"Why?" I said. "Why me? Why didn't you just keep it? You're the one doing photography. You're the one with the portfolio. Dad's right about that. You need it more than me."
This was the question I really wanted the answer to, out of everything. I can say that now. At the time I don't think I knew that's what I was asking. I think I thought I was asking about logistics.
Niva didn't answer right away. She picked up a piece of the torn newspaper out of the box and started folding it, smaller and smaller, the way she used to fold gum wrappers on long car rides.
"Do you remember the bird walks?" she said.
I did. Sort of. The way you remember things from when you were eight or nine, in pieces, with the weather more vivid than the people. Mom and me at the Utica Marsh, early on Saturday mornings, before anyone else was up. The boardwalk going out over the cattails. The red-winged blackbirds on the reeds making that sound like a rusty gate. Mom with the camera around her neck, crouching down next to me and whispering, Look, look, look, don't point, just look. Her breath in the cold. I had not thought about those mornings in a long time. I had put them somewhere and not gone back for them.
"She used to take you," Niva said. "Just you. Every Saturday in the spring. She'd take you to the marsh and you'd come back with your boots all muddy and she'd come back with a whole roll of film and she'd get it developed at the CVS, and half of the pictures would be birds, and half would be you looking at birds." She folded the newspaper again. "I asked to go once. You remember? I was eleven. And she took me, and I was bored, and I talked the whole time and scared everything away, and on the way home she said, That's okay, honey, Maya's the one who looks. You're the one who talks. Everybody's got a thing."
I didn't know that. I had never known that. I felt it land somewhere in the middle of me, low, like a stone in a pond.
"I don't think she meant it mean," Niva said. "I really don't. But I thought about it, like, constantly. For years. I took photo in tenth grade partly because of that. Like, to prove I could look too. And I'm good, I think. Ms. Haddad says I'm good. But then I found the camera, and I held it, and I was paying for it every week and thinking it was going to be mine, finally, the thing she gave you a piece of and not me, and then—" She stopped.
"And then?" said my grandmother, gently.
"And then I got it home," Niva said. "Two weeks ago. I paid it off and Mr. Pinkney cleaned it, he did the light seals and everything, he wouldn't let me pay for that, and I brought it home and hid it in my closet in a shoebox. And one night I took it out, when Maya was asleep, and I looked through it. Just looked through the viewfinder at our room, in the dark, with the streetlight coming in. And I pointed it at the window. And Maya's bed is under the window. And she was asleep with her face all smushed on the bird book from the library, the old one, the one she's renewed like eleven times." Niva looked at me for the first time since the camera came out of the box. Her eyes were red. "And I thought, she's the one who looks. Mom was right about that. She was wrong about the rest of it, but she was right about that. And I'm leaving next year. And if I take it with me it's going to be in a dorm in Syracuse in a drawer, and if I leave it here it's going to be in this house with you, pointed at stuff. And that's where it's supposed to be."