Rain clouds had been gathering even as the heat rose and now the sky crackled with the coming storm. The other women had already gathered their children, calling to them in long and lovely strings of words that I could never hope to follow, and left the park, heading back to their unimaginable homes. On y va. On y va. À la maison.

All except Nell. She wasn’t leaving. She lay on her back on her blanket playing with her baby, kissing his fingers, stopping to whisper in the older boy’s ear. The blanket is a ship, perhaps she said, or maybe, the blanket can fly. We can make this happen if we lie here still together and never leave this one place that we are right now. Perhaps she whispered things like that to him. I had been determined to stay as long as she did, but I saw now that she had no intention of leaving, even as great fat drops of rain began to fall, dotting the sandbox, staining the front of her dress. I didn’t know the word for lightning, couldn’t make light of the weather, couldn’t ask her why she wasn’t leaving.

I called to E to come, to come now. I gathered B, who was beginning to cry, grabbed the blanket. The clouds opened. There would be lightning and plenty of it. E screamed and I pushed her forward, back to our apartment, the still open window, tripping, barely catching myself, B in my arms, all of our things in my arms too. Running away was such an awkward business.

Back in the apartment I dried E’s hair, B’s. Unpacked our wet things, hung the towel up to dry. When I looked back through the window to the park, Nell was still there with her children. They were lying on their backs in the rain.

An hour later, when I looked again, I saw a man standing over them with an umbrella, it looked as if he were yelling at her. He pulled her to her feet, really pulled her. He took the baby. He could have been yelling, she could have been, the rain would have covered up any sound. She could have been screaming and I wouldn’t have heard it. I didn’t think she was screaming. When I looked again they were gone.

After the rain stopped we discovered that the mother giraffe had been left at the park, but when I ran back to get her, I found the sandbox empty, only sticks and rocks and wet sand. E was sad when I told her this, but not overly so. The treatment had, after all, worked. The baby had been cured.

There was a woman’s shoe lying beside the sandbox, an expensive looking ballet flat. It occurred to me that Nell must have lost her shoe, that she must have stumbled home in the rain with one bare foot. There was nothing to do of course but leave it there. Nothing to do but hope that she was fine and would eventually come and find it. When I jumped back through the window I lowered the shutters so I couldn’t see out onto the little park anymore. It seemed better that way, safer. I had never had a man pull my arm the way that man had pulled Nell’s, never in my life. Thinking of it made my skin sting in the places where he had touched her.