WHAT CAME BACK — Part 4 of 4: I Had to Drown My Son a Second Time to Save My Daughter

0:03 Hello and welcome to Ghost, Scary Stories. This is What Came Back? Episode 4, What I Gave Back.

0:26 The last day of July was the hottest day of all. I have looked it up since. 109 degrees, a record that still stands. The air over the dead grass shimmering, like something seen through water. And the reservoir hit its bottom that day. There was almost nothing left of it, a black puddle in the centre of a vast cracked plain, and the whole drowned town standing bare under the sun.

0:54 Every wall, every dead tree, every leaning headstone in that hundred-year-old graveyard fully out of the water at last. Edith had told me what that meant, at the end, the last time I saw her at the waterline. When the town's all the way up, she'd said, it doesn't need you anymore. It's solid by then. It's real. It walks off into the world wearing your boy's face and it never looks back. And you spend the rest of your life knowing you let it loose. She'd looked out at the rising stones. I never had the nerve. Mine's still in my house. But yours has nearly finished, hasn't it?

1:33 You can feel it. I could feel it. That last morning the boy came down to breakfast, and he was perfect. Warm, pink, ordinary. He laughed at something, and the laugh was exactly right. My son's laugh. No copy in it anymore. No beat behind. He'd finished learning, and in the next room Paul sat in his chair looking at the wall. Gone so far now he didn't always answer to his name. And upstairs, Grace.

2:04 Grace didn't get up that morning. I went to her room and she was so still, I thought, for one stopped heartbeat, that she was gone. She wasn't, but she was grey as ash, her breath shallow and slow, her eyes half open and not tracking. And when I said her name she didn't answer. My fierce, furious, clear-eyed girl.

2:27 the only one of us who'd named the thing from the start, the most alive person I have ever known, and the thing had nearly drunk her dry. One more day, maybe two, that was what I had. And looking down at my dying daughter, with my dead son laughing in the kitchen and my husband fading in his chair, I finally found the thing Edith said nobody finds. I found the bottom of it, the all the way down. because it turns out you can love a thing with your whole ruined heart and still know it has to die if the alternative is this. If the alternative is Grace going grey under your hands while you set a place at the table for what's killing her. I waited until dark.

3:14 The dark came late, and I sat with Grace until it did, holding her cool hand, and then I went down to the boy's room. He was awake. He was always awake at night now. He looked at me in the dark and he smiled. And he said, Are we going somewhere, Mama? Yes, baby, I said. We're going down to the water. And here is the thing I will carry to my own grave. He got up and he took my hand. And he came. Willingly.

3:47 Trusting.

3:49 Because he was certain. Certain the way he'd been certain in every word for two weeks. that I would never go through with it, that I loved him too much, that I'd chosen him at the door and would choose him at the water too, the way Edith chose hers, the way they all chose theirs. He held my hand and he walked beside me, out into the terrible heat of that last night, down the quarter mile to the lake, chatting, easy, my little boy, and every step of it was the worst thing I have ever done. He talked the whole way down, about nothing, about a show he wanted to watch, about whether we could get ice cream tomorrow, about a kid at school, school that was a year and a lifetime gone. He swung my hand the way he used to.

4:40 He pointed out the moon, and I walked beside him through the dead grass with the heat sitting on us like a hand. And I answered him, God help me. I answered him in my normal voice. Yes, baby. Sure, baby. We'll see. Because I could not bear to spend his last walk frightening him, and because some coward part of me wanted these last few minutes of having him, even knowing what they were, even knowing where we were going.

5:09 The cicadas had gone quiet. The whole valley was silent and baking, and lit by that enormous moon. And the two of us walked down into it hand in hand, a mother and the warm, dead thing that loved her toward the black water at the bottom of the world. We came to the waterline, except there was no waterline anymore, not really, just the cracked mud going down and down toward that last black pool in the middle of the drowned town, the dead street and the ruined church, and the headstones pale in the dark all around us. We had to walk out among them to reach the water, out across the floor of the drained lake, between the leaning stones of that hundred-year-old graveyard, our feet sinking into mud that had been under forty feet of water a

5:59 month before. The smell of the bottom of the lake was everywhere, green and mineral and rotten, and the boy stood there holding my hand and looked out at the black water, and for the first time since he'd come back, I felt his certainty change.

6:15 He knew.

6:16 He understood, finally, that I'd meant it. and I watched the thing wearing my son's face become afraid. Mama, he said, and his voice had a crack in it now, a real one. Mama, it's so cold in there. You don't know how cold it is. I don't want to go back in the cold. I was down there so long. And he was crying, and the tears were real. And this is what I have to make you understand, because it's the whole horror of it. I didn't stop loving it It was not a monster in that moment. It was a frightened, freezing thing that had clawed its way up out of the dark because a grieving woman called it every night, and it had been warm in my house, warm at my table, warm for the first time in a hundred years, and it did not want to go

7:09 back into the cold black water any more than my real son had wanted to drown. I saw it clearly. Not a demon. Not a trick. a cold thing made out of my own grief and my son's empty place, wearing his face, begging me in his voice not to send it back into the dark. And I knew that what I was about to do was kill my son a second time, with my own hands, on purpose, knowing exactly what it would cost. I got down on my knees in the mud in front of it. I held its cold face. It had gone cold again, here at the water, the warmth all running out of it, and I made myself look into the eyes that were not Toby's eyes. You're not my son, I said. Mama, my son is dead. My voice didn't shake. I have wondered since how it didn't shake. Toby went into the water

8:07 in May, and he drowned, and we never found him, and he is dead. He has been dead for fourteen months. You are not him. You're something that learned him. You're something I called up because I couldn't stand it. And I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. But you're not my boy. And I won't keep you. And I won't have you.

8:31 And I'm sending you back. I was weeping now. I could hardly see. But I made myself say the last of it. The all the way down of it. Go back to the water. I let my son be dead. I let him be dead.

8:48 Go back.

8:50 It made a sound I will hear for the rest of my life. Not a child's sound. Something underneath the child. Old and lost and furious and grieving all at once. And then the warmth went out of it entirely. And the weight of it in my hands turned to something else. Something wet and cold and slack. And it pulled away from me. And it walked.

9:13 It walked.

9:15 On its own. down across the cracked mud toward the last black pool in the middle of the drowned town, getting smaller and greyer and less like my son with every step, until it reached the edge of the water and stepped down into it and was gone. No splash. The water just took it back, the way it takes everything back. I knelt in the mud until the sky started to grey at the edges. Then I got up and I walked home, What did it cost? You'll want to know that. It cost the boy, of course. But the boy was already gone. Fourteen months gone. I'd only borrowed him back for the length of a heatwave. What it really cost was the believing. For two weeks, I'd lived in a world where the water could give things back.

10:14 Where the worst thing that ever happened to me could be undone. Where I could be forgiven by the one person whose forgiveness I wanted. and I had to give all of that back too. I had to walk home into a world where my son is just dead, plainly and permanently dead, and stays that way. I had to become, again, a woman whose child drowned. There's a particular loneliness in that I didn't have words for before that summer. Grace woke the next morning. She woke slowly, over days, the grey going out of her, the colour coming back, And by the end of August, she was eating and sleeping at night instead of all day. And one afternoon I heard her laugh at something on her phone and I had to leave the room. She doesn't remember much of July.

11:07 I've never told her what I did. I think some part of her knows. Paul. I don't know about Paul. That's the truth I have to live in. He came back partway. The lights came back on in him, slowly. the way they came back in grace, but not all the way. There's a quiet in him now that wasn't there before, a slowness, a distance, like a man who left something at the bottom of a deep place and can't quite remember what. Some of him faded out that July and I don't know if it ever fully came home and I don't know if that's the things doing or just grief, just what a year and a half of this does to a marriage and I will never know.

11:51 and that not knowing is the last thing it left me. I tried, once, to tell him. Late one night in the fall I started to say it. There was something in the house, Paul, that summer, something I let in, and I had to take it down to the water, and, and he looked at me with that new slow distance, and he said, I know, Nora.

12:15 It's okay.

12:16 We lost him. It was a hard summer, and I understood that he didn't remember, not really, that whatever the thing had taken out of him had taken that with it, and that I would be the only person on this earth who carried what really happened in that house. So I stopped. I let him believe it was grief. Maybe it was. We don't talk about it now. We're careful with each other. We're trying. The rains came in September, and the reservoir filled back up, and the drowned town went back under. the walls and the dead trees and the headstones, all of it sinking back into the dark where it waits for the next dry summer. You'd never know now, looking at it, just water, flat and ordinary, lying there at the bottom of the valley. I don't

13:10 go down to it at night anymore. I made myself stop. But some nights, in the small hours, when the house is dark and hot and quiet, I hear a sound at the front door, low, near the bottom of the door, the way a child knocks, because a child is closer to the bottom of the door. And I lie there in the dark next to my husband, and I do not get up, and I do not turn on the porch light, and I tell myself, it's the house settling, the wind, a branch. I tell myself there's nothing out there, but I keep the porch light off, Because part of me is still afraid I'd answer it, and part of me the part I will be ashamed of until the day I die. Part of me still wants to. Edith died that winter. Alone, they said, in her house. When

14:05 they went in to see to things, they found two places set at her kitchen table. I think about that. I think about it more than I should. And last week I was driving the road that runs along the far side of the reservoir in the early dark and I saw a house I'd never paid attention to lit up against the dusk. And in the lit window a woman was standing looking out at the water and down at the bottom of her yard at the very edge of the lake in the last of the light there was a small figure standing in the shallows perfectly still looking up at the house. I slowed the car.

14:48 I did.

14:49 I almost stopped. And then I drove on. Because what would I say? What could I possibly say that she'd believe, that I would have believed, back in June, when the water started to fall, and I started going down to it every night to ask? There's nothing to say. The water's still there. It's always there. And somewhere, always, There's someone standing at the edge of it, grieving hard enough to be heard. The grief still walks down to the water.

15:21 It always will. It's just not me anymore. For now.