Anyone who is a parent, or in charge of the care of a small child will probably know what it feels like; that brief moment of sheer panic when you can’t find your little one. You can relate, I’m sure, to that sinking feeling in your gut, that shortening of breath accompanied by the hammering in your chest that all occurs when you check place after place and don’t find her.  And when you start asking everyone, “Have you seen her?” and they all shake their head watching as your world slowly implodes into fear.

“I’ve been blessed that none of my children have ever gone missing for more than a few minutes, and when they did, someone (my wife) quickly found them and kept them safe until I returned from a frantic search through a theme park.  But last night, another member of my family went missing.

Our dog.

Somehow, he had gotten outside in the front yard around 10PM and no one knew that we’d shut the door and locked it for the night. My wife and I each went to put our son and daughter to bed, and after that went to relax and watch some TV (TNT’s “Body of Proof,” if you must know such details 🙂 )

Usually, our dog sleeps on a rug by the door to our backyard, and by the time we are done watching TV for the night (last night about 12:20 AM), we take him out for a final potty run before retiring for the night. So, when I got up out of the sofa and went to the rug, he was not there. Odd, I thought, he’s usually downstairs with us, even if he sleeps through all the exciting legal, medical, crime dramas we watch. He probably went upstairs to sleep on his doggie bed.

We sometimes joke that he got bored with our TV viewing choices and decided to go to bed without us.  With that in mind, I climbed the stairs expecting to find him snoring on his doggie bed.

Well, he wasn’t there!

That was very strange, because he was usually there, or down by the backyard door.

Quickly, I went to every room in the house. To the garage, into the backyard in case we’d forgotten to let him back in the house.

No, he wasn’t there.

Then we remembered that he might have gone out to the front yard (not fenced in like the back) when we had gone to check a new Christmas wreath someone had given us that night. My wife vaguely remembered that he might have gone outside, but he usually hangs around with us the entire time and always comes back in with us.

That had been 2.5 hours ago, and he was nowhere in sight.

In sight? Except for a few dim street lamps, it was very dark outside.  A few neighbors had Christmas lights on their houses, but many of the rest had no lights at all.  We whistled for him but he didn’t come running.  It was now about 12:40 AM and we didn’t want to wake the entire neighborhood by shouting his name out loud.

With the kids and grandparents asleep, my wife and I jumped in the car and started driving up and down the street, windows open and whistling for him.

Nothing.

We drove up to the park where we often walk him to, but there were nothing but rabbits fleeing the beams of our flashlights.

Where could he be?  We returned home after a while to see if he had returned. Of course, he wasn’t there.  But from the nearby hills, I heard a pack of Coyotes yipping the way they do when they’ve killed some prey.  I thought the worse and kept myself from pondering the possibility that my dog had fallen victim to that pack.

By now, we were running out of ideas. We got back in the car and drove all around the neighborhood whistling and praying that we’d find him, but in the dark we just couldn’t see anything more than a few rabbits running over the lawns of our neighbors. After about ten more minutes, I was just about ready to call it a night. It was about 1:00 AM and there was no trace of him. How would I sleep that night, wondering if he got hit by a car on a busy street nearby, or killed by a pack of coyotes, or heavens only knew.

As we drove one last pass on our street, we noticed a pickup truck with a driver double-parked at the corner with his headlights on and engine running.  He seemed to be watching us. I made a U-turn after passing him, and he followed me. So I pulled over to the curb to let him pass.  But he didn’t.  He stopped right next to me and rolled down his window. Something like this happening at 1 AM would have freaked me out, but I opened my window anyway.

He called out, “Hey, are you guys looking for a dog?”

“Yes!  Do you know where he is?”

“He’s at my house down the block.”

Heaving a sigh of relief, we drove to the end of our block and the kind man told us that our dog had walked into his garage and was very friendly.  He tried to call my cell# on the dog’s tag, but couldn’t get through.  It turns out that they heard us driving by and whistling.  But when our dog, who was inside their house heard my whistling out in the street as we passed by, he started barking. That is when the man got into his truck and waited for us to return to our street, where he began following us.

As soon as our dog saw us, he started bouncing up and down for joy. He was so happy to see us, and we were incredibly grateful and relieved. It turns out that this man and his family just moved into the neighborhood, so we’d never met him prior to this incident.

I am thankful that there are kind and decent people out there who took in our dog and kept him safe. What a great person who would keep on the lookout for us and actually chase us down to ensure our reunion.

This was the best Christmas gift ever.

Thank you, kind sir, and thank God.

FOUND

Home safe and sound

 

Joshua Graham is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author, winner of the International Book Award and Forward National Literature Award. His thrillers include DARKROOM, LATENT IMAGE and BEYOND JUSTICE, and TERMINUS. Graham's works have been characterized as thought-provoking page-turners.

Legal Notice: All information on this website and blog are from Mr. Graham's personal experience and insight and should not be viewed in any way, directly or inferred, as qualified professional advice.

All creative writing on this website or Mr. Graham's books: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. (novels, short stories)