WHAT CAME BACK - Part 1 of 4: My Drowned Son Knocked on the Door. I Let Him In.

0:03 Hello and welcome to Ghost Scary Stories. This is What Came Back? Episode 1. Come in.

0:27 The summer he came back was the hottest anyone could remember. I want to start there. with the heat, because you need to understand it to understand the rest. By the second week of July, the grass had gone the colour of straw, and the air over the road shimmered, like something about to catch fire. The weather people kept using words like historic and unprecedented, and the reservoir was dropping an inch a day. And at night the house held the day's heat, the way a stone holds it, long after the sun is gone. We slept on top of the sheets. We left every window open and prayed for a breeze that never came. You couldn't get cool. That's the thing I need you to feel before anything else.

1:19 That whole month, nobody in that town could get cool. So when I tell you that I was grateful, the first night, for how cold he was, I need you to understand that the heat is part of why I let it happen. My name doesn't matter. What matters is that 14 months before that July, my son drowned. Toby was eight. He'd be ten now, if. He went into the reservoir on a Sunday in May when I was 20 feet away with my back turned, talking to another mother about nothing, about a school fundraiser, about something I cannot for the life of me remember, and by the time I turned around, the water was flat and quiet, and there was no one in it. They dragged it for nine days. The reservoir is deep, and it is old and it does not give things back. They never

2:16 found him. That is its own particular kind of horror, the not-finding, and I won't pretend it isn't. There's no box in the ground. There's no place to go. There's just the water, sitting there at the bottom of our valley, holding my child somewhere inside it, every single day. You don't survive a thing like that.

2:41 Not really.

2:42 You learn to carry it. The house became a museum to a boy who wasn't there. I couldn't move his shoes from the rack by the door. I couldn't throw out the half-finished cup of juice that had gone solid in the back of the fridge until Paul did it himself, quietly, one morning, when he thought I wasn't looking, and I hated him for it for a week. That's what grief does.

3:14 It makes you cruel about small things. Paul and I stopped talking in any way that mattered. We moved around each other in that hot house like two people, sharing a waiting room, polite, careful, miles apart. He grieved by getting busy. I grieved by going down to the water at night. Neither of us had any kindness left over for the other, and I'm ashamed to say neither of us had much left over for Grace. Grace was eleven that summer. Our daughter, our living child, three years older than her brother, and the one we still had, and I am sorry to tell you that for fourteen months I half forgot she was there. She got herself up in the mornings. She made her own toast. She'd lost her little brother and both her parents in the same week,

4:10 in every way that counted, and she'd gone quiet and watchful and self-contained in a way no eleven-year-old should have to be. I'd catch her looking at me sometimes with a flat, grown-up steadiness that frightened me, though I couldn't have told you why then. I know why now. She was the one of us who could still see clearly.

4:33 She was watching the whole thing from outside, the way you watch a car drift across the line toward you, knowing you can't do anything but knowing exactly what's coming. I went down to it most nights. I want to be honest about that. Because it matters later. After Paul was asleep, after Grace was asleep, I'd walk the quarter mile down to the shore and I'd stand at the waterline in the dark and I would talk to it, to the lake. I'd ask it to give him back.

5:04 I knew how that sounds. I knew it then. I'd stand there with the mud sucking at my shoes and the black water lying flat and patient in front of me and I'd say his name out loud. and I'd say please, and I'd say I'll do anything, the way you do when there is nothing left to bargain with, and you bargain anyway. I did it every night for fourteen months, and I have thought about that a great deal since, about whether something was listening the whole time, about whether I taught it what I wanted, about whether I called it up out of the dark, one inch of falling water at a time, because the lake was falling.

5:48 That summer, with no rain and that terrible heat, the reservoir dropped lower than anyone had seen it. The mud came up around the edges, cracked and grey and stinking. Old fence posts started to show. There's a town under there, you understand. They flooded a whole valley to make the reservoir, a hundred years back, drowned the houses and the church and the graveyard, and most of the time you'd never know.

6:16 But that July the water pulled back like a sheet pulled off a bed and things that had been under it for a century started to remember they were there. I'm getting ahead of myself. I do that now. Let me tell you about the knock. It was past eleven on a Tuesday. The dark comes late in July, so it was full night, finally, and I was sitting in the kitchen with the lights off because the lights brought the heat. Paul was upstairs, Grace was in her room, and someone knocked on the front door. Three knocks. Low.

7:04 Near the bottom of the door, the way a child knocks because a child is closer to the bottom of the door. I want to tell you I was afraid.

7:13 I wasn't.

7:14 I should have been. and I've wondered since whether the not being afraid was already part of it, whether it was already in my head, before I ever opened the door. But all I felt was a kind of swoop in my stomach, the way you feel when the phone rings too late at night. I went to the door. I opened it. He was standing on the porch.

7:39 Toby. My Toby.

7:42 Eight years old. in the red shirt he'd been wearing the day he went under, the one they never found because it was on him, and it was soaked through, dark and dripping, clinging to him. His hair was wet and flat and there was a piece of lakeweed stuck to his cheek, green and fine like hair. Water ran off the hem of his shorts and pattered on the boards of the porch. And in the worst heat of the worst summer of my life, the air that came off him through the open door was cold, cold like the inside of a refrigerator, cold like a draft from a cellar. He looked up at me, and he said, Mama, I don't have the words for what happened in me then.

8:27 I've tried to find them and they aren't there. Every cell in my body that had been screaming for 14 months went quiet all at once. He was here, he was here, and he was cold, and he was dripping on my porch, and some part of me, some small, far-off part, was already saying, this is wrong, this is wrong, the lake does not give things back, and I stepped aside, and I said, come in, baby, come inside. I invited him in. I've gone over that moment more times than I can count. Nobody made me do it. He stood on the threshold, and he waited, and I see now that he was waiting, that he couldn't come over it until I said the words. But I didn't know that then.

9:19 I just opened my arms and my house, and I let him in out of the dark, and that is the thing I will answer for. Whatever else is true, that part was me. I knelt down, and I pulled him against me, and he was so cold, and the cold felt good. That's the part I can hardly say. After a month of heat that wouldn't break, his cold little body against mine felt like relief, like stepping into shade.

9:50 And I held him, and I pressed my face into his wet hair, and I breathed him in. And under the smell of him, under the cold and the wet, there was another smell, green and mineral, and faintly rotten, the smell of the bottom of the lake, the smell of the mud that had come up around the edges all that dry month. I noticed it. I want to be honest. I noticed it, that very first minute. and I told myself it was just the water, just the reservoir.

10:25 Of course he smells like the reservoir, and I kept holding him. I got him a towel. I peeled the wet shirt off him, and his skin underneath was white and cold and perfect, not a mark on him, not a sign of fourteen months in the water, and I made myself not think about that. I dried his hair. He let me. He stood very still and he let me do it, watching my face the whole time, not blinking, and I told myself it was wonder, it was love, it was a boy looking at his mother after a long time away. But there were things, small things, even then.

11:06 I rubbed the towel over his arms, and his skin didn't pink up the way skin does, didn't warm under the friction. It stayed cold and white, and faintly damp, no matter how I dried it, as if the water were coming from inside him. When I knelt in front of him, his chest wasn't moving the way it should. He'd take a breath, a real breath, and then go a long time without another, longer than a child can, longer than anyone can, and then remember, and take another.

11:41 Like breathing was a thing he was doing on purpose. like he'd watched people do it and was copying it from memory. I noticed. I want to be honest with you about how much I noticed and how quickly I taught myself not to. I didn't wake Paul. I want you to notice that because it's the start of something.

12:05 My husband was asleep upstairs and our son had come back from the dead and I did not go and wake him. I told myself it was because... I didn't want to frighten anyone, didn't want a commotion. I wanted to keep this quiet and gentle. The truth, the truth I can only just about look at now, is that some animal part of me already knew that if I woke Paul, Paul would do something, call someone, question it, and I did not want it questioned. I wanted to keep it. From the very first hour, I wanted to keep it, and I was already quietly, beginning to lie.

12:50 I put him to bed in his own room. We'd never changed it. Fourteen months, and I'd never been able to touch it. The dinosaur sheets, the nightlight, the books stacked the way he'd left them. I tucked him into his own bed, and the cold of him soaked up into the blanket, and I sat with him until his eyes closed. And then I went out into the hall, Grace's door was across from his. It was shut, the way she kept it now. I stood in front of it for a moment with my hand half raised, and I thought about going in, about sitting on the edge of her bed and saying, Your brother's home. Something's happened.

13:34 Something impossible and wonderful. And I didn't. I told myself she was asleep. I told myself it could wait for morning. The truth is I didn't want to say it out loud to the one person in that house who would look at me the way she looked at things, clear and flat and unfooled. I went past her door. I went to bed next to my sleeping husband, and I lay there in the heat with my heart going like a hammer, thinking, he's home, he's home, he's home. I woke a few hours later. Something pulled me up out of sleep, some sound or some cold, and the room was close and hot, and Paul was breathing slow beside me, and I got up. I don't know why. I went down the hall, past Grace's shut door, and I pushed Toby's door open. He was awake. He was lying exactly

14:33 as I'd left him, on his back, eyes open in the dark, looking at the ceiling. And the bed around him was soaked, the sheets, the blanket, all of it dark and wet. and when I put my hand on them they were cold, river cold, though the night was sweltering and his skin should have dried hours ago. Toby? I said.

14:58 Baby, are you okay?

14:59 And he didn't turn his head. He kept looking at the ceiling, and he said, in his voice, in my son's exact voice, I was so cold down there, Mama. I stopped in the doorway.

15:13 Okay.

15:14 It was so cold and so dark and I couldn't get up, but I could see you. He turned his head then, slowly, and he looked at me, and he smiled, and his teeth in the dark were very white. I watched you, every night. I saw you come down to the water and cry. I saw you the whole time, and I understood everything. Standing in that doorway in the dead heat of July with my arms breaking out in goose flesh, that whatever was lying in my son's bed had not just arrived, it had been down there in the cold and the dark for fourteen months, under the falling water, watching me stand at the edge of the lake and ask. Watching me. Learning me.

16:01 Listening.

16:03 Every night. While I told it exactly what I wanted.