short-sleeve onesie.
She pressed the sound machine to turn the night-light on as well. With the soft glow of the light, Brynn could see that Lucas’s skin was red and angry. His cries continued, and now he was gasping for air in between his sobs. She felt her own body growing hot with panic, the reality sinking in that she was home alone in the middle of the night with a sick newborn, while her husband sat in jail, accused of murder.
Brynn didn’t know what to do. She hadn’t ever given Lucas any medicine like Tylenol—he hadn’t been old enough, or sick enough. She wasn’t even sure how to administer it to him. She carried him to the bathroom and took out a bottle from the medicine cabinet. She scanned the label for instructions. Under two years: ask a doctor.
Balancing Lucas on her lap, she looked up the number for the after-hours line of the hospital’s pediatrics department. The number she thankfully hadn’t had to use yet. She lifted her shirt to see if Lucas would feed, but he only cried harder.
“Pediatrics?” a tired female voice answered. Brynn held the phone between her ear and shoulder.
“Um, hi,” Brynn said, suddenly feeling embarrassed for calling so quickly, for immediately outsourcing her own duties as a mother. Didn’t babies spike fevers all the time? What did the other moms do when this happened to their kids? Why was she so incapable of handling anything by herself? Maybe she should hang up, she thought. But she didn’t. “Um, my son is a patient of Dr. Smith, and uh, he has a fever of 102.4, and I’m just … I’m not sure what to do.” Brynn heard the sound of typing.
“What’s your son’s full name?” the woman asked.
“Lucas Henry Nelson,” Brynn said.
Brynn swore there was a heavy pause on the other end of the phone. By now, the entire island knew what had happened to Cecelia and knew that Ross was the prime suspect. Could the nurses refuse to help her? What if this nurse had known Cecelia? She heard more typing. Suddenly, her own bladder felt impossibly full. She carried Lucas to the toilet with her and held him while she went, cradling the phone under her ear. Lucas continued to cry, though now his cries were more like hiccups, defeated by his fatigue.
“Shhh,” she whispered to him. “It’s okay.”
Finally, the nurse responded.
“A hundred and two point four you said?”
“Yes. He was fine when he went to sleep, um, a few hours ago. Now he’s just really hot and irritated.”
“Well,” she said, “there’s not much you can do besides comfort care.”
“Comfort care?” Brynn asked.
“Comfort care, right,” she said again.
“So, just … nothing?”
“Well, no,” the nurse said. “You can give him Tylenol or Motrin. Make sure it’s infants’, not children’s, though. There’s a difference. Give him 1.25 milliliters. Keep him hydrated. Is he feeding? Is he crying actual tears? Is he making wet diapers?”
“Yes, lots of tears. And I just changed his diaper. He wouldn’t nurse, but I’ll try again.”
“Okay, good. Try to get him to nurse or try a bottle, and just keep him cool, maybe a cold washcloth on the back of his neck, that sort of thing. The medicine should help. Call us again if the fever doesn’t go down or gets worse.”
“Um, okay.” Brynn didn’t want to hang up. She felt safe on the phone with the nurse, even if she felt somewhat judged. She knew that the moment she hung up, she’d forget what the nurse had told her, and she’d feel the same wave of panic and desperation she felt when she first called. “Wait, um, sorry, so, 1.25 milliliters and … just, just hold him? What if he doesn’t get worse but he doesn’t get better?” She racked her brain; there must be more questions she had to ask. There must be more advice she needed. The solution couldn’t just be to basically wait it out!
She heard the nurse breathe.
“It’s going to be okay,” the nurse said. “I know it’s scary the first time your baby gets a fever. Just remember that it usually passes quickly. And don’t worry about calling again. That’s what we’re here for.”
Brynn could feel her own tears falling down her face, once again.
“Okay. Thank you,” she said, and hung up.
She took the Tylenol into Lucas’s room and filled the syringe while Lucas waited on the soft rug on the floor. He squirmed.
By some stroke of luck, he sucked the medicine right down. Brynn waited, holding him upright, worried that he might vomit it back up. But he didn’t. He latched on to her for a feed and stopped crying. At last, they both sat in silence.
She held him until he fell asleep, and she was so tired that she wasn’t sure if it had taken five minutes or two hours, but eventually she swaddled him back up and put him in his bassinet. She curled up on the bed. Her body felt dry and frail, wobbly, as if she were made of paper, an origami person masquerading as a real one.
She imagined the times that she’d been sick as a baby, and what her own mother had done, in their simple house back in the early nineties, without a sound machine, without Velcro swaddles, probably even without Tylenol. Brynn had been a colicky baby.
“Oh, you cried constantly,” Brynn’s mother had once told her. “Absolutely constantly.”
But her mother had told her this with a smile, as though in retrospect, it had been the best time of her life, as though the sleepless nights had been a harmless joke, a funny memory. That was the thing about those early days—mothers were so tired that they forgot the messy and painful details quickly. They forgot how hard it all was. And when they looked at baby photos, they only felt affection and nostalgia.
“That’s why humans have multiple kids, you know,” Annie had once told her, another fact she’d taken from one of the many momfluencers she followed. “Because we forget how bad it is. We literally forget. We rewrite our own histories. After a year or two, we look back and just think, Oh, newborns are so snuggly, I want another one, it was such a cozy time. Our bodies refuse to remember, and then they fuck us over by making us go back to hell!”
She couldn’t believe that Annie was right. How could she ever forget the difficulties of this time? All she could think about, all she wanted to talk about with anyone who would listen, was the trauma of Lucas’s birth, the struggle of getting him to eat, to sleep, the absolute insanity of becoming a parent. She’d remember this forever. It had changed her permanently, in her soul. She’d have to carry it with her for the rest of her life.
Brynn’s eyelids were heavy, and she yearned for sleep, but her mind wouldn’t let her. There were too many what-ifs. She worried now that she hadn’t taken Lucas’s temperature properly. What if his fever was even higher? What if she needed to take him to the emergency room? What if she fell asleep too hard, and woke up hours later to find Lucas dead? The thought had crossed her mind before, more than a few times. Not as something she wanted—not ever—but as one that made her feel, just for the faintest, fastest flicker, a terrible sense of relief, followed by the awful pain of guilt. She’d never hurt Lucas, but she still wondered what life would be like if he died, though she’d never vocalize the thought to anyone. What if, she wondered, there was a terrible accident, out of her control? What if he died of SIDS? She imagined how people would feel sorry for her, how she’d live in silence, how she could sleep and be left alone.
And then she’d buried the thought away and told herself that there was something wrong with her, something rotten. What kind of a mother had those thoughts? What kind of a mother longed for the kind of silence that only exists without children?
Brynn realized that she had barely thought about her kiss with Sawyer, she’d been so distracted by Lucas’s fever. It seemed irrelevant now, compared to having a sick baby. A reckless mistake, that’s all it was. It didn’t count. She could forget about it. No one would ever know. And yet, Brynn knew that wasn’t true. Even if they never told Ross, she would always know that it happened. And she would always wonder.
At some point in the middle of the night, Brynn drifted off to sleep. She dreamed about Cecelia. She could see her working at the club the night she died, gliding among tables, smiling and chatting, balancing a tray on the palm of her hand. She could see her texting with Jacob on her break, making plans to meet later. She could see her carrying out a final round of drinks before the club closed for the night. But she couldn’t picture Ross at all. He wasn’t there. She knew he wasn’t there.
Brynn’s eyes opened. She awoke with a sudden thought. It hadn’t occurred to her before that Cecelia’s body had been found washed ashore at Norton. She’d been in the water, perhaps far out at sea, but she hadn’t necessarily started her journey to sea from the beach. Maybe she’d never actually gone to Norton at all, but rather ended up there after being thrown overboard offshore. Maybe she had been in a boat—the kind of boat that had enough horsepower to charge through the rough waters off the south shore of the island. A boat like Ross’s. The one where he kept his lucky hat. His stupid, lucky fishing hat.
Brynn’s stomach was empty, but she could feel her intestines and throat clenching as if she was about to be sick. She looked at her phone and remembered the app that was connected to the satellite phone that she’d insisted Ross buy last summer when he got his boat. She knew that he’d lose cell service when he went offshore tuna fishing, sometimes more than a hundred miles away to a spot called the Canyons, where the continental divide began and the ocean floor plummeted thousands of meters deep. A satellite phone kept on the boat was the only way to track his location.
Ross took care of the boat with an intensity only matched by the way he took care of Lucas when he was on daddy duty. He scrubbed it clean after each use. He was methodical in his organization of the gear he kept on board. He kept his lucky derby hat and favorite beer koozies safely in the center console, along with an extra set of fishing pliers and a first aid kit. The boat keys, attached to a neon-green inflatable key fob, always hung on the hook in the mudroom. Everything was accounted for, as if the boat was the most important thing in Ross’s life.
The Regulator was a far cry from the patched-up aluminum boat with a 10-horsepower motor that Brynn’s father had kept trailered in their backyard, occasionally launching it in Lobsterville in search of stripers or bluefish.
Ross had promised endless family boat outings all summer. He’d even bought an infant-size life preserver, a navy and yellow marshmallow of a jacket that engulfed Lucas. But, so far, Brynn had only been aboard a handful of times last summer for a few sunset cruises after Ross finished work.
She opened up the app. She considered closing it before she looked at location history. Wouldn’t all of this be easier, she thought, if she just removed herself from it? Wouldn’t it be easier, in a way, to accept that maybe Ross had done the unthinkable? She could potentially wrap her mind around it if the situation were black-and-white. He was guilty or he wasn’t. But now she wasn’t sure. She wanted to believe that he was still her husband that she knew, and loved, and still the dad that Lucas adored. But she also knew what the app would say. Somewhere, inside of her, she just knew.
And there it was.
The night Cecelia died: a round trip from Eel Pond in Edgartown, where Ross kept the boat, out to the waters off Chappaquiddick, past Cape Poge, past East Beach, past Wasque, all the way to the south side of the island, where she was found on Norton Point Beach. Fast, direct, and precise. There was no way to misinterpret it.
Before Brynn could process anything, Lucas woke up, screaming.