It Was an Ugly Couch Anyway by Elizabeth Passarella

Author:Elizabeth Passarella
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2023-02-21T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

LOST IN TIMES SQUARE

When my sister was young—young enough that I, almost four years younger, was not yet sent out into our neighborhood to tag along without a parent—she left our house in our quiet neighborhood in a suburb of Memphis to meet up with friends. “Mom! I’m going to Caydie’s!” she said to my mother, who was probably in the front yard weeding with a tumbler of iced coffee sitting next to her. Long before iced coffee became a drink you could order at Starbucks or any old diner, my mother was taking her leftover mug of morning coffee, pouring it into a tall, turquoise plastic cup, and filling it with the ice cubes from our freezer that always looked to me like Saturn: round with irregular, chipped rings, like discs, around the middle where the ice maker mold punched them loose. Sometimes she added a Sweet‘N Low. It was the only drink I remember her carrying outside to weed the vinca beds.

My mother, we learned later that day, heard, “I’m going to Amy’s”—a different friend entirely.

When children get separated from their parents, it is almost always a result of a simple misunderstanding or insignificant choice. You thought we were meeting at the bottom of the waterslide; I thought we said the snack bar. Even the rare instances where something horrible happens, it’s because a parent turned to talk to a neighbor for a few minutes too long or left a window open that they normally lock. That’s why the fear of losing your child or not stopping them before they step into traffic is so terrifyingly tangible. Because it doesn’t take much. You don’t have to be a neglectful parent, just one who heard a long a sound and assumed “Amy” instead of “Caydie.”

Of course, my sister was not lost. She was at Caydie’s. But later in the afternoon, when my mother needed her to come home, she knocked on Amy’s door, only to be told that Holland had definitely not been there all day. Assuming she’d been abducted on her bike on the way there, my mother called the police. Holland came home an hour or so later to find officers and flashing lights up and down our street and had to explain to all of the hysterical adults that the only tragedy of the day was that apparently our mother was losing her hearing.

I once lost my dad in a hardware store when I was four or five years old. It was the classic scenario where the kid is mesmerized by a display wall of plumbing fixtures, then comes out of her trance to realize her dad is nowhere in sight. For me, the panic did not set in immediately. I started walking up and down a couple of aisles, and just as my stomach started to churn, I saw my dad. I ran to him and threw my arms around his legs, only to look up and see a face looking down at me that definitely did not belong to my father.

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