She did not look at Renee. She looked through the place where Renee was standing, the way you look through a window at the weather, and walked on, and climbed the steps to the stage, and sat down in the folding chair beside the podium where the valedictorian always sat, and folded her hands on the papers in her lap.
Renee sat. The superintendent began to speak about resilience. Renee heard none of it. There was a hum in her ears like a refrigerator. She looked at the back of Tom's head and his still hands and thought about the word promised, and about the color leaving his face, and about the fact that in eight years of marriage she had never once asked him a single question about the night of the accident, because he had told her it was the worst night of his life and she had believed him and she had not wanted to make him live it twice. She had thought that was love. She had thought it was the kind thing.
She could not breathe. That was the simple, physical fact of it. The gym was hot and close and smelled of wet wool and two thousand people, and there was no air in it for her.
"I need some water," she whispered to Ingrid, and got up, and went down the row past Pete's knees, and up the side aisle under the bleachers, and out through the lobby with its trophy cases and its rows of senior portraits, Nora's among them, the photograph Renee had paid for and Nora had hated.
She pushed through the outer doors and the rain hit her in the face like a slap, and she stood on the concrete steps and gulped the cold wet air.
And there was a woman standing at the far end of the building.
She was under the narrow overhang by the gym's emergency exit, the one the custodians propped open with a rubber wedge on hot days and had propped open today, Renee guessed, because the gym was already sweltering. A thin woman in a dark green rain shell with a company logo on the breast and the hood pushed back. Jeans. Rubber boots, the brown calf-high kind every fisherman and cannery worker on the coast wore, the kind they called Xtratufs and sometimes, affectionately, Astoria sneakers. She was standing very close to the open door, her head turned toward the crack of light and sound coming out of it, her whole body leaning toward it the way a plant leans toward a window.
Renee knew her before she understood that she knew her. It was the hair, dark and heavy and pulled back, Nora's hair. It was the angle of the jaw.
The woman must have felt herself being watched. She turned her head. Across sixty feet of wet sidewalk the two of them looked at each other, and Renee saw the crooked front tooth as the woman's mouth came open, and then the woman pulled her hood up and walked away fast, head down, out into the rain toward the far end of the parking lot.
Renee went after her.
She did not think about it. Her flats filled with water on the first step. Her blazer was soaked through in seconds. She went between the pickups and the minivans, past a Subaru with a GO GRAD sign in the back window, and caught up with the woman just as she reached an old blue Toyota Tacoma with a cracked windshield and a sun-faded sticker from a seafood plant on the bumper and opened the driver's door.