I took that one without telling them. Then I told them, and they both complained, and I took another one where they were ready, which I already knew would be worse.
I gave Niva the camera then. I said, "Your turn," and held it out, and she looked at me for a second like she wasn't sure it was allowed. Then she took it, carefully, the way he had taken it from me in the kitchen, but different. She took four pictures. Three of the marsh. And one of me, which she didn't tell me she was taking, with the last of the light on the side of my face and my hands shoved in my coat pockets.
We drove back with the heater on high. Grandma Ardis said she had seen a muskrat while we were gone and that it had looked at her with contempt. My father laughed, really laughed, at a red light on Genesee Street, and I sat in the back seat with the camera in my lap and nine frames left and thought: I don't want to use them yet. And then I thought: Don't save them either.
That night I called my mother.
I did it myself, from the porch, with the screen door closed behind me so nobody could hear. Nobody told me to and nobody told me not to. I had thought about asking my father first and decided that it was my birthday and my camera and my mother, and I didn't need to.
It went to voicemail. It usually does on weekends. She and Grant go to the lake.
"Hi, Mom," I said. "It's me. It's Maya. Thanks for the card." She had sent one, earlier in the week, with a gift card for Target inside and a drawing of a cake with too many candles on it, in her loopy purple pen. "I got your camera back. The Pentax. Niva found it. It's a long story. I guess I wanted to ask you—" I stopped. I didn't know what I wanted to ask her. Whether she remembered the bird walks. Whether she knew she'd said that thing to Niva in the car. Whether she ever thought about Niagara Falls. Whether she missed the camera, or us, or the man who'd written her a card about holding the bag. "I guess I wanted to ask you about it sometime. If you want. You can call me back. Okay. Bye."
She texted on Tuesday. Omg Maya!!! That camera!!! I have SO many stories. Call you this weekend I promise, love you to the moon. Then a camera emoji and a heart.
It's Saturday now, as I write this down. She hasn't called yet. She might. It's only two o'clock, and the lake is far from the cell towers, and she has always been a person who meant things completely at the moment she said them. I have stopped being angry about that, mostly. I am trying to be the kind of person who looks at a thing for what it is.
Niva finished the roll on Wednesday. She took the last nine frames in our kitchen and on our street: Mrs. Okafor on the upstairs porch with a dishtowel over her shoulder, Mr. Antonelli's kayak sticking out of the basement door, Grandma Ardis at the kitchen table reading the Observer-Dispatch with her glasses on the end of her nose, and the last one, which she spent ten minutes setting up, of my father's hands on the table, palms up, with the gray toner in the creases. She says that one is going in the portfolio if it comes out. She says it's the best thing she's ever taken, and she hasn't even seen it yet. She says she just knows. She says it weighed right.