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Over Thanksgiving Larkin was sick. It was the first time she's been really, really sick, and it turned our holiday into hell.

She'd had a few brief episodes over the course of her 21 months -- a runny nose or slight temp -- but always it went away. This time, in the run-up to Thanksgiving, a nighttime fever deepened, and her days became lethargic. Her fever reached 104, and we took her to the doctor.

It was a virus, our pediatrician said, most likely roseola, a cousin to the herpes viruses that causes chicken pox and mono. Roseola is believed to be responsible for half of all the first fevers in children. It can take four or five days to subside, often followed by a nasty-looking rash on your child's body or arms.

A benign thing, but scary. During the day Larkin was listless and clingy. "It's like she's trying to crawl back inside me," Molly said. (If your toddler isn't generally big on cuddling, here's your chance to steal several months' worth.) At night she suffered a fever so fierce, she seemed to glow. We gave her Motrin and Tylenol. We brought her into our bed, where she managed intermittent sleep interrupted by spastic bouts of misery. Roseola can include febrile seizures, and Larkin seemed epileptic. She'd arch her back, throw her hands high over her head in a gruesome parody of a fan doing The Wave, and scream bloody murder. We'd ask her, did she want something to drink? "Noooo!" she'd wail. "Nooooo!" Then she'd turn around and beg for water, drink a whole cup down, then a second -- our little camel, trekking the vast desert of her fever.

As for us, it felt like we were being tortured. For three nights we hardly slept as Larkin thrashed about the bed, kicking and screaming in misery. We couldn't make it stop. That's what makes caring for a feverish infant so torture-like. After four hours, you'd do anything, say anything, just to make her agony -- and your own -- go away. Desperation builds into rage, and since you can't direct your rage at your helpless child, you aim it at yourself, feeling a literal urge to tear your hair out.

And you aim it at your spouse. By night three Molly and I were rubbed raw. There were some terrible, truly wretched moments. At 3 a.m. Larkin woke and started doing the epilepsy thing. "Down!" she yelled, "Down!"-- then, when we put her down, she screamed even louder. She arched her back. She banged her head on the footboard. She tried to launch herself off the bed and onto the hard floor.

Nothing would calm her. I picked her up and walked her around the room. Her screaming went into overdrive, hoarse and violent. I tried everything. "Larkin, you want some water?"

"No!" she wailed. "No! No! No!"

"Want some juice? Want to go downstairs and watch Clifford?" In desperation I reeled off a half dozen of her favorites, hoping something would calm her. But it only pumped her up to more intense frenzy. Did she want to sit on Daddy's lap and read a book? Did she want cookies?

"Stop asking her those questions!" Molly hissed.

"Fine," I muttered through gritted teeth, "what do you want me to do?"

"I don't know, but just don't ask keep asking her what she wants -- I can't stand hearing her say No!"

So we kept walking her and holding her ... and finally, mysteriously, the storm passed. By Thanksgiving morning her fever had broken. Molly and I were dazed and depleted, spacey from lack of sleep. We were going for holiday dinner at my sister's, and I hadn't done anything about the three dishes I was supposed to bring. I could hardly move. I sat in the living room chair like a zombie, looking out the window. With the warm weather the trees turned late this year, and outside was a world of yellow and gold, the branches dropping lazy floating leaves, a blue sky melting the mist overhead.

Larkin seemed better. The TV was on, the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade underway. At one point Ronald McDonald appeared on the screen, grinning and waving.

"Dada!" Larkin cried out, pointing at him. Molly and I shook with laughter and fatigue. It was going to be all right.

That was three days ago. Larkin's virus is gone. But she seems a bit shaken by the ordeal. She's more needy than before, and more easily scared. She demands to be picked up and carried. At the playground she quakes in tears at the top of the slide, a slide she has gone down a hundred gleeful times before, with never a care.

"It sounds crazy to say," Molly says, "but I think her personality has been altered."

I agree. This isn't exactly a scientific thought, but in my mind Larkin has gone through a rite of passage, an initiation into a new phase of life and a different awareness of herself. A new dimension has opened up, one of fear and bewilderment, accompanying a sense of her own vulnerability. Fever does strange things to you, and because Larkin doesn't yet have the language to describe (or complain about) her nights of hell, we can only guess what her trial by fever was like, and what monsters she saw.

Actually, she almost has the language. On the third night, after Larkin's fit had passed, she subsided into silence. Molly and I lay on the bed, attempting to compose ourselves, with Larkin between us -- when out of the darkness came a single, piteous, whimpered word: "Help."

It still breaks my heart, thinking about that.