My brother Joel and his wife Bethany, in addition to their two children, nine-year-old Dustyn and six-year-old Kate, fostered three-year-old Jayden. Jayden is a plucky child, fearless and brave, a child born into a life of domestic chaos and instability. If there is a door to open, Jayden will open it. If there is a hallway to run in, a window to climb through, a drawer to open, Jayden is into it, through it, inside it.

The family was in an elevator, in descent. Their luggage cart sat by the door. Bethany hates elevators, everything about them, their claustrophobic confines, her distorted self half-mirrored in its stainless walls, the alarming list of instructions for fires, malfunctions, electrical failures. She stood rigid, silent.

The elevator halted, somewhere in the lower floors. The door opened. Before the family could move Jayden darted into the hallway and before anyone could lunge across the loaded cart after her, the door slid shut and the elevator swept down toward the next floor. The family rushed at the buttons, their cries of alarm urgent in the swaying cubicle. The elevator stopped. The door opened. The family shouted at each other, pushed more buttons. The door slid slowly shut and the elevator rose smoothly through its cabled column while the family crowded the door, breathless with anxiety, phones in hand. What to do first? Secure the exits? Find hotel security? Began a room to room sweep?

The elevator stopped abruptly. Cables tightened, bushings murmured. The door opened suddenly. Jayden stood in the hallway, arms folded. “Hi guys!” What fun this was! In, out, up, down! Daddy couldn’t get me!

The family fell through the opening and took her up. Their voices filled the empty hallway. Perhaps a tear or two was brushed away. She was here. She was safe. 

Behind them the door of the elevator stirred. Joel stiffened and spun around. Through the closing opening, as if in a dream, he saw Kate, still inside with their luggage, face constricting in terror. Her eyes widened, her mouth opened. The door closed. The elevator swept down. From deep in the recesses of the column, the family could hear the receding wails of their daughter.

Joel was at the twin red buttons. Upupupupupup. Kate was being taken to the parking garage. Need we say more? Of its shadowy corners? Of the loitering, the exits, the low slung cars with mis-matched body panels and dragging mufflers? 

We must now, in compassion and empathy, discreetly draw the curtain on the collapsing mother, Bethany. Let it suffice to consider the wild swings of raw emotion: fear, relief, the reel of horror abruptly cut with the chippy Jayden in her arms. Dustyn, always practical, said it well: ”I was far more worried about Mom than Kate!”

There was an outside stairs to the parking garage around the corner. Should Joel run down the stairs? But Kate wouldn’t get out in the garage, would she? Who knew what buttons she was pushing in her distress. Even now she could be rising high above them. Or be in the trunk of a- 

The elevator doors opened. The luggage cart was inside. Beside it stood the lost Kate, sniffling, wet-faced, smiling bravely.

All’s well that ends well, Pa Ingalls always said. I don’t know what Bethany would say to that, or Kate, or Joel. Dustyn might allow it true. Jayden would.