The last week of August was the kind of week the Oregon coast gives you once a year as an apology, blue and still and seventy-one degrees, the river flat as poured metal all the way to Washington. On the Thursday before Nora left for Chicago, the three of them drove up Coxcomb Hill to the Astoria Column in Dana's Tacoma, with Nora in the middle of the bench seat and her knees up because of the gearshift.
A lot had happened in ten weeks, and none of it was finished.
Tom had driven to Seaside on the Tuesday after graduation and walked into a fly shop on Broadway and asked the man behind the counter if he had a minute. Marcus Dell had listened to the whole thing standing up, leaning on the counter, his prosthetic leg in a running shoe. When it was over he had said, "Get out of my store," quietly, and Tom had gone. Three weeks later a letter came to the house in Marcus's handwriting. It said that he had always wondered why the woman at the sentencing had looked at him like she was sorry for something bigger than she'd done, and that now he knew, and that he didn't forgive anybody yet, and that Tom should not come back for a while, and that he was glad, in some way he couldn't explain, to have been told. Tom had read it at the kitchen table and then gone out to the garage and stood there with the light off for a long time. He hadn't had a drink. He'd gone to his meeting instead and, for the first time in ten years, Renee learned later, had told the room what he was actually there for.
On the Friday after that he had written to the Oregon Board of Maritime Pilots. He had not let a lawyer soften it. In July he surrendered his license. He was working on Pete's guide boat out of Hammond now, baiting hooks for tourists from Boise, coming home with fish scales on his forearms and saying almost nothing, and he looked, Ingrid said, ten years younger and twenty years older at the same time.
The district attorney's office had written to say the statute of limitations had long since run and they would not be pursuing the matter. A woman from the Oregon Justice Resource Center had driven out from Portland and sat at Ingrid's kitchen table with Dana and a stack of forms, and Tom had signed a sworn declaration nine pages long, and the petition for executive clemency had gone to the governor's office in Salem in the middle of August. It might take a year, the woman said. It might take two. It might not happen at all. Dana said she'd waited longer for less.
Renee was living in the apartment over the shop. It was one room and a galley kitchen and a window that looked straight down Commercial Street at the bridge, and she had discovered that she liked it there, which surprised her. Tom came for dinner on Sundays. They were careful with each other. They talked about things that were true, which turned out to be harder and stranger than she'd expected, like learning to walk on a boat. She had not decided anything. She found that she was allowed not to.
And Dana came into the shop most afternoons, after her shift, still in her boots, and sat on the stool behind the counter and drank Renee's terrible coffee and learned, without being asked, to strip the thorns off roses with a paring knife. They did not talk about Tom much. They talked about Nora, the only subject on earth both of them were experts in, from opposite ends of a long hallway.
* * *
The Column was a hundred and twenty-five feet of concrete painted in a spiral frieze of the town's whole history, the explorers and the fur traders and the Clatsop people and the first ships across the bar, all winding up toward the sky like a barber pole. Inside it was a single iron staircase, turning and turning.
Dana counted the steps out loud. She did it without seeming to notice she was doing it. "Forty-one. Forty-two." Nora, ahead of her, stopped on the fiftieth step and looked back down the spiral, and Renee, who was last and more out of breath than she was willing to admit, saw Nora's face and knew exactly what she was remembering.