WHAT CAME BACK - Part 2 of 4: My Daughter Said "That's Not Toby." I Told Her to Be Quiet.

0:03 Hello and welcome to Ghost. Scary stories. This is What Came Back. Episode 2, What He Remembers.

0:26 Morning came the way it always came that summer. Hot and white and too early. the sun already hard in the windows by six, and I went down the hall before Paul woke, before Grace woke, and I pushed open Toby's door, half believing the night had been a dream, half believing I'd find an empty bed and have to go through the losing of him all over again. He was sitting up, awake, on top of the dry side of the bed, his hands folded in his lap, looking at the door as if he'd been waiting for it to open. The sheets under him had dried in the heat but they'd dried stiff and strange, salt stiff, water stained.

1:09 And when I came and put my hand to his cheek to say good morning, he was still cold. Bright daylight, the room already warming toward another scorcher, and my son's face was cold as a stone pulled out of a river. I had a choice right there. I want to be honest about that, because there was a choice and I made it. I could have gone and woken my husband.' I could have said, Paul, come and see, something is wrong, something is wrong with what came back. Instead I smiled at the cold thing in the bed and I said, are you hungry, baby? And I started, that very first morning, to build the house of lies I was going to live in. I made him breakfast. He sat at the table in Toby's chair and I put eggs in front

1:57 of him and he watched me eat mine first, watched my fork, watched my mouth and then he picked up his own fork and did it the way I'd done it. A beat behind, a careful copy. He didn't eat much. He moved the food around. When I cleared the plate it was mostly untouched and I told myself children don't eat when they're overwhelmed. Of course he's overwhelmed. and I scraped it into the bin. That was when Paul came down.

2:29 I'd been so frightened of that moment, and it was nothing like I'd feared. Paul stopped in the kitchen doorway, and he looked at the boy at the table, his dead son sitting there eating eggs in the morning light, and his face did something I can't describe, just came apart and put itself back together, and he said, Toby?

2:51 In a voice gone to pieces. And the boy looked up and smiled and said, Hi Daddy. And Paul crossed the kitchen and got down on his knees and held him. And over Paul's shoulder the boy looked at me, just looked at me, calm and pale and patient, while my husband shook and wept against him. And I felt the cold coming off the two of them all the way across the room. Paul wanted to call people. Of course he did. that's what you do he stood up wiping his face and he was already reaching for it already saying we have to call someone the doctor the police they'll want to he came out of the water Nora they have to know this is this is a miracle this is the biggest and I caught his arm I caught his arm and I said no he looked at

3:50 me I didn't have a reason I could say I couldn't say the true thing, which was that some animal part of me knew that the moment any one official looked at this boy, the moment a doctor put a stethoscope to that silent chest, it would end. It would be taken away. The spell would break, and I'd lose him a second time. I couldn't say that. So I said, not yet. Please, let's just, let's have him to ourselves for a little while. Let's not turn him into a circus.

4:24 He's been through something we can't imagine. Let's just let him be home. And Paul, my grieving husband, who wanted so badly to believe, looked at the boy and looked at me and he let his hand fall. He nodded. Okay, he said. Okay, a few days.

4:44 I'd won.

4:45 I remember the little flush of triumph and I remember being ashamed of it and I remember the shame not being enough to stop me. That was the first time I lied to Paul to keep it. It was not the last. And I think I've thought about this a great deal. I think it was the first time the thing in my house took something from him, because Paul was never quite the same after that morning. Something went out of him. He'd argued for a heartbeat, and then he'd folded. And over the days that followed, he folded more and more easily, agreed more and more quickly, until agreeing was all he did. Grace came down last. She stopped in the same doorway her father had stopped in.

5:31 But where Paul had come apart, Grace went still. She stood there in her nightshirt, eleven years old, and she looked at the boy at the table for a long, long time. And the boy looked back at her, and neither of them said anything. The kitchen got very quiet. Then Grace turned to me, and in a flat, level voice, a voice with no childhood left in it at all.

5:57 She said, That's not Toby. Grace, I said.

6:02 It's not.

6:03 Look at it. She wasn't crying. She wasn't shouting. That was the thing that frightened me. How calm she was. How certain. It doesn't blink right. It's wrong, Mom. You know it's wrong. That's enough. I said it's sharp. sharper than I'd spoken to her in months, and I saw the words land on her like a slap, saw her understand that her mother had chosen, in that first morning, the cold thing in the chair over her, that's your brother, he came back to us and that is your brother, and you will not talk about him like that in this house. She looked at me, that flat, clear, unfooled look, and then she looked at the boy, who was watching the whole thing, with his head tilted slightly, studying us, learning the shapes of us. And something passed over her

6:56 face that I would only later understand was fear, not of it, but for me. She turned around and went back upstairs and shut her door. And we lost her too, a little, in that moment. I let it happen. I was letting all of it happen. The dog knew before any of us, if I'm honest. We had an old retriever, Bishop, grey around the muzzle, the gentlest animal you ever met.

7:24 Twelve years old, and he'd never so much as bared a tooth at a living thing. Bishop would not go into Toby's room. Bishop would not let the boy near him. The first time the boy reached out to pet him, the dog came up off the floor with a sound I'd never heard him make. Low and steady, and from somewhere very deep, hackles up the whole length of his spine, and he backed out of the room stiff-legged with his eyes, never leaving the child. After that he kept to the far end of the house. He'd sit at the top of the stairs and watch Toby's door and growl, low, all day long, a sound that got into your teeth until I couldn't stand it and put him out in the yard, and that's where he stayed. He wouldn't come

8:11 back in. He'd stand at the screen door in the worst of the heat, panting, and he'd look past me into the house, at the dark of the hall, and he'd back away. I told myself dogs are strange about change. I told myself a lot of things that week. The wrong things were what got to me. The studying. He'd remember things that hadn't happened. He'd say, remember when we went to the beach and I lost my shoe in the water, Mama, and you carried me back, and it would be wrong. It would be a beach we never went to, a shoe that never sank, and I'd feel the cold go down my back. And then the next day, or two days later, he'd say it again, and this time it would be right. The real beach, the real day, corrected,

9:04 as if he'd gone away and found the true memory somewhere and brought it back to me, fixed. He was getting it right. He was learning us. Learning the exact shape of the family he was wearing. And every day there were fewer mistakes. And that frightened me more than the mistakes ever had. A wrong thing you can deny.

9:25 A thing that's getting better at being your son. Day by day. Careful and patient and almost perfect. There's no denying that. There's only watching it close the gap. and then there was the night he forgave me. It was a few days in. I'd gone to sit with him at bedtime, the way I had every night, and he was lying there cold in the dark, and out of nowhere, in that voice, in Toby's exact voice, he said, said, it wasn't your fault, Mama. I didn't move. That day, at the water, you were talking to Mrs. Andrews about the school thing and you turned around and I was gone.

10:13 It wasn't your fault. You didn't see. I don't blame you. I never blamed you. And the thing is, I'd never told anyone that. Not Paul, not the police, not a living soul. That it was Mrs. Andrews, that it was the fundraiser, that I had turned my back for 90 seconds to talk about a bake sale while my son went under. I'd carried that exact shape of guilt alone for 14 months, the precise particular details of it, and now the thing in his bed was holding it up to me, gently, and forgiving me for it, and I broke.

10:49 I just broke. I put my face down on the cold wet pillow next to his cold wet head and I sobbed like I hadn't let myself sob since the day they called off the search and it stroked my hair with a small cold hand and said, there mama, there, I'm home now and I have never in my life felt so absolved and so doomed at the same time.

11:14 It knew the worst thing about me and it loved me anyway. How do you give that back? How do you take a thing like that back to the water and let it drown? I didn't sleep that night. I lay awake in the heat next to Paul, who was breathing slow and far away, and I thought about the lake, because I'd gone down to it, that week, once, in the afternoon, while the boy was up in his room, and Paul was at work, and Grace had shut herself away.

11:45 I'd walked the quarter mile down out of some pool I couldn't name, and I'd stood where I always stood, and the water was gone. Not gone, but pulled back, far back, twenty feet of cracked grey mud, where the shallows used to be, the old shoreline marked in a dark wet ring like a bathtub. The heat was eating the reservoir alive, and out in the middle, where the water was still deep and black and flat, something had started to show above the surface. a shape, the very top of something, dark and angled, that hadn't been there in the spring. I'd stood and looked at it a long time, the mud baking and stinking under the sun, and I'd told myself it was a snag, a dead tree, nothing.

12:35 But the water was falling. Every day the water was falling, and every day my son got a little more solid, a little more right, a little better at being him. I didn't put those two things together yet. I just lay in the dark that night and felt the both of them, the falling water and the warming buoy, like two ends of the same long rope. Somewhere past midnight, I heard a sound in the hall, a wet sound, a soft, dragging, wet sound, bare feet on the boards.

13:12 I got up.

13:14 The hall was dark and hot and and the door to Grace's room was open, and it had not been open when we went to bed. I went down the hall, and I looked in. The boy was standing beside Grace's bed. He was dripping. He'd been dry for days, but now he was soaked through again, water running off him, pooling dark on the floor around his feet, and he was standing over my sleeping daughter and looking down at her in the dark. And when I came to the door, he turned his head and looked at me, and he smiled.

13:46 And he arranged his face into something that was meant to be love. That's the only way I can say it. It made the shape of love with its mouth and its eyes. The way it had learned to make the shapes of all our feelings. Copying. Studying. Getting better. And underneath the shape there was nothing. Just a cold, pale thing dripping lake water onto my daughter's floor. Watching her sleep.

14:12 I should have screamed. I should have grabbed Grace and run. Any mother would tell you that's what you do. I held out my hand and I whispered, Come on, baby. Come back to bed. And it took my hand, cold and wet in mine, and it let me lead it back down the hall to its own room. And I tucked it in, and I pulled the wet blanket up over its chest, and I sat with it until its eyes closed. I didn't go to Grace. I didn't check on her. I told myself she was fine. She was sleeping.

14:46 Nothing had happened. I didn't care what it was. It called me Mama. And by then, God help me, that was enough. Ghost Scary Stories is a production of Calaroga Shark Media.

15:12 Some elements of AI may have been used in this production, but it was written, edited, mixed and produced by real, live people.

15:22 Executive producers Mark Francis and John McDermott.