I was writing a horror novel. Real life horror interrupted.
I was writing a horror novel. Real life horror interrupted.
On "conditions of absolute reality." Content warning.
CW: If you don’t feel like reading about serious things right now, imperiled children, etc., I totally get it. See you next time out.
April 5th, 2024. 1:30 am:
I wake up in a hospital bed, still in my jeans, my body curled around my three-year-old son, and it’s the worst moment of my life—worse, even, than the moment hours before when the doctor finally returned to our little ER cubicle with her hands clasped together, looking like someone who’s reached a conclusion.
“Until now, we’ve had a lot of questions and not a lot of answers,” she began. “Now we have some answers, as well as more questions.”
I stared at her. Waiting.
“Yes, it’s leukemia,” she said. Cancer.
It registered as physical pain. It was exactly like someone kicked me full force in the face. I felt my face cave from the middle inward.
But waking up on the 12th floor of the hospital at 1:30 is worse, is the worst, because as I blink awake I see that it’s real. The hospital room is real. The beeping machines are real. The seafoam color on the walls—somehow the same sweet shade of is-it-blue-or-green that we’d painted his nursery—that’s real, too. Which means this is really happening. The news we received earlier is actually true. The googling I’d done about survival rates, sneaking off to the bathroom to do it, that actually happened.
You hear a lot about “every parent’s worst nightmare,” used to describe violent crime and horrific diagnoses. But for me, it’s like being woken from a dream of safety I didn’t even know I was having. Part of me is still back there in April, mumbling: I mean, c’mon, every little kid gets bruises. What are the odds?
Twelve hours later, we’re in surgery to get a port installed in his heart so he can start chemo.
This first hospital stay could last a month, the doctors say. They have to throw everything, a kitchen sink full of grenades, at the cancer. The aim is to get him into remission inside of 28 days or—nothing good, we’ll talk about that if it comes to it.
Time blurs. It’s 26 hours later. It’s 35 hours later, I don’t know, maybe. I’m staring out the hospital window and not seeing anything except blue haze when my body jerks into motion. I stand up. I turn around. His father stands up out of his chair and turns to face me. We put our arms around each other. “My heart is breaking,” I say. His voice is a croak. “Mine too.”
It’s 72 hours later, something like that, and it’s starting to become necessary to respond to texts still coming in from planet earth. Hey, just checking in, we still doing happy hour today? No. No, I can’t. But how does one “respond” to a “text”? It seems like a thing I should be able to do, yet I have no words. Is this what it feels like to have had a stroke, developed aphasia?
I grope around in my mind and the words I eventually find come from a famous horror-novel opener:
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against the hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.
“Conditions of absolute reality,” that’s what I text my friend Stephenie, screenshotting the whole paragraph. Stephenie’s a Shirley Jackson fan too, and I know I don’t need to send her the whole paragraph, but I do anyway because it’s great. So much atmosphere! So much voice! The way she just establishes the house as both a major character and the final boss like it’s nothing! Such a power move. And that bit about even crickets needing an escape hatch because sometimes reality is just too fucking much—God, I love it. I want to spread it on toast and eat it for breakfast.
The funny thing is I’ve been working on a horror novel for years. It’s about the large and beautiful and, at the same time, decrepit and insane-making house I moved into a few years ago. Then moved back out of, not necessarily because of the appalling local history I stumbled across, though that wasn’t unrelated, either.
Historical happenings like the one I discovered aren’t unusual in this part of the world, the upper south. This set of facts struck me as particularly terrible for being so awful and yet so little-known, both covered up and half-buried in the most literal sense. I dug in, googling until I found contemporaneous accounts of the tragedy in antebellum newspapers and magazines, whole pages of which had been wonkily scanned and uploaded by everyone from state librarians to grad students to amateur historians like me.
At the same time, I got to thinking about the house, the blithe suburb itself. All its unflinching facades, unblinking windows. Backyard pools. Top-rated schools. I thought about the reverse trolley problem that American parenthood presents: How you want good outcomes for your children so much that you make choices in direct opposition to the common good. How you do so without even thinking.
All this came together in my mind as an idea for a horror novel, but for years now I’ve been stuck with it, grinding away at lifeless drafts and hating myself for not managing to make the ideas land. Modern horror is a genre I’ve only come to recently—I wasn’t allowed to watch the movies as a kid or teenager, and I only started reading contemporary horror novels around about 2022, when a friend recommended Clay McLeod Chapman’s Ghost Eaters.
Maybe everyone’s friend was recommending Ghost Eaters—or maybe the rough ride of recent history turned us all in the same direction—because horror sales have been climbing for years. They hit an all-time high in the first quarter of 2024, about the time I was getting kiddo’s news.
But this is horror, the real thing:
They’re putting so much poison into him that I have to wear gloves to change his pull-ups. Nurses don two layers of PPE just to hang the bags on the IV pole.
He moves his head and there they are, the first long hairs on his pillow. I think of taking a picture to text his father, to say, hey, head’s up, it’s started happening. But I can’t bring myself to. I don’t want that picture on my phone. About a week later his father buzzes both their heads so that we don’t have to watch it falling out, day by day.
He’s being tortured, and I’m helping them, colluding: holding him down as he screams, forcing things into his mouth, assisting them as they stick needles in him and cause him pain when my ONE JOB is to protect and comfort him. But he can’t trust me.
The fatigue. It’s amazing. I thought I knew; I had a newborn not so long ago. But this is something beyond. I can’t remember the details of the next procedure that were just very carefully and slowly explained to me. I lift my arms and apply deodorant to my shirt. I eat the paper wrapper of a straw like it’s a French fry and then I do it again a few weeks later. I buy a new vacuum cleaner and, proud of being able to cross this item off my to-do list, throw away the box still containing most of the parts. It’s because it’s impossible to sleep in the hospital, especially with them coming in every few hours to take vitals. It’s because I’m waking up at 4 a.m., fear like a hand at my throat. It’s because there’s nothing as exhausting as having to manually override my mom-instincts again and again and again and again.
From shock, from trauma—because how could he possibly understand why all of this is happening and why it’s necessary?—my chirpy little guy retreats so far into himself that everyone starts describing him as severely autistic.
The mortality rate is 1 in 6. These are good odds, I know that. Warren Buffett would take those odds all day long. And people say it to you, “Kids survive leukemia now,” and I know they mean well, and I want to scream at them: You try accepting that there’s a 15% chance your kid won’t see five. You do it.
At the same time, I feel like if my child survives this, we’re wishing unbearable loss on another family, as if the 1 in 6 thing were hot potato or like not getting a seat in musical chairs. It’s not helped by the fact that horror is seeping in through the walls. Next door, the kid is wailing mommy, mommy, no continuously for something like 10 minutes and I turn on the TV to drown it out. I pull up white noise on Spotify on my phone, too, and turn up the volume, wishing I did not understand that both the mom and kid are experiencing something awful enough that your eyes close all on their own. As if that could stop you seeing it, as if there were any way to stop it happening. Something language only ever skims the surface of.
It's the day of the eclipse and we’re back in the hospital again. So we take turns going down to the 10th-floor observation deck where doctors, nurses, and some patients and families are all gathered in their special eclipse glasses. The view is very good; the hospital is one of the taller buildings in the city and it’s facing the right direction. When I go back upstairs, there’s a family ahead of me going back into the PACU ward, too. I clock the back of the little girl’s head—she’s under 10—and I know the story of them leaving their hospital room as if I’d been there. How the little girl is self-conscious about her hair being almost gone and probably didn’t want to leave the room at all. How her mom and dad put such careful, exhausted effort into getting what little hair she has left into pigtails with cute little polka dot bows, even though they’re at the stage where if you touch her hair it comes off in your hands. Some of the last long hairs are wafting off her head as she shuffles in front of me with her IV pole. Long hairs are floating off her head in the non-breeze.
Babies in ventilation tents. Kids in wheelchairs with fresh amputations. Tiny little oncology patients, lurching in that cute Frankenstein-ish way because they’ve only just learned to walk, wearing hospital gowns printed with Tigger. Special tricycles that you can attach IV poles to, with the names of cancer charities printed on the metal. They save lives in children’s hospitals, they are places where decades of STEM-major brilliance translate into modern miracles, and the one in our city is brand new, as good as any hospital I’ve ever seen, with so much thought and money put into every detail that—I can’t think of a higher compliment—you feel like you’re in Sweden or Australia. The facility is legit beautiful and the standard of care is unreal. At the same time, because of the kind of place it still is, you’re sometimes eye-flushed with visual reminders of things that happened in occupied Europe during WW2. Little children.
Another day, we’re returning to the hospital to visit the outpatient oncology clinic, parking in the underground deck, and before I’ve gotten out of my car I see a mother and her kids crossing toward the elevator, some squabble in progress. I watch it all go down in my rearview mirror: I see the mother suddenly grab the iPad out of her kid’s hand and in one snapping motion send it sailing across the concrete like a frisbee. A moment of rage, a moment of being beyond self-control, and it’s horrible to witness because I understand. I’ve seen them in the clinic before and the iPad is wrapped in a foam holder from a cancer charity. We’ve got the same foam holder. I wait until they’re gone to get out of my car. I don’t want her to know that anyone saw.
All at the same time, there’s so much grace, beauty, kindness, so much life proving lovely when it didn’t have to. For one, all of this is happening because I got something I wanted so badly: this beloved late-life child. I was 38 when I had him. In 2020, during the depths of COVID, we shared a body. Still in the womb, he used to kick the edge of my writing desk. When they handed him to me in the hospital for the first time, something like warm water ran down my arms into my hands. I’d never felt so much longing, my fingers flapping in an unconscious gimme gimme gesture. My parents couldn’t be there because of COVID rules, but I texted them a picture of him sleeping in my arms, saying, “He’s an angel,” when usually I’m careful not to use religious language with them, lest I get their hopes up. The first few weeks he was home, I’d be carried away by these bolts of happiness and we’d dance around my home office to The Toys’ “Lover’s Concerto.” When he was six weeks old and couldn’t sleep unless he was being held upright, I paced around the house in the dark with him, reciting poems from memory to keep myself awake. Around and around, through the living room, into the kitchen and around the table, down the hallway, back into the living room. All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
It little profits that an idle king…
I am just the same as when Our days were a joy, and our paths through flowers.
One night when he was about a year old, I had him sitting in his highchair in the kitchen while I chopped peppers or something for dinner. (You know the sort of half-assed stir fry.) Raffi was on Spotify and one song became the next. He started singing “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore.” I couldn’t remember ever hearing the song in church growing up, but it was so familiar at the same time. What is it about those old spirituals that they seem like they’ve always been with you? I turned and looked over at him, a bib still around his neck, playing with some little plastic cups, and all of a sudden I had to put my forehead down on the countertop. Raffi was singing:
The River Jordan is chilly and cold, hallelujah Chills the body but not the soul, hallelujah
I was just so grateful. I’d become part of something old and human and yet new and—at least so far—ever-springing, and I was so glad, so glad.
Part of the joy was a very specific sort of relief: Thank goodness I don’t have to be cool anymore and can just cry to Raffi whenever I feel like it! Thank goodness for the near-crippling weight of the car seat in the crook of my arm and the never having any GD time for my own work, for this novel I’ll maybe never get out of my mental Drafts folder because the same forces that came for basically every woman writer in history came for me, because I wanted them to. These days I’m crying for different reasons, all the time, certainly frequently enough to meet a clinical threshold, but just as often as then I’m crying from gratitude, from being moved.
I have felt so loved. My sister Amy met us in the ER and didn’t leave. She works in pharma and understands doctors and hospitals and took notes, took in all the details when we couldn’t. When I could look up again after getting kicked in the face, it was her eyes that I sought out. Stephenie brought nicotine gum and aromatherapy to the hospital1. Greg left a case of Coke Zero Spiced (delightful, try it) on my porch and gave me a new journal every time I filled up the last one. Nicole brought us dinner nearly every night of the first week despite having a full-time job and a PTA officer role and four little kids of her own, including toddler twins. Dani, also dealing with a kid in a medical situation, joked with me by text about how quickly we can dissociate—in seconds flat! How is this not a pageant talent-portion skill?? Jessica knit him a blanket. My brothers offered money and listened to me rage on the phone and checked in though they had so much going on themselves. My dad wouldn’t stop texting me until I answered him about how I was doing. My mom came to stay and when she was here her calm was the only calm I knew. So many people have sent toys that we are now sitting on the world’s largest private plastic dinosaur collection. His ex-nanny sent care packages. My godparents sent pajamas and a giant inflatable triceratops and kept calling when I didn’t pick up. Alan dropped Little Golden Books at the hospital reception desk and Andi mailed some perfectly chosen pop-up books; she should really, I don’t know, manage a bookstore. A dear friend from college got in touch for my address so she could send him things, and then her mom got in touch, too. My sister Molly flew down and stayed with me the first week we were out of the hospital, when kiddo was so traumatized and drugged-up that he tantrummed every day, all day. She sat on my couch and read to him from a dinosaur encyclopedia. She filled my fridge with groceries and made dinner every night, spearing some broccoli on a fork and explaining “So, this is a vegetable.”
A stranger stopped his father in the Walmart parking lot to press a $20 on him, having read the situation: bald child, mask. The cleaning lady in my building, Carolina, who’d seen plenty of us both before and after his diagnosis, asked me in halting English what was going on, and when I told her, she cried.
Some of the other things I’m grateful for, they’re darker, maybe, but more striking for being so. I’m grateful that I didn’t have any specific religious faith to lose, but instead had spent years slowly and mostly unconsciously coming around to an Episcopal-church-going friend’s view that this, here, is the Kingdom of Heaven that Jesus talked about: this world, all of it, everything, right now. What’s in front of us. What is so real that it moves us, what shouldn’t be real but is. It’s a roomy bit of metaphysics that I didn’t have to change to accommodate this.
Of course, I wish I’d never seen or come to know any of this, I would do anything to change this for him, and also, I swear, it’s like looking at Everest to see him play in a hospital bed as the poison drips into him. The other day he woke up from a nap, looked me in the eye, and whispered, “What does the name triceratops mean?” A pop quiz. He’s so totally uninterested in the cancer. Only wants to talk about giant reptiles from millions of years ago.
“If he doesn’t see his entire life through the lens of his illness, why should you?” My shrink puts the question to me. Well, right. Sounds easy, like a switch you only have to throw once, but in practice it turns out to be as bedeviling a problem as drinking enough water or getting enough sleep. I’m so angry. I’m angry because remission doesn’t mean what we think it means, at least not with this disease. We’re so lucky we got there and yet the treatment will continue for at least a year, brutal beyond all imagining. I’ve lost track of the number of spinal taps we’ve had, the total number of days we’ve spent in the hospital. Chunks of his early childhood are floating away like melting polar ice. We can’t run into a grocery store for milk without worrying. He can’t play with his cousins. He can’t go to birthday parties or holiday gatherings or to the playground if it’s crowded. We’re missing preschool. We may miss school. We don’t know.
Going from my part of town to another part of town, I find myself at an intersection looking at the restaurant I was due to meet a friend at when the call from our pediatrician came. Kiddo was bruising up like a banana, so much so I worried that his doctor would think we were hurting him. Still, we took him in, got a routine blood test, expecting to hear about anemia at worst. And instead we got the call two days later, his doc instructing us to go to the ER immediately, there would be a pediatric hematologist there to meet us, he’d already spoken with them.
It's just an Italian restaurant with a good house white and some so-so gnocchi. It’s the same restaurant it was back in April. And it’s not.
Lately my draft has been starting to click, with new chapters appearing and, crucially, working. I don’t think it’s a coincidence. This experience has not made me a stronger person or a better writer, but it has made me desperate and it has made the stakes of my story vivid in the most horrible way. Horror isn’t about “our deepest fears” or even catharsis, so much as it’s about having something to lose and engaging with it, really engaging with it, when things could go either way. You can’t engage all the time, like Shirley Jackson implied. Sometimes you need the escape hatch. I’d spent years building mine, and never could find a way in until I needed it this badly.
Cat, I can't say anything helpful about what you're going through, so instead I'll simply praise your telling of it. This is beautiful writing tragically written, yet beautiful just the same. Sharing such writing takes courage, even when it's coming out of desperation, and your long dedication to your art is apparent.
This essay just randomly popped up in my feed, and it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve read in weeks. I’m so sorry for what you and your son are going through. If the compassion of strangers means anything in this chaotic world, you have mine.