20 minutes in hell

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Have you ever wondered what hell is like?

If you are a parent, I can tell you that hell is when you can not find your child.

Last night Peach was missing. Though I never measured the time, it was probably no more than 20 minutes, 25 top, but if you are a parent, you know that 20 minutes spent knowing your child is missing is an eternity. More than 5 seconds missing is years off your life. Heart failure.

The story goes:

While I was making dinner -- a late dinner because we went to evening Mass -- the kids were all busy doing something, excited for the Buckeye game which was about to begin, and Doug was in the basement working on replacing my dryer vent -- all of us preoccupied with something, Peach asked if she could go next door. Our newlywed neighbors were babysitting his young nieces for the weekend and the girls had been back and forth between houses since Friday afternoon. Distractedly, I said, "sure, dinner will be soon" just to warn her that she couldn't be there for long.

Mistake #1: though our neighbor's front door is only 10 yards from ours, I did not confirm that she made it there.

When dinner was ready, about 15 to 20 minutes later, I went outside and yelled for her. She didn't answer, so I walked next door and noticed that their front door was closed (when they are home, usually their glass door is closed but the front door is open). I rang the doorbell and when no one answered I came back home, perplexed. Maybe she had found them not home and came back indoors without me noticing. I yelled in the house for her. No answer. I yelled down to Doug to see if she knew where she was, but he did not.

That is the moment at which I panicked. The girls had been playing in the creek earlier in the day. What if she went down there alone. It was almost dark out. I headed out the back door and down the steps to the creek, yelling her name. I looked up and down the creek but nothing moved. No color could be seen and she had been wearing a bright blue dress and a magenta jacket.

I ran back in the house and yelled to Doug that she was missing. He came running up the basement stairs. "She's not next door?"

"No one is answering, I don't think they're home."

"Did she fall asleep somewhere?" She had been sleepy at Mass. The boys went upstairs to check all the bedrooms. No sleeping girl anywhere.

Doug headed next door. He banged on the door loudly, but no one answered.

He headed down the street to another neighbor's where she sometimes played with the dog. I yelled, "I'm calling 911."

After talking to the operator and giving a description of my daughter (a surreal experience), Doug came back from checking down the street with no luck. No one had seen her. Her bike was laying at the end of the driveway and she had vanished. By this time it was dark, just minutes after I realized she was missing.

We headed next door again, he around one side of he house and me around the other. When we got to the backyard I noticed their basement lights on. I yelled over to Doug, "Do you think they could be in the basement and not hear the door?" I didn't know how that was possible as hard as Doug had knocked and I had repeatedly rang the bell. He banged on the window to the basement, but after a few minutes, nothing happened. I rang the bell again -- over and over. I looked at the knob. And walked off the porch.

Mistake #2: I should have tried the knob. Although we don't have that kind of familiar relationship with our neighbors, I should have tried the knob.

Doug called them on the phone, both their land line and his cell phone. No answer. I called one more neighbor, but no, they had not seen her.

By this time there were three police cruisers in our little cul de sac. It looked like a bank robbery. One officer said there were six more cruisers looking for her in the area. He asked if he could come in and look for her inside, a question that sent chills up my spine. We came inside and went down to the basement. He looked around and asked if she had any special hiding places, to which I responded, "No, not that I know of." We had been in the basement only a minute or so when he heard on his radio they found her. "They found her? Where?" In my mind I'm thinking a cruiser found her, possibly blocks away. He said, "I don't know, let's go back outside."

When we got outdoors, Peach was standing at the end of our neighbor's driveway, crying in Doug's arms. She had walked out the neighbor's door right into the "crime" scene, surrounded by five police officers, her worried father, and a concerned neighbor. She immediately started crying.

Apparently our neighbors and the girls had all been down in their finished basement, with the football game on, and did not hear any of the commotion. For some reason, unknown to us still, one of the adults decided it was probably time for Peach to go home and so she did.

It took about three hours for my heart rate to return to normal.



No one person was at fault in this unfortunate event, but we certainly learned some valuable truths.



The first truth is, no one but you can be truly responsible for your child. You can't expect other people to think like you do and when you start to expect it, you're mistaken. Doug and I would never have done what our neighbors did -- take everyone to the basement and become so engrossed in something that we could not hear the outside world, not even answering the phone. That doesn't make it wrong, but it means they do things too differently for our comfort. I don't think we'll make that mistake again.

The second truth is, rely on those you know you can rely on. I called 911 after we looked for only maybe 10 minutes. But, something was nagging at me -- don't waste any more time. I'm sure the police answer calls for missing children a lot, when in all likelihood, the child is just misplaced. But they came in full force, no questions asked. We could have gone door-to-door and asked all our neighbors to help, but remote bystanders really can not be relied upon. They don't have your child's best interest at heart.

The third truth is, no child is safe, really. I have always been overly cautious with my children, but as my oldest child grew up and my youngest child no longer needed to be watched every single minute, I relaxed a little. No parent can relax in today's society. You have to assume that there is danger every where, because it is. While we live in a very safe (a relative term), quiet neighborhood, my daughter being abducted was just as possible as what really happened. She could have been miles away by the time I noticed her gone.



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