Today, Alex came in from outside, where he had been playing with his sister in the wooded area by our house.  He was alone.  I asked him where Megan was, and he became upset, thinking she had already come home.  He told me that the boy he had been playing with had seen Megan with "a man" that looked like her "dad".

When I established that she was not in the wooded area any longer, I did the thing we all fear most.  I called the police.  I had to give the very nice dispatch lady her description.  I hadn't panicked too much, until I had to do that.  That is when it got very scary.  I called Dan at work and put 911 after the number.  He barely hung up the phone to dash out the door in response to my choked explanation.  I started banging on neighbor's doors to elicit search help.  Time crawled to a painful itch on the back of my neck.  Poor Alex was also panicky.  He felt responsible.  Normally, Megan wears a cellphone on her pants loop.  Yesterday, she realized she had left it at her best friend's house.  They were supposed to have dropped it off last night, but they never did.  I let her go out without it because Alex was supposed to keep an eye on her.  I didn't realize until today how many different directions a lost child could disappear to in this neighborhood.  We have two churches at the end of our street, one close and one sort of far.  The far one has construction workers.  The close one has meetings off and on most of the day with people in cars going in and out.  The woods adjoins to the backyards of a newer, larger neighborhood.  Those aren't even the places that are "streets".

Just as our neighbors started running down the street, Alex called out.  He had found her.  (Praise God!)  She was at one of the houses getting a bandaid.  She had seen this woman out walking her dog, and asked her for a bandaid.  The woman had kindly taken her home, not thinking that we would be frantically looking for her since she then stayed in the house to play with the woman's granddaughter.  Of course, the woman felt awful.  We were all so relieved.  That is only the second time I have seen my husband that angry in 9 years.  Alex came home and had a meltdown.  I felt like throwing up.  The dispatch lady was very happy that she was okay.  The neighbors were all relieved and Megan went to each of them and apologized for not telling Alex or myself where she was going before she left.

After we were all home, it took hours for us to feel normal again.  I had a strange feeling that maybe I was still outside passed out in the street, and this was just a coma dream.  I thought maybe I had "snapped" and she was still missing but that my brain couldn't take it and had fabricated it all.  We went out to dinner to be around normal sounds and sights and to help us de-stress from the whole experience.

My heart goes out to those whose stories turned out differently.  Those whose descriptions hang on a wall in stores and on mail flyers.  God be with them and have mercy.