This weekend we went on a family vacation to a casino. We stayed in a hotel next to the casino with a bunch of our relatives. The first day it was just us and my parents, but then Saturday everyone else showed up. No one under the age of 21 was allowed in the casino, so the plan was to have my cousins, who are under 21, babysit Owen and his cousin Lyric, who are obviously under 21. It was just for an hour while all the over 21’s went to the casino and had the buffet.
This brings me to the beginning of my story. James walked across the street of our hotel to buy Subway for Owen and Lyric. When he got back we split the kids meal in half and Owen sat in our room at the table eating his meal. A while later, when Owen had pretty much finished eating, we got a knock at the door. My cousins had returned with their parents and were ready to babysit. I talked to Berta and asked her whose room we should have them babysit in, and we decided on ours, so James was cleaning up our room in anticipation of two toddlers being confined in it for an hour. I stood at our hotel door with it wide open while my Aunt and Uncle and cousins all congregated to talk about the plans. My Mom opened her door as well, which was directly across the hall from ours. As I stood at the door and talked, James continued to clean up the room. After the plans were finalized, I turned to go back into the room.
I glanced the room and didn’t see Owen, so as I had done about 500 times that day, I said casually to James, “where’s Owen?” James shrugged his shoulders seemingly unconcerned and said, “I don’t know”. So I turned around and peeked down the hallways of the hotel and then entered my Mom’s room and asked “is Owen in here?” They looked around and said, “no, he’s not in here”. Hmm, I started to feel a bit on edge, but not like we had an emergency situation or anything. Only moments before he had been sitting in our room, and we were all congregated right outside our door, so surely Owen was either in our room, or in one of their rooms. How could all those people have let him slip by without seeing him? My Mom and Berta quickly started looking for Owen, as did my cousins, Kaylee and Karina. Both my Dad and James wandered away down the hallways seemingly unfazed.
This is when it changed from, “ha ha, where did that kid run off to” to “where the hell did he go!?!?!?” “Where is he?!?!?!” “Someone must have saw where he went!?!?!?!” My Aunt and Uncle were informed and they joined in the search. There was now numerous people walking up and down halls yelling Owen’s name. My Mom started trying to open all the doors in our hallway thinking that maybe Owen went into someone else’s room. I walked up and down the hallway, afraid to go to far away from our room. I kept checking our room, as if suddenly he would appear in there. I kept asking aloud into the air, “where is he?”, “where did he go”, and once after checking my room for like the fifth time, I turned and said loudly, “what the fuck!, where did he go!?!?!? We checked everyone’s rooms, numerous times, and there was no Owen anywhere to be found. Everyone was beginning to get a little panicky at this point. People started to spread out further and further down the halls, and venture around corners and down stairwells. I saw James meandering back to us and I said “was he over there?” and James said “no, he’s not down there”. I then said, “well where is he!?” and James shrugged his shoulders again and said, “I don’t know”.
This is when a deeper feeling of panic set in. My Mom yelled, “where did James look?” and I yelled back, “I don’t know, I don’t know!” Berta announced that she was going to tell the front desk. No one said what we were all thinking at this point, but the only reason for telling the front desk was to get security involved and prevent anyone from leaving the hotel. My Mom said, “yes! go tell the front desk, they should know!”
At this point panic began to fade into terror for us all. There is that point in time when you begin to think, “okay, how far can a two year old get on his own?”, “why haven’t we found him?”, “if someone took him, they have already had enough time to leave the hotel with him”. I kept thinking of his face, and thinking to myself “am I ever going to see Owen again?” This is the point where I began looking out windows into the parking lot, but knowing that he was long gone if he had left via the parking lot. I felt like the terror was going to become overwhelming, and I remember having the thought, “okay, he’s not here, he’s not in the room, where do you think he is, use your Mother’s intuition”. Up to this point I felt glued to the room, as if I could not leave the immediate area for some reason. I think I was thinking that if we all left this area he would come walking back and no one would be there. But once Berta went to tell the front desk, I realized he wasn’t there in this area, some of us had been searching there for over 5 minutes by this point, and he just wasn’t there.
So I thought to myself that I had to leave the area and go find him, I had to use my intuition and think about where I felt he was. I ran down the hall and started running down the stairs. I was heading for the first floor. I had it in the back of my mind the entire time that he maybe tried to go the pool. I had it in my mind, but for some reason didn’t tell anyone to go look by the pool. We were on the third floor, the top floor of the hotel. I ran down one flight of stairs and came to the door of the second floor. Instead of heading towards my destination, I decided to get off on the second floor and search that area first. I walked down the hallways yelling his name. At the end of the hallway I saw Kaylee and she was yelling for Owen too. Then she heard Berta through the stairwell, and she said “what Berta, where are you?” and then she said “Jennifer, Berta found him, but I don’t know where she is”. I said “where is she!?!” and Kaylee said “I don’t know” and yelled for Berta, and I could faintly hear Berta yelling for me. I was still in a panic because I wasn’t sure that Kaylee heard right, or that Berta had really found him. I ran to the end of the hall and yelled “Berta!, Berta where are you!?!” We heard faint and muffled replies of, “Jen I found him”, “Jen, he’s here”.
Kaylee and I ran back up to the third floor by our rooms. I wasn’t convinced that they had found him until we turned the corner and saw everyone standing by our room and James set Owen on the floor and Owen ran down the hall smiling and jumped into my arms and hugged me!
Berta never informed the front desk. On her way down to tell them as she was walking on the first floor she started yelling his name. She then saw him peek behind a corner and laugh and then disappear into the recreation room, the room we had had breakfast in that morning.
So apparently, what we figure happened was this; Owen decided he had had enough of our hotel room and when I opened the door to talk to everyone, he slipped out and walked down the hall without anyone noticing. James was busy cleaning the room for Owen and Lyric to get baby-sat in and assumed that I was guarding the door, and I had assumed that Owen and James were in the room together behind me and I wasn’t paying the least bit of attention to keeping an eye on him. Also, there were several people in the hallway between ours and my parents rooms, with the doors open, so it’s easy to assume that someone will see your kid run off when there are that many people around. Also, neither one of us ever thought that he would just walk out of our room and wander down the hallway, down three flights of stairs, and start playing in an empty room for about 7 minutes time. Owen is a very visual child and he knew where our hotel room was whenever we would come back to it. He knows how to get places after only doing it once, so I think he just felt safe and confident leaving, and figured he would go exploring the hotel a bit further. We all deduced that the amount of time he was missing was more than 5, bu tless than 10 minutes. I feel it was right about 7 minutes long. When Owen was safely in my arms again, I brought him into our room and he shook his head no waved goodbye to the room. So apparantly he just really didn’t want to be in our hotel room at that time and went to great lengths to escape it.
As far as James goes, he told me later that he was very scared too, and that he kept checking the windows as well, but every time he saw me he tried to act as if it was no big deal so that I wouldn’t panic further. I think this worked to some extent, but his seemingly nonchalant attitude made me feel as if I had no help in my search. I think I would have preferred a bit more of a take charge, quick paced reaction, but his reaction was kind of how men seem to react in this situation. All the men reacted the same sort of way. My dad had calmly wandered away too, and later told us that he was doing a thorough search of each hallway on each level and was making his way to the pool, as he had the same thought that Owen may have tried going to the pool.
My Mom and Berta confessed that they were entering panic mode and if it would have gone on even a minute or two longer they would have been reduced to a blubbering mess of tears, as would I. Berta said she was choking back the tears on her way to the front desk, and my Mom said that she was about to just loose it towards the end of our search as she entered the stairwell after me. She said her heart started hurting and it took it awhile to feel normal again afterward, so we probably would have found my Mom later unconscious from a heart attack if he had been missing much longer.
Kaylee was a bit upset that I had said the “F” word. She told on me to Berta right away, who told her that I was upset so it was okay. She then wisphered the news to her Mom afterward, and her Mom explained that when people are upset they sometimes say things like that. I think if there is any appropriate time to swear, that was it.
Afterward, we all confessed to each other that we were all beginning to the think the worst, that someone may have taken him. It really gave us all a taste of what it must be like for these poor parents who loose a child and never recover them. My 7 minutes will never compare to their lifetime of pain, but I feel I glimpsed a tiny fraction of understanding and I now know the terror of what it feels like to loose track of a child for even a very short amount of time.
July 29th, 2007 | 
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