When Joyce Carol Oates was a child, she got into an elevator in a crowded department store and was accidentally separated from her mother for a period of time. The incident was so frightening she still dreams about it decades later. In “Lost Child,” that seed of early memory grows into a more traumatic and more ambiguous story. A very young girl is taken to a hospital by her father, who gets into an elevator with her, prods her to get out on a certain floor, and then doesn’t get out himself. That moment of finding herself alone, abandoned, by the elevator doors will haunt and terrify Kit for the rest of her life, and what happened that day will never be entirely clear to her. As an adult in her fifties, she finally chooses another person to whom she feels she can reveal her past and unexpectedly launches a new kind of friendship.
— Deborah Treisman, fiction editor | 
