They were voicemails left on my phone in the middle of the night, when my phone is always turned off. I periodically would wake up to new messages on my phone. At first, they started as just muffled voices I couldn’t understand or windy sounds, but they eventually started to turn into clear messages I could make out, and could no longer ignore.

The first one I could properly hear was a conversation between myself and what sounded like a counselor or social worker I never remembered happening. A vague conversation with the tone from the counselor seeming to suggest I did something wrong, but wouldn’t admit to it, listening to the little snapshot of the back-and-forth raised the goosebumps on my arms.

I figured it must have been some counseling I had to do after Josh disappeared and I had forgotten about it or blocked it out of my mind. Either way though, it still didn’t explain why it was being left as a voicemail on my phone in the middle of the night.

It also didn’t explain why the voicemails started coming in every night.

At first they were just continuations of that vague conversation with the counselor and I thought it must have been the counselor doing it, or someone who found her tapes. Those thoughts would not last. After a few days, the voicemails turned much darker, much more-detailed and much more personal the first night. I finally gave in and decided I would leave my phone on when I went to sleep.

It took me a few moments for the ringing next to my head to rustle me from my slumber then reached over and snatched up my phone on about the third ring.

“Hello?” I couldn’t have sounded any groggier.

No voice picked up on the other end of the line. All I heard was the click sound a tape deck makes before it starts to play and then a voice that took my breath away. It was Josh. Talking to me through the shitty speakers of flip phone.

“I don’t know,” were the first words I heard Josh speak.

The voice was clearly Josh. The exact voice I remembered from around when he disappeared. Not the giggly toddler voice he had before he turned five and headed to Kindergarten or some kind of maturation I imagined would have happened had he lived to 16, but that exact, childish voice he had around eight and nine years-old.

“I don’t remember,” Josh’s sweet voice went on in the recording. “I try not to remember. I just remember the red bottle and then I remember it would happen. That’s it.”

My still-waking and still-buzzed brain tried to filter the words that were coming out of little Josh’s mouth, but still couldn’t make sense of them.

“I tried it once. She mixes it with the orange fizzy pop I like, but it tasted bad, so I didn’t again.”

Josh was talking about my drinking. The red bottle referring to my usual fifth of Smirnoff, the orange fizzy pop, the Orange Crush soda I had relied on as a mixer for damn near 30 years.

“That’s when it would happen,” Josh’s voice starting to quiver with sobs which drew my attention away from my pondering.

“What happened?” An unknown female voice popped up onto the tape and asked Josh a question.

There was a long pause from Josh.