WHAT CAME BACK — Part 3 of 4: The Woman Down the Road Kept Hers for Forty Years

0:03 Hello and welcome to Ghost Scary Stories. This is What Came Back? Episode 3, What the Water Keeps. The town came up out of the water in the third week of July. I'd kept going down to the lake. I couldn't stop. While the boy was in the house getting warmer and more real, I'd walk the quarter mile down to the shore in the afternoons and watch the water leave, and one day I came over the rise and stopped, because the reservoir I'd known my whole life was gone, and in its place was something I didn't have a name for. The water had fallen forty feet, maybe more.

0:56 What was left sat small and dark in the middle of a vast bowl of cracked grey mud, and rising up out of that mud, All across the drained floor of the valley were the bones of a town. Stone walls, roofless, gone green-black with a hundred years under the water. The stump of a steeple, the church it belonged to half-melted by the decades but still standing, still pointing up. A street.

1:24 You could see a street, the line of it, and the foundations of houses set along it in rows. Dead trees, drowned a century ago, stood in their places with their bare grey branches still on them, perfectly preserved in the cold and the dark, a whole petrified forest coming up into the murderous July sun. I knew about the town.

1:48 Everyone here knows, the way you know a thing without ever thinking about it, that they flooded the valley a hundred years back to make the reservoir, moved the living out and left the rest, the houses and the church destroyed. and the graves. The graves. I stood there in the heat, and I looked out across the drowned town, and I thought about the cemetery that had to be out there somewhere, in all that mud, the headstones, the boxes in the ground.

2:19 A hundred years of a town's dead, lying under the water that held my son. And I could see it. That was the thing. Off past the church, where the ground rose a little, There were shapes coming up through the mud in rows, pale, square, leaning. Stones. The tops of headstones breaking the surface of the drained lakebed in neat lines. Dozens of them. A drowned graveyard coming back up into the light after a hundred years under. And I thought, for the first time, all the way through, the water gave him back. The water is going down, and it gave him back. And what does that mean about what else is out there in the mud, waiting to be uncovered? That was the afternoon I met Edith.

3:14 She was standing at the waterline when I came down, an old woman I half-recognised from the edges of town, the way you recognise people you've never spoken to. Seventy. Eighty. Thin as a rail. In a housecoat, in the heat. She was looking out at the drowned town the way I was looking at it. And without turning her head, she said, It came up like this once before. 1976.

3:39 The summer it didn't rain. I didn't say anything. That was the summer my Daniel came home, she said. He'd been three years in the water by then. Went through the ice when he was six, and we never found him. And then the lake went down in 76. And one night, there he was on the porch. Six years old, cold as the day we lost him, calling me Mama. The heat was very loud around us, the cicadas screaming in the dead grass, and I felt all of it go far away. You let him in, I said. It wasn't a question. I let him in. She turned and looked at me then, and her eyes were the most tired eyes I have ever seen in a human face. I know who you are, she said. I know what's in your house. I've been watching for it since the water

4:34 started to drop. I knew it would come for somebody. It always does, when the town comes up. It comes back for whoever's been grieving hardest at the edge of the water. She looked at me a moment longer. That's you, isn't it? You're the one who comes down here at night. What is it? I said. My voice didn't sound like mine.

4:58 What is it? Really? And she told me. She didn't have a word for it either, not a real one. But she'd had 40 years to understand the shape of the thing, and she laid it out for me there, at the edge of the mud, plain and quiet, like someone reading a sentence they'd long since memorised. The water keeps what it takes, she said. A drowned town, a drowned graveyard, a hundred years of the dead lying in the cold and the dark. It holds them, and it holds something else too, something that lives down there in the deep and the silt, something old, that learns the dead the way a parrot learns a voice. And when the water falls low enough, when the grief on the shore is strong enough, it comes up wearing one of them,

5:49 wearing the one you want most. It comes up on your porch in the body of your lost child, and it waits for you to ask it in. It can't come over the threshold, Edith said. Not unless you say the words. They never tell you that part. You have to open the door. You have to let it in. After that, she made a small motion with her hand, like dropping something. After that, it's yours. And you're its.

6:20 I asked her what happened. To Daniel. To her. She was quiet for a while. Then she said, I kept him. God forgive me. I kept him. He was so cold and so sweet and he knew me. He knew everything about me. He loved me in a way nobody living ever has and I couldn't. How do you put your own boy back in the water? How do you do that twice? She shook her head slowly. So I kept him and it fed. That's what it does, you understand.

6:54 It feeds on you keeping it. The more you love it, the more real it gets, the more solid and warm and right and the more it takes from everything else, from everyone else. Took what? I said. My husband, she said. First. He faded. That's the only word. He got quiet, and he got agreeable, and he got thin somehow. Thin all through, until one morning he just... He wasn't much there anymore.

7:26 He sat in his chair, and he agreed with whatever you said, and he looked at the wall. He died four years later, and I swear to you he'd been mostly gone for three of them. Then my daughter. She left. She got out. She was the smart one. She looked at what was sitting at our table. And she packed a bag and she begged me to come with her.

7:49 And I wouldn't leave him. I wouldn't leave my Daniel. And she went. And she never came back. And I don't blame her. I have never once blamed her. Edith's voice didn't break. It had broken so long ago, there was nothing left in it to break. Everyone, in the end. Everyone real went away, or went hollow. And I sat in that house with the cold thing that called me Mama.

8:18 And I set a place for it at the table every night. And I have been alone with it for forty years. I looked at this woman, this hollow woman, in a housecoat. who set a place for a thing every night. And I understood that I was looking at myself, at where the road went, at the end of it. How do you stop it? I said. You take it back to the water, she said, and you tell it what it is. You say it out loud, the true thing.

8:49 You're not my son. You're not real. My son is dead, and you refuse it. You send it back. It can't stay if you won't have it, she looked at me with those terrible tired eyes but you have to mean it all the way down and nobody means it you see that's the trick of it by the time you understand what it is you love it too much to send it back you'd rather lose everything else i did i lost everything else she turned back to the drowned town i couldn't do it i've never been able to do it he's still in my house He's there right now.

9:42 I walked home in the heat, not feeling the heat at all. The first thing I noticed when I came up the drive was that the yard was empty. Bishop wasn't at the screen door where he'd lived for two weeks, panting, watching the dark of the hall. I called him, and he didn't come. I found him that evening, down at the bottom of the yard, in the long grass at the edge of the property, closest to the water, lying on his side. Old dog, I told myself. Twelve years old and a heat like this. It's hard on an old heart. But he was thin. He'd gone thin in two weeks the way it takes a year to go thin, and his eyes were open, and he was facing the house, facing Toby's window. I buried him myself in the hard, dry ground, and I didn't tell anyone, and I understood

10:35 without letting myself say it that the thing in my house had finished with the easiest of us first. The dog had known from the first minute, the dog had fought it the longest, and the dog was the first one it used up. and when I went inside I saw the rest of it, the thing Edith had told me to look for, the thing I'd been refusing to see for two weeks. I saw my family. Paul was in his chair. He'd come home from work early and he was just sitting there, in the worst heat of the day, not reading, not watching anything, hands on his knees, looking at the wall. I said his name, and it took him a moment to find me, like a man surfacing from deep water, and he smiled a slow smile and said, Hey, good day? And there was almost no

11:26 one behind it. He'd been the loudest, most stubborn, most alive man I ever knew. I'd married him for the noise of him, and he was going out like a coal, agreeing with the wall. And Grace. I went up to find Grace, and she was lying on top of her covers in the heat, and she'd gone grey. That's the only way I can say it. My bright, fierce, furious daughter, the one who'd looked the thing in the eye and named it, had gone grey and small and quiet, with shadows under her eyes like bruises, and when I came in, she barely turned her head.' Hi, Mum,' she said, in a voice with the colour drained out of it. She was eating less. She was sleeping all the time. She was the most real thing left in that house, the

12:17 most stubbornly, fiercely alive.' and the thing was working on her hardest of all, and it was winning. I stood in my daughter's doorway, and I finally let myself do the arithmetic I'd been refusing for two weeks. The boy got warmer as Paul went cold. The boy got more real as Grace went grey. There wasn't enough in that house for both. It was eating my living family to feed the dead one I'd let in the door. And it would not stop. It would never stop. It would take Paul all the way, and then it would take Grace, and I would be Edith, alone in a hot house, setting a place for a cold thing for the rest of my life. I could keep the son I'd gotten back, or I could save the daughter I still had. Not both.

13:08 There had never been both. That night I went to his room. I don't know what I meant to do. Look at him, maybe. Try to find the nerve. try to find the all-the-way-down meaning that Edith said nobody ever finds. Because that was the trap. I understood it now. That was the whole shape of the trap. By the time you knew what it was, it had made itself impossible to give up. It had spent two weeks learning exactly which griefs to press and which memories to return and which forgiveness to offer until refusing it felt like murder.

13:48 Edith hadn't been weak. Edith had been caught the same way I was caught, in a snare built one small mercy at a time, and she'd sat in it for forty years. He was lying in the dark, warm now, warm as a living child at last, the cold all gone out of him, and that was the most frightening thing of all. He'd nearly finished, and before I could say a word, without opening his eyes, in a voice that was no longer quite a child's voice, that had something underneath it now, something old and patient and certain, he said, you won't send me back, Mama. I stood very still. You came down to the water every night and you asked for me. I heard you. I came all that way for you. His eyes opened in the dark and they were not Toby's eyes, not anymore, and

14:42 they were looking right at me. You won't put me back in the cold. You don't want to. I know you don't. I know everything about you. And he smiled, warm and sweet and terrible. You think it's Grace or me? You think you have to choose. But you won't choose her. You've already chosen. You chose at the door, the first night, when you said come in. He closed his eyes again and settled into the warm, dry sheets. Go to bed, Mama.

15:17 It's late. We can talk about it in the morning. when you've stopped pretending, and the worst thing, the thing I lay awake with all that long hot night, was that every word of it was true.