So I opened the book first. It was a field guide to the birds of New York State, a used copy with a previous owner's checkmarks in the margins next to the birds they had seen, little pencil ticks with dates. Red-tailed hawk, 4/2/91. Cedar waxwing, 6/17/88. My father leaned over my shoulder and pointed at one.
"Look at that," he said. "Somebody saw a snowy owl in Rome in nineteen ninety-six. Rome, New York. Twenty minutes from here."
"I'm going to see one," I said.
"I know you are," he said.
Then I opened Mrs. Okafor's card, and pretended to my father that there was nothing in it but a card, and Mrs. Okafor winked at me so hard her whole face moved.
Then I pulled the blue box toward me.
I want to describe the next minute carefully, because I have thought about it so many times that I am not sure anymore which parts I saw and which parts I have built afterward out of what I know now. I will tell it the way I believe it happened.
I untied the bakery string. The bow came loose easily, and the tag, which was attached by a little loop of the same string through a hole punched in one corner, slid down the side of the box and lay flat on the table, still face down. I lifted the lid.
Inside, nested in a bed of torn-up newspaper, the Observer-Dispatch, I could see part of a headline about the Aud, was a camera.
It was not a phone camera, obviously, and it was not one of the little instant ones that print out pictures like receipts, which is what Niva had gotten for her fifteenth birthday from our mother and used for about a month. It was a real camera. An old one. Black and silver, heavy-looking, with a lens that stuck out from the front like a short fat telescope and a leather strap folded neatly beside it. Across the top, in raised silver letters, it said PENTAX, and under that, smaller, K1000.