Lost in Suburbia: Kids’ Cautionary Tale

Two girls, 9 and 10 years old, were stranded at dusk on Harbor Boulevard. What had started as a summer day at a neighbor’s pool turned into a scary trek up and down the busy road trying to get home.

Missed connections, hunger, spending their last dimes on fast food and bus fare, theirs is a cautionary tale.

Darkness hovered as the grade schoolers found themselves penniless and unable to persuade anyone to let them telephone their parents.

I met them when they were exhausted and teetering toward panic. Their cotton shorts and pudgy toes were dirty from plodding the boulevard in flip-flops for six hours.

They may as well have been in New York instead of three miles from their Costa Mesa homes. I delivered them to their doorstep, but not before we exchanged the common currency of strangers--doubt. Should they get in my car?

I wonder now, days later, if I did the right thing. Haven’t I now encouraged them to get into another stranger’s car? Despite my safety lecture, maybe they will remember this more: that nothing bad happened when they were marooned and that a nice lady drove them home.

And what about me? Would I step in again to help?

Other adults I’ve spoken to were also troubled by this situation. Why the girls were allowed to be left unsupervised at an apartment pool. Hadn’t the “Home Alone” movies scared enough parents into going over what their children should do if separated? And what would that be? What is the right thing for a lost child and a helpful stranger to do?

At 7:30 p.m., the pair wearily trudged into Conroy’s Flowers, their backpacks dragging on the ground. I was buying something at the counter when they asked to use the phone. They offered no explanation.

When I asked if they were OK, they said yes, but it was an emergency. After I prompted them for five minutes, they divulged the details in the manner of kids--the events were not explained chronologically or with the key points first.

I can understand why it may have been tedious for adults they encountered on the boulevard to get the full picture of their situation and to offer help.

To tell their story I have to make up names; they don’t want theirs used. As the smaller, freckle-faced girl said nervously, “My dad doesn’t even know what I’ve been through, and he will kill me if he finds out.”

She was skinny and fair with long brown hair. I’ll call her Bonnie. The older girl was dark-skinned and chubby, her wavy hair straggling out of its bun. I’ll call her Kathy.

About 1 p.m., Kathy’s teenage sister dropped Kathy and Bonnie at a pool in a friend’s apartment complex, then drove to her job at an Army recruiting office. She was to pick up the girls when she got off work at 5 p.m.

Five minutes after the girls got into the pool, a lifeguard ordered them out, saying that they could only swim with adult supervision. They were surprised; they had swam at the friend’s complex before.

The girls had $2 each. They decided to take a bus north to Fedco, where a neighbor, Irwin, works. Irwin, they felt, would help them get a ride home or let them use the phone to call their parents. But a Fedco worker, they said, told them Irwin wasn’t working and the girls could not use the phone.

Gus Wahaab, manager of the discount membership store just south of the San Diego Freeway, was horrified to hear that a worker might have turned them away.

“It is our policy to let our customers use our phone. My God, if it’s an emergency! Especially. This is of concern to me. . . . A mistake was made. My gosh, what’s a phone call? It’s nothing.”

Wahaab said he would find out which of his 370 employees had spoken to the girls. I stressed that since they were at Fedco early in the ordeal that the situation might not have seemed so urgent to his worker. I hated to see someone lose their job.

“No, no, I won’t fire them. I just want them to know the humane thing to do. You see two stranded girls, they need to make a phone call, my God, let them use the phone. Or call me and I’ll call their home.”

Like several of my relatives and friends, he did not understand why the children were dropped off to swim unattended at a pool.

“I have kids. My son goes next door, he knows, I know, my wife knows, what time he’s coming back and who is there. So there’s a lot of question marks here.”

He would not, he added, want his child getting into my car.

*

The girls left Fedco and tried calling home from pay phones along the boulevard, but nobody answered. “They thought we were at the pool,” Bonnie said.

They spent most of their money on sodas, fast food and bus fare to the store where they sought help.

With their last two dimes, they reached the Army recruiting office where Kathy’s sister worked, but she had left to gather the girls at the pool. I don’t know why they didn’t telephone the sister earlier.

Broke now, they continued schlepping south on Harbor Boulevard where the commuter flow was picking up speed. At several businesses, the girls said they were denied use of a phone.

Then they reached Conroy’s, where workers did not hesitate to let them make calls. By now, though, the line was busy. Images of frantic parents came to mind.

For 15 minutes the girls tried to reach someone. I told the girls that if they thought their parents wouldn’t mind, I would take them home.

It worried me that the girls’ only concern was inconveniencing me. “That’s too far for you to drive!” exclaimed Kathy. “We are almost down to 20th Street!”

I assured them that it was better that I drive a ways than for them to face potential danger in the darkening world of Harbor Boulevard.

The girls didn’t worry about who I was, though. Was I dangerous? Would I sell them on the black market? Was I a weirdo?

I worried for myself. Would my insurance cover them if there were an accident? Would their parents accuse me of kidnapping? Or worse?

I had once driven a mentally impaired teenager a few miles to a sheriff’s substation in Mission Viejo because she did not know her address. A deputy scolded me for putting her in my car.

My brother, Doug, father of four, including a 9-year-old son, Cameron, was resolute about him not getting in a stranger’s car.

What would he have wanted to have happen?

“Well, first, I would never leave him at a pool. But if I did, I would want him to stay put until his sister came to pick him up. Yes, he would be bored, but that would be what I would tell him. And he always knows to call me.”

But would he have the dimes to do so? Then what?

Michelle, wearing her Conroy’s apron, was equally worried. She could not leave her job to give the girls a lift, so she encouraged me.

For peace of mind--the girls’ and mine--I left my business card with the flower shop workers, who gave the girls an “I Love You” floral card with the shop’s phone number. The girls were to call the shop to report their safe arrival.

The drive was a sweet and amusing one. Kathy said they had been very frightened and tired trying to get home and blurted, “I could hardly think straight for what to do!”

Bonnie coolly issued navigating direction as she strained to see over my seat.

“I don’t know the street names,” she said. “I just know how to get home by telling you where the bus goes.”

That they were using public transportation so independently simultaneously impressed and concerned me.

Her directions reminded me of those my brother gave, based on his memory of the route he took as a 6-year-old from our childhood home in Chicago (“You’d walk out the driveway, go left, cross the train tracks, walk through the cemetery, look up for the water tower then turn right. Doing that backward is how you would get to our house.”)

So the directions went “. . . Right at Taco Bell. Go way, way down there. Left at where the church and big red flowers are. Go way, way down. We go left where the ‘Ped Xing’ sign is. Right before the bakery. Look for the big boat. Oh, there’s Irwin’s house! The one with the old boat! That’s Irwin’s son in the golf cart ramming the garage. . . .”

And there we were. At the curb to meet us was Kathy’s mom, dragging an ankle cast as she hurried to the passenger door of my car. She opened the door, and out spilled her daughter.

The mother thanked me profusely. Perhaps a combination of relief and embarrassment led her to hastily slam the door in the middle of my sentence.

I was trying to tell her what I knew of their journey with the hope she might want to follow up with advice to prevent a repeat misadventure. It seems a critical dialogue to have with every child.

The episode has lingered in my mind. Earlier this week I called Costa Mesa Police for advice. Officer Paul Cappuccilli tossed around a few ideas and settled on this: I should have called police on the business line, and they would have come out and taken the girls home. “For your protection . . . as a citizen wanting to do good, but the kids should be taught that we want to help them.”

Parents, he added, should instruct their kids to call 911 if they have a problem and can’t reach Mom or Dad.

“We would consider the situation a public assist. Telling kids to call 911 is a lot easier than telling them to differentiate between an emergency situation and a nonemergency.”

*

The distress in the girls’ faces when I first met them was so familiar to me. A 25-year-old memory of mine is what I suspect drove me to drive them.

When I was 8 or 9, my mother dropped me off outside a Mormon church in Whittier. I was to meet a classmate whose family attended. I could not find them, felt lost without a family attached to me and bolted.

I don’t remember trying to call my mom. I just panicked and began walking home. As I trudged on, it seemed as if I was heading through a desert instead of up and down highways and the sloping Santa Gertrudes.

I was frantic, crying, getting my Sunday school Mary Janes muddy--worrying if I would ever make it home and if my parents would be mad at me.

The hike was all of 1.5 miles, but as with any journey where your arrival is uncertain, there is anxiety until you get there. I ended up climbing a chain-link fence and sneaking down the flood control channel behind our tract to slip into the house as though I’d just been dropped by my friends. I don’t think I ever told my family what really happened.

Had anyone stopped to offer me a ride home, I would have taken it without fear. Times have changed. But I understood Bonnie’s fear that her being lost was somehow her fault, that she would be in trouble if she didn’t make it home.

Who among us hasn’t felt the girls’ terror? And how sadly complicated it is now to help, or be helped, by strangers.