I calmed myself. He must be absorbed in something. That’s all. Too busy in his own little world. But a wave of panic careened into my island of calm.
Tommy! Tommy! Tommy!
I was running now, calling out frantically. No longer caring about looking like a crazy woman who couldn’t keep watch over one small boy while other women were happily herding tribes of kids about.
A pale, red-haired woman with a baby on her hip touched my arm—one of the T-shirt women. “I’ll help you look. He’s about two, right? What’s he wearing?”
“He was wearing blue,” I said, both relieved and shocked. The fact that someone was worried enough to offer help meant that things had gone a step further. Tommy was lost.
“All blue? A hat?”
I nodded. “Blue shorts and T-shirt. Yes, a hat.” Which hat? The one I’d bought from a fair last month. “It’s blue as well. With a giraffe on the front.”
“What’s his name?”
“Tommy. It’s Tommy.”
She hurried across to the T-shirt brigade, most of them with young children and babies. “We’ll see if we can spot him,” she called back. Three sets of pram-wielding persons moved off in different directions.
My heart sank. There were hundreds of little boys here that looked just like Tommy, unless you were close enough and low enough to look under his hat. How were strangers going to find him when I couldn’t spot him myself?
A thought jumped into my mind, and I grabbed hold of it. Maybe Tommy tried to follow his father. Yes, that was the only explanation.
I headed towards the cafés. Luke was ambling back to the water park, laden with ice-cream and drinks. Without Tommy.
Luke stiffened like a pole at the sight of my anxious face and the sight of people moving about in unexpected patterns behind me, gently calling Tommy’s name. It was instantly clear what the problem was.
“Where’s Tommy?” he asked reflexively.
“Luke! Tommy just wandered off!” Everything was okay now. Luke would find Tommy.
“What do you mean he just wandered off?” He stared down at his cardboard tray of ice-cream for a moment, as though he didn’t know what to do with it. “Where was the last place you saw him?”
The way Luke was staring at me in fear and disbelief caused a stabbing feeling in my stomach that reached all the way to my throat. “Exactly where he was when you left.”
“He’s probably still there somewhere.” Luke made his way back to the water canals. I followed, glad to have some sort of direction.
Luke stopped and stared at the spot where we’d last seen Tommy, like it should have an arrow pointing to where Tommy had gone. He hurried around the canals, searching. His eyes filled with a hazy panic. “Fuck. What if he headed for the harbour? To sail his boat?” Dumping the cardboard tray of ice-cream and drinks in the trash, he bounded away.
My breath stilled. I didn’t think of the harbour. It didn’t even enter my head that he could get that far. What if the whole time I’d been looking for him, he’d been heading in a beeline for the water?
I trailed after Luke—Luke already far ahead of me.
But there was no tufty-haired Tommy anywhere along the long line of concrete steps that edged the harbour. I scanned the surface of the water alongside Luke.
“Call the police,” Luke called to me. “I’m going to keep looking.”
I fumbled in my pockets, searching for my phone. Neither my fingers nor my mind was working. I couldn’t find the damned phone. Terror roared inside me.
The red-haired woman moved in front of my face again. “Excuse me, I just called the police for you. I hope that’s okay.”
Something in the way she said that and the guarded look in her eyes made me think it was me she was concerned about. But I was imagining that, surely. I was a responsible parent. As responsible as she was for the red-haired baby on her hip.
“Thank you,” I breathed, although I wanted her to go away—her and her doppelg?nger baby who was staring at me reproachfully.
It seemed wrong that a stranger had taken it into their hands to call the police before I did. Tommy was my child. And the more that strangers pushed their way in, the farther away Tommy got from me.
By the time the police arrived, a frantic half hour had gone by.
Luke and I met up again. He handed me his phone. “It’s Saskia.” He hadn’t answered it yet—there was just her name flashing on the screen.
My mind grabbed onto yet another desperate possibility. Had Saskia found him just wandering around and she was calling to tell me?