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 a
fter 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.”