Chapter Twenty-Six
Cole
He was gone.
Literally gone.
I’d pulled away from the kiss with Allie and looked down for him, and where he was supposed to be was just a blank space, empty air.
I didn’t know if the security guard was going to be able to help, so after I told him what Declan looked like, I took off. No way in hell was I just going to stand around there waiting for someone else to find him.
I went all the way around the block, calling his name. I ran into Allie and her mother, and they looked startled to see me.
“I don’t see him anywhere,” I said. “I don’t know if he managed to cross the street or something. I’ve got to keep looking...” I looked at Allie’s mom. “Would you stick around here, in case the security guards find him?”
“Of course,” she said. “And I just know he’ll turn up, I just know it—”
I didn’t stick around to hear the rest of what she had to say. Of course it was going to be something hopeful, something reassuring, but those words rang hollow to me right now. Most people go through life thinking this sort of thing would never happen to them, that the stories they see on the news or read about online happen to other people, but never them.
But what happens when one day you are that person?
I’d already been that person once, with everything that happened with my sister, and now here I was, potentially that person again. My feet thudded against the concrete. Sweat trickled down my brow. Where the fuck was he? How could someone his size have gotten so far?
There was an easy answer to that, of course, one that I was trying valiantly not to let enter my consciousness. It muscled its way in, though.
He got that far because someone took him.
And once that thought was forefront in my mind, the onslaught followed. A deranged murderer took him. A sociopath. A pedophile. A sick, twisted person who was going to torture him.
I tried to push that thought out of my mind, but when I did, I was suddenly imagining Declan, him being somewhere with people he didn’t know, wondering where I was, why I was letting this happen to him, why I wasn’t coming to save him.
I shook my head and yelled his name louder. I asked people if they had seen him. Some people looked concerned, others looked a little wary, but all of them shook their heads. No, they hadn’t seen him. He seemed to have disappeared into thin air.
There was no worse feeling than being completely helpless. And that was exactly how I felt as I power walked down the street, yelling Declan’s name. I could hear the note of desperation in my voice.
I stopped walking for a moment and tried to take a deep breath. My shoulders were practically up to my ears, and my jaw was clenched; my whole body felt flooded with cortisol. I was standing outside a frozen yogurt place; the Children’s Museum was across the street, a few buildings down from where I was. I could see Allie; she had just come back out. She was alone, craning her neck up and down the street as if that might somehow make Declan appear. She hadn’t found him yet. I hadn’t found him yet. But I had to keep looking.
I was about to start walking again when I happened to look into the frozen yogurt shop, the glare off the window shifting enough that I was able to see inside. And there, at one of the tables, was Declan.
I just stood there, frozen in place, unable to believe my eyes. He had a cup of frozen yogurt that he was eating with an orange plastic spoon. He was sitting at a table with a group of other children, 6 or 7 of them, maybe. It was a large table, and there were two young women at it, too, sitting at the end. They had a bunch of balloons attached to a baby stroller that was parked next to them.
Declan looked up right then and waved.
I walked inside, trying to take deep breaths. Part of me wanted to yank him out of that chair and shake him. Part of me wanted to run over and hug him and never let him go. But instead, I walked over and forced myself to smile.
“Hey, bud,” I said. “What are you doing?”
“I’m eating frozen yogurt with my new friends,” he said.
The two girls at the end of the table looked at me in confusion. One of them craned her neck around to look at the table behind her where a woman was sitting with a girl who looked to be maybe 7 or 8. Then, they both regarded me again.
“Um...do you guys know each other?” the girl with brown hair finally asked.
“Uh, yeah, we do,” I said. “This is my son, and he somehow snuck away and ended up over here.”
The two girls looked at each other. “I thought that was his mom,” the other one said, nodding to the woman behind us. “I thought he had just come over from that table and wanted to sit with Oliver and his cousins. It’s Oliver’s birthday,” she added, as if that somehow made a difference.
I nodded slowly, took another deep breath. This wasn’t their fault, those two girls, even though I felt an involuntary surge of anger toward them.
“Well, happy birthday, Oliver,” I said, addressing the kids, not sure who Oliver was, not caring. “But Declan and I need to get back. You’ll have to bring them ice cream with you, bud.”
“It’s not ice cream; it’s frozen yogurt.”
“Where’d you get the money for that, anyway?”
“I just ordered it, and they gave it to me.”
I looked behind the counter, where there were three high school-age looking kids. Of course they did.
“Right,” I said. “All right, I’m going to go pay for that ice cream, and then we need to get going, okay?”
I went over and pointed Declan out to the girl standing at the cash register. “I’m paying for his ice cream,” I said. “Apparently he ordered it but didn’t pay for it.”
The girl shrugged. “Oh, that’s okay. It happens sometimes.”
“It’s actually not okay,” I said. “So I’d like to pay for it.”
I pulled my wallet out of my pocket and yanked out a five-dollar bill, which I placed on the counter. I didn’t bother to wait for her to give me change; I just walked back over to Declan and told him we had to leave.
He’d finished his frozen yogurt by then, so he said goodbye to his newfound friends, and I led him outside. We walked a few steps away from the entrance of the frozen yogurt place, and then I stopped him and squatted down so I was eye level with him.
“Declan,” I said. He had a little smear of chocolate frozen yogurt on the corner of his mouth, which I reached up and wiped away with my thumb. “Declan, first I want to say that I am very relieved that you are safe. The second thing I want to say is that you scared us all. A lot. We had no idea where you were because you just walked off without telling us where you were going. What if I hadn’t seen you at the frozen yogurt place? What would you have done then?”
“I would have left and gone back over to the museum.”
“What if we weren’t there, though?”
“You wouldn’t just leave me!” he said.
“Of course we wouldn’t. But we didn’t know where you were.”
He looked down at his shoes. “They were leaving the museum, too,” he said. “I saw all those balloons. So I followed after them because I wanted to see the balloons. And they ended up coming over here, so I sat with them because they were getting frozen yogurt, and I wanted one, too. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you mad.”
I exhaled. “I’m not mad,” I said. “I was scared. I was afraid something had happened to you.”
“What do you think had happened?”
“We don’t need to get into the details. But I need to know that you understand that you cannot do something like that ever again. It’s not safe. We can’t get separated, okay? When we are in a big place like this, I need to be able to see you at all times. Do you understand?”
He nodded. “Yes,” he said.
“Okay, good. Let’s go back over and find Allie. She’s been really worried, too.”
Declan took my hand, and we walked to the corner and waited for the light to change so we could cross. He had crossed the road by himself. Well, he’d been tagging along with that group of kids, but still. I shuddered at the thought of him dashing across when the oncoming traffic had a green light. Now that he was here, now that he was safe, all those awful possibilities flared again.
Allie was talking with the security guard as we approached, but when she saw that I had Declan, she ran over to us, then dropped down to her knees and threw her arms around him.
“Declan!” she exclaimed. She had tears in her eyes, and I could tell she was trying valiantly not to cry. “Oh, Declan, you’re here! We were so worried about you! Where did you go?”
“He was across the street eating frozen yogurt,” I said.
The security guard gave us a moment and then stepped over to me. “He’s all right?” he said.
“Yes, he’s fine. Thank you for helping us look, though; I really appreciate it.”
He nodded. “Glad this one had a happy ending. They’re not always so lucky.” He gave me a pointed look, and I knew he was trying to shame me, knew he thought of me as just one more careless parent who was too interested in their phone to keep an eye on their kids.
The thing was, he wasn’t too far off. I looked down as Allie was listening to Declan describe where he had gone off to, what flavor frozen yogurt he’d ordered. I hadn’t been distracted by my phone; I’d been distracted by another person, but in the end, did that really matter? What mattered was Declan had run off, and I had allowed it to happen because I’d been preoccupied. I wanted to just erase the whole thing from my memory, because he was here, he was safe. I wanted to embody the all’s well that ends well mantra, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that things could have so easily gone terribly wrong, that this outcome could have certainly gone a different way.