It was cold. The cattails had gone brown and fluffy at the tops and were coming apart in the wind, little bits of white drifting across the water like slow snow. The sky over the Mohawk was orange at the bottom and pale green above that and then deep blue at the very top, the colors stacked like layers in a cake. The red-winged blackbirds were gone, flown south weeks ago. But there were geese out on the open water, a lot of them, talking to each other in that low honking mutter, and there was a great blue heron standing on one leg at the edge of the reeds about fifty yards out, perfectly still, like something someone had carved and put there.
I lifted the camera to my eye.
Through the viewfinder everything got smaller and sharper at the same time. The world went into a rectangle. I turned the lens and the split circle slid together around the heron, and I watched the needle of the light meter swing and fixed the dial until it settled, the way he'd shown me. My hands were shaking a little, from the cold and from something else.
"Don't hold your breath," my father said quietly, beside me. "People hold their breath. Breathe out, and then press it when you're empty."
I breathed out.
I pressed it.
The sound the shutter makes is not like a phone. A phone makes a fake sound, a recording of a sound. This was a real one, mechanical, a solid clack-whirr that I felt in my fingers and my cheekbone where the camera was pressed against my face. The heron didn't move. Somewhere inside the camera, I knew, the heron had just happened to the film, permanently, and nobody could take it back.
"One," said Niva, behind me.
I took eleven pictures at the marsh. The heron, twice. The geese taking off all at once when the man with the canoe slammed his car door, which I was almost sure would come out as a blur, and which I took anyway because of what the tag said. A cattail with the light behind it. The boardwalk going away into the dark. And then I turned around, and Niva and my father were standing behind me on the boardwalk, side by side, with the orange sky behind them, my father holding my bird book and my grandmother's empty album and Niva's phone and the blue box we'd brought the camera in, all of it bundled against his chest, his hands full of everybody else's things.
Holding the bag.