t is a good day for disappearing. Lainie can’t help but think it. She parts the pleated mustard drapes of which she was once so proud and gazes into a barrage of rain that bounces like marbles to the street. Baltimore, land of dirt and concrete, is now of water, pouring not only from sky but also from everything else. Rain torrents from roof gutters, dumps from trees, cascades from railings, whirlpools behind passing cars. It falls so hard that it seems to shoot upward from tripped booby traps. In such a downpour, you can’t see far. You could step into it, be lost in seconds, and that is precisely the idea.

Timmy’s backpack is so crammed with toys it takes both of his arms to hold it, leaving his tears unwiped. Tammy’s bag, too, is bursting, but she doesn’t leak a tear. Lainie wonders if it’s because she’s a girl and has learned that the masculine maxim of never running away from trouble is bullshit. (Lainie finds herself cursing in her thoughts lately, another exciting development.) Tammy looks up at her mother, eyes dry and perceptive. The girl has always paid heed to the lessons of picture books. Running is why animals have feet, why birds have wings, why fish have fins.

Lainie became aware of her own feet, their full potential, only this morning. Richard was shambling through the house, eyes swollen, shoulders cracking banisters, tearing free the black tie his dead fingers refused to knot and letting it slop to the floor. She was in her standard position, the patch of carpet permanently dented from the ironing board, skimming the Westinghouse Spray ’N Steam over one of Richard’s dress shirts. He’d gotten home late; she’d felt his half of the bed sink and she’d clung to her side of the mattress so as not to roll into his bottomless hole. This morning, he’d wakened at full boil, slithering his greasy body from bed and dressing without a rinse, his hand constantly dipping into a coat pocket that sagged with the weight of an object as heavy as her iron.

She’d kept beaming into the shifting textures of the TV. The news was no better or worse than any other day. Sportsmen excelling. World leaders orating. Blacks marching. Troops amassing. Women linking arms. Nothing connected one story to the next except forward progress, each spotlighted individual advancing, improving, evolving. At some point, Richard left, the slam of the front door his farewell peck, and the floor had trembled, and that tremble had shaken the ironing board, and her thumb had slipped from the setting dial, and she was just standing there, all at once certain that she was the only one in the world not moving.

The iron was too heavy to set upright. She’d had no choice but to let it settle onto Richard’s shirt. For ten seconds, normalcy was rescuable with a twitch of her wrist. Then smoke began to seep. The Westinghouse sank into the Dacron blend the same way an idea soaks into a mind. Lainie let the smoke coarsen. She let the toxic fumes thistle her sinuses. She’d only pulled the iron from the melted smutch of the board when the children had rushed downstairs, sniffing the smoke, at which point she’d turned, and smiled, and told them, “We’re going on a trip. Pack all of your favorite things.”

Now she has three heavy bags biting down on her shoulders. One of her arms has gone numb; she doesn’t mind. Numbness: It’s how she has survived life with Richard. The woman known as Mrs. Strickland is a corseted, aproned, lipsticked shield from the sting of discarded potential, and to use that shield to advance her own purposes, just this once, is thrilling. She adjusts the straps, her fingertips brushing the furrows in her neck from Richard’s choking. Everyone will see the bruises. Everyone will know. She takes a deep breath. All you have to be, she tells herself, is honest. Truth will begin to pour, and freedom will begin to rise.

A cab pulls up in front of the house, its tires sizzling through standing water. Lainie waves at it through the screen door.

“Come on, kids, let’s hustle.”

“I don’t want to,” Timmy pouts. “I want to wait for Dad.”

“It’s too wet,” Tammy says. “The rain’s high as my dress!”

Lainie has regrets. She regrets that she’ll have to quit her job over the telephone from Florida or Texas or California or wherever they land, and that doesn’t strike her as very professional. But she’ll explain to Bernie the reason she had to leave, and Bernie will forgive her, probably even agree to serve as a reference. There’s another regret: not jotting down Mr. Gunderson’s address, so that at some point in her deliriously undefined future she could write him, let him know that the instant he’d handed over his leather portfolio bag, she’d understood that it was never too late to exchange the things you believed defined you for something better. His bag, in fact, is one of the three strapped over her shoulder right now. Turns out, it can carry quite the load.

Mostly, she regrets that it took her so long to arrive at this front-porch launchpad. Her sloth has had real costs. The children have seen and heard things that have shaped them in unkind ways. Timmy’s dissection of the skink remains a troubling, unresolved thing. Thankfully, both children are young yet; Lainie’s no Occam Aerospace Research Center scientist, but she knows that maturation is no straight line and that her influence upon her kids has a long path still to run. She lifts the bag from her right shoulder so that all three hang from her left, and kneels, wrapping an arm around Tammy while leaning into Timmy.

“Run,” she whispers to him. “Right through the puddles. Make the biggest mess you can make.”

He frowns down at his clean pants and shoes. “Really?”

She nods and grins, and he begins to grin, too, and then he bolts down the steps with a hoot, marauding through the yard, dousing himself from both directions. Tammy panics, of course, but that’s why Lainie’s got her arm around her. She lifts her daughter, propping the girl on her hip, opens the door with a foot, and stands beneath the awning that had once represented so much promise but is now laden with enough disappointment that she worries it might collapse and she, trapped beneath it, might crumple.

But Timmy is at the cab, soaking wet and laughing, and hopping in place for her to hurry up, and Lainie laughs, too, and realizes that no, she won’t crumple, she won’t crumple ever again. She runs into the waterworld. She likes how the rain cracks crisply on her short haircut, how it slides off the curled back. The cabbie takes her bags, and she crashes into the backseat, yelping as raindrops run down her back. She brushes water from Timmy’s cap and wrings the ends of Tammy’s hair as both of them howl and giggle. She hears the trunk door slam, and then the cabbie lurches into the front seat, shaking his head like a wet dog.

“We’re all going to float to Timbuktu if this doesn’t let up,” he chuckles. “You going far, ma’am?”

He looks at her in the rearview mirror. His eyes skip downward to her bruised neck. Lainie doesn’t flinch: let truth pour, let freedom rise.

“Somewhere I can rent a car. You know a place?”

“The one by the airport is the biggest.” His voice is softer now. “If you’re aiming to get a car without a reservation, I mean. If you’re aiming to leave quick.”

Lainie consults his identification card: Robert Nathaniel De Castro.

“Yes, Mr. De Castro. Thank you.”

The cab pulls from the depths of the curb and starts down the middle of the road.

“Apologies for the crawl. Little tricky on the roads today. But don’t you worry. I’ll get you where you’re going, safe and sound.”

“It’s all right. I don’t mind.”

“You look happy. The three of you. That’s good. Some people, a little rain falls, they get a little wet, it ruins their whole day. Earlier on, dispatch sent me to pick up this joe, take him to this industrial park over by Bethlehem Steel. Second time I’ve took this joe there. There’s not a thing over there—not a thing. I circled around to check on him. I was kind of worried, you know? And there he was, sitting on a concrete block in the rain. Now there’s a joe who doesn’t look happy. There’s a joe who could use a rental car, you know? Looked like he was waiting for the world to end. From the look on his face, I half believed it would, too.”

Lainie smiles. The cabbie keeps talking, a pleasant distraction. The children have their faces pressed to the windows, and she rests her chin on Tammy’s sweet-smelling scalp. Outside, it’s as if the cab has run off a cliff and is sinking into the sea. To survive under so much water, she thinks, she’ll have to learn to breathe inside it, to adapt into a different kind of creature. Strangely enough, she’s confident that she can. The world is rampant with creeks, streams, rivers, ponds, lakes. She’ll swim through as many as it takes to find the right ocean for them, even if it takes so long she has to grow flippers.