“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.