My Son Kept Saying The Water Came Up Too Fast

My son has a rough, raised mark on the left side of his chest, right over his heart. It is about the size of a coin. The doctor said it was a benign thing, that it might fade or might not. It has not faded. If anything it has settled in deeper, like it means to stay.

Before he could string a full sentence together he was talking about a boat. Not a toy boat, not the little plastic ones in the bath. A working boat with nets that smelled of salt and rope that took the skin off your hands. He would sit at breakfast and tell me the water came up too fast, over and over, the way you would report something urgent that no one was listening to.

I want to be honest. We live inland. We are not boat people. My son had never seen the sea when he started talking about it. The closest thing to a harbour in his life was a duck pond. And yet he spoke about a place he called the grey harbour, where the houses came right down to the edge and the boats knocked against the wall all night.

He told me about a man named Tomas. He said Tomas was strong and had a red hat and let him steer sometimes. He said the storm came from the wrong side. He said the water came in over the front and it was so cold it stopped your chest, and he pressed his small hand flat over the raised mark and said, it hit me here.

I asked him where Tomas went. He said Tomas held on to the boat. He said he himself did not hold on, that a wave took him, and then he was cold for a long time and then he was warm and then he was ours. He was not upset when he told me. That was the strangest part. He told it the way you tell an old story that has stopped hurting.

My husband looked it up once, late at night, half embarrassed to be doing it. He searched for the grey harbour and a fishing boat lost in a storm. There are so many. The sea has taken so many men over so many years. We did not find Tomas. But we found a hundred stories that could have been his, and my husband closed the laptop and did not talk for a while.

What unsettles me is the small things. My son ties knots. Nobody taught him. He was doing a proper loop over loop with his shoelaces before the other little ones at nursery could manage a bow, and when I asked him where he learned it he said, on the boat, of course, like I was slow. He hates the cold water in the paddling pool. He will play in it for a minute and then stand at the edge with his arms crossed over the mark on his chest, watching the surface like it might rise.

I do not tell many people. When I do, they smile the way you smile at something sweet and made up. And maybe it is. Maybe he heard a story and built a world out of it, the way little ones do. But he named the mark over his heart before I ever pointed it out. He knew it hurt him first. He knew it hit him there.

He is older now and he talks about the boat less. I asked him about Tomas the other day, careful, testing. He thought for a moment and said the name felt far away, like a friend he used to have. Then he went back to his drawing. It was a boat. It is always a boat. He gives the man in it a red hat.