“It was a smart choice to shoot this in black-and-white,” Dad said. “What’s great here are the different tones and textures that the black-and-white shows. And there’s a good balance between the whitest whites and the blackest blacks. The things you want highlighted, like the tops of the train tracks, stand out because they are in the whitest white.”
I wasn’t sure I understood, but I tried to take it in. “I didn’t think of using black-and-white,” I said, but then quickly added, “I mean, I wouldn’t think of using it.”
Dad didn’t notice my slipup, though. He was so into the photo.
“It’s not a perfect photo,” Dad said. “The background is too bright. It should be darker, because the photo is about the tracks, but the brightness of the background leads your eye up to there. You want to figure it out, but you can’t because it’s blurry. So he makes you look there, but there’s no real payoff. If he had made this darker it would’ve been a better photo. I almost want to open up my photo editing program and fix it, because it’s a good image, but it could be great.”
“Are all his other photos as good as these?” I asked.
“Most are,” he said. “Not every photo can be amazing, but he had several photos that took my breath away. Most of the other portfolios are good, but they’re safe. Of course, that’s what I’d expect from kids. It’s hard to —”
“Then I’d choose him, too,” I said flatly, wanting this to be over.
“You don’t want to see the others?” Dad asked.
I shook my head. I needed some time to feel bad. There would be no prize money. No showing Dad my talent. No way to take Grandma Lilah out to see the loons. Summer would just end.
“Okay, then. Give me a few minutes here. I need to get my equipment out of the car and send a few things to Marjorie. Then maybe we can go see the loons?”
“I’m sure they’ve gone now,” I said.
Heading upstairs to my room, I heard him open the porch door. “Hello! Beautiful day today!” he called to someone.
I didn’t realize the trouble until I glanced out my window to see Nate and Grandma Lilah in their yard. And to my horror, Grandma Lilah started walking right over to Dad as he took his suitcase out of our car.
Wait! He can’t meet her up close yet! What if he recognizes her? I ran down the stairs, but as I got to the front porch, Dad, Nate, and Grandma Lilah were already talking. “Such a lovely girl, our Lucy of the Loons,” Grandma said as I rushed up beside Dad.
He grinned. “Lucy has really enjoyed your family.”
“It’s time for Loon Patrol,” Grandma Lilah said.
“We’ve already done it today,” Nate said. “The loons were down near the point.”
“And the babies?” she asked.
“They’re getting big,” Nate said.
“I must write that down!” she said, turning for the house.
Nate sighed. “Sorry. She’s mixed up today. She’s having a hard time remembering things. It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Emery.”
“Remembering things?” Dad’s forehead tensed. “Nate? Are you a photographer?”
My mouth was completely dry as Nate looked at me. I shook my head at him, but Dad said, “Nate Bailey! From the kids’ photography contest, right?”
“Sorry, you didn’t win, Nate!” I said quickly. “Some kid from Oklahoma did.”
“Lucy! You’re not supposed to tell him! Marjorie will be mad at me.” Dad laughed. “So this is why you were so interested in the contest entries, Lucy.”
I didn’t know what to say, but Dad had already turned back to Nate. “I probably shouldn’t say anything, but you’re a runner-up,” Dad told him. “When I started reviewing the portfolios, I didn’t expect to see a photo I wished I’d taken myself. But I felt that way about one of yours, Nate. In fact, I awarded it best photo. It’s a brave image.”
“Brave?” Nate asked.
Dad inclined his head toward Grandma Lilah on the porch, looking for the clipboard. “The photo for ‘lost’ showing your grandmother,” Dad said quietly. “It stays with me. A good photo can do that. It can make someone care.”
Nate’s eyes flashed to mine. “You used it? After what I said?”
My throat felt so full I could barely talk. “I wanted to —”
But Nate turned and ran away from me. He stormed past Grandma Lilah looking for her clipboard on their porch and into their cottage, slamming the screen door behind him.
“What was that about?” Dad asked.
“I have something to tell you,” I said slowly. I wasn’t used to making such big mistakes. “Those photos weren’t really Nate’s. I mean, he helped, but he didn’t actually take them.”
“So who shot the photos?” Dad asked.
I couldn’t believe he didn’t see it. I looked into his eyes.
“Me,” I said.
At home, Dad had barely touched the sandwich Mom had set on the kitchen table in front of him. “Lucy, why did you do this?” he asked. “Now there are only nine finalists, and Marjorie will have to go back through all those portfolios and choose another one.”
“But why? If my photo won, then —”
“I can’t choose you as a runner-up! People will think I picked you because you’re my daughter!”
I couldn’t help the tears in my eyes. But inside, I was really mad, too. He was upset with me because it might make him look bad. “I’m a finalist because my photos were good enough,” I said flatly. “But you wouldn’t have seen that if my name was on them.”
Dad stared. “So you did this to prove something to me?”
“Maybe at first I wanted that a little. But there’s something I want even more now.” I could feel a tear crawling down the side of my nose, but I left it there. “I want to win the prize money to rent a pontoon boat to get Grandma Lilah out to see the loons.”
“A pontoon boat?” Mom asked.
“Because motorized rafts cost too much,” I said, “and she can’t climb into a regular boat or a kayak, so all she can do is watch the loons from the dock. And they don’t swim over on our side of the lake a lot because of all the people. Maybe this is Grandma Lilah’s last summer here.”
Now that I’d said it out loud, it sounded ridiculous. How could renting a pontoon boat ever make a difference? Grandma Lilah’s problems were bigger, more impossible than that.
“Oh, Lucy,” Mom said quietly. “You can’t do the wrong thing, even for the right reasons.”
Dad sighed. “I love that you care so much about the family next door. Maybe next summer we can —”
“No!” I said. “You always promise me things for later. But maybe this time there aren’t more chances.” I took a deep breath and looked right at him. “It’s the magazine’s contest. They should decide if it’s okay.”
Dad dropped his head back to stare at the ceiling. “You’re putting me in a hard position, Lucy.”
“If Marjorie says yes, that photo will go in the magazine,” Mom said. “That may not be the kind of attention the Baileys want to have, Lucy. If Marjorie agrees to this, you have to ask Grandma Lilah and her family and let them decide.”
I hadn’t thought of how public winning would be. I looked out the window to our driveway. Could I go to the Baileys and tell them? Nate was already mad at me. What would the rest of them think when they saw the photo? Would it hurt them to see it? They had been so nice to me all summer.
But the runner-up prize was enough money for a whole day’s rental of a pontoon boat. It felt even worse to think of the Baileys leaving when I hadn’t even tried.
“Ask Marjorie,” I said. “While you call her, I have something I need to finish.”
“Good afternoon,” Grandma Lilah said from her porch chair. “You just missed Nate.”
“Come inside, Grandma Lilah!” I heard Nate yell from inside the cottage.
“Oh, there you are, Nate! We have company!” Grandma Lilah called to him. “Lucy and her dad are here.”
Standing on her cot
tage porch holding my scrapbook, I wanted to cry, but I knew it’d worry her. “I came to see you, Grandma Lilah. But first I have to give Nate something. I’ll be right back, okay?”
Dad leaned against the porch railing and started talking about how beautiful the lake looked and how nice it was to be home.
Inside the cottage, I couldn’t even look at Nate on the couch by himself. “I made this scrapbook for Grandma Lilah,” I said quietly so she wouldn’t have any chance of hearing me out on the porch. “I put in some of my photos from the contest, but also a lot of the regular photos I took this summer. I thought she might like to have them.”
I held the scrapbook out to him, but Nate didn’t take it. “Megan said it was okay for me to use the photos she took of the loon babies, too.”
His eyes opened a little wider. He was probably surprised by that, but not as shocked as Megan had looked to find me on her cottage steps yesterday. She had crossed her arms over her stomach. Maybe she thought I was bragging as I told her my idea about the scrapbook. Then I said, “And I wanted to ask if I could make copies of the photos you took of the two babies. I don’t have any good close-ups of the two little loons together, and you took some great ones.”
Megan’s mouth had dropped open, but when she came back with her camera, she said, “I’m sorry I deleted your photos. The first one was an accident, but then I kept going.”
I nodded. “I’m sorry we had a bad start this year.”
“There’s always next year,” she said, and I saw a little bit of friendliness in her eyes.
“Yeah,” I’d said.
But standing in Nate’s cottage, I could hear Grandma Lilah out on the porch, laughing at something Dad had said. And I knew that next year might be really different in some ways. “You can decide when to give it to her, okay? I don’t want to mess things up like I did at the cookout.” I left it on a little table near the door. “Whenever you think is good.”
Out on the porch, I sucked my bottom lip, waiting for a pause in Dad’s conversation with Grandma Lilah about the hanging baskets on her porch. “Grandma Lilah, I have to tell you something,” I said.
Dad put his hand on my shoulder. It felt solid and nice there. I hadn’t expected him to come with me, but I was so glad that he had. He made me feel braver.
“A few weeks ago, you and I were sitting here on the porch and I had my camera,” I said to Grandma Lilah. “We were waiting for the other kids to come back from Loon Patrol, and I was fooling around taking photos for my photography contest. You showed me your Doris Day movie star look.”
Grandma Lilah smiled. “She was my favorite!”
But I was fighting the urge to throw up. “One photo was different than the others. You looked worried in that one.”
“Worried?”
“I should’ve asked you if it was okay to show it to people. But I didn’t do that. I sent it to the photography contest. I just kept thinking what a good photo it was. If we won, Nate and I wanted to use the money to get you out on the lake to see the loons. I guess I thought if I were doing it for a good reason, that made it okay.”
She held out her hand. “Let me see.”
See what?
“Let me see the photo,” she said.
“You don’t want to see it,” I heard Nate say from inside the house.
“Of course I do!” Grandma Lilah said.
She didn’t put her hand down, so I took my camera out of my pocket and scrolled backward to the photo of her sitting up very straight in the porch rocking chair, holding the teacup in her hands, her eyes full of panic. I held my breath, handing my camera to her. “I’m sorry.”
“What happened?” she asked, looking at it.
I didn’t know how much to tell her. “I gave you the teacup to hold and you said it wasn’t yours. You got upset, until I said it was mine.”
“I’m not well,” Grandma Lilah said softly.
“Don’t say that,” Nate said. I looked over to see him standing on the other side of the screen door.
“But if I can’t say it, I have to go through it alone.” Grandma Lilah held the camera closer to look carefully at the screen. “My eyes look scared.”
“I know,” I said, dropping my gaze to the porch floorboards. “I shouldn’t —”
“But my hair looks wonderful.”
I glanced up, surprised to see her smiling. “Did it win the contest?”
“Runner-up,” I said.
“Maybe runner-up,” Dad said. “Just because my editor said yes doesn’t mean it’s decided. Grandma Lilah, if Lucy wins, this photo will go in a magazine. Lots of people will see it. You and your family need to decide if that’s okay with you. And I have to decide if it’s okay with me that my daughter entered. I’m the judge.”
“Well, it’s not your picture,” Grandma Lilah said.
“No,” Dad said. “But people might think —”
“Oh, people will think what they think!” Grandma Lilah said. “Don’t ever choose the people who don’t matter over the ones who do.”
I didn’t know that you could choke on air, but Dad did.
“I’ve never had my photo in a magazine,” Grandma Lilah said. “Have I, Nate?”
“No.” He opened the screen door. “At least I don’t think so.”
She laughed. “I’ll be just like Doris Day. She was in all the magazines.”
I hadn’t noticed the scrapbook in Nate’s hand until he laid it in her lap. “Lucy made this for you.”
“For me? Oh, thank you, dear.” Turning the pages, she smiled at the photos of the loons, the view at the top of Cherry Mountain, Nate skipping the rock, and the photo he took of me in the kayak.
Underneath my photo, I’d written “Lucy of the Loons.”
“So you’ll remember me,” I said.
“I can’t promise that,” she replied softly as she turned the pages.
The next day, I walked over to join Nate and Emily and Grandma Lilah on the dock for Loon Patrol.
Nate didn’t look up as he filled out the form for today’s weather and lake conditions. We hadn’t really made up, and it didn’t look like we were about to.
“We can’t go yet,” I said. “We have to wait.”
“Why?” Emily asked. “Did you forget something?”
“Nope.” I couldn’t help grinning. “But Grandma Lilah needs to put on sunscreen and get her binoculars and maybe bring a sweater. It might be windy in the middle of the lake.”
That made Nate look up from the form.
I pointed down the shore to the pontoon boat heading our way. Dad was driving and Mom held on to Ansel’s collar as he stood on the seats, barking to see me.
“My parents loaned me the prize money ahead, and we’ve rented this for the whole day,” I said. “So, Grandma Lilah, you’re coming on Loon Patrol. In fact, you can go out on the lake as many times as you want today.”
Emily clasped her hands together. “What a great idea, Lucy!”
Nate gave a small smile, handing Grandma Lilah the clipboard. “We’ll need this.”
“Dad said we have enough room for eight people,” I said. “So we can all go this time and we have room for two more. Everyone else can take turns.”
“I’ll go get my parents!” Emily said, taking off for the cottage. “And I’ll grab your binoculars and a sweater, Grandma Lilah.”
“A boat ride? Oh, how nice!” she said, like it was something that might happen any day.
On the other hand, Mr. and Mrs. Bailey looked very surprised to see a pontoon boat tied up at their dock as they came down the lawn toward the beach a few minutes later. But they seemed even more shocked to see Grandma Lilah sitting in one of the forward seats.
“Hurry up or you’ll miss the boat!” Grandma Lilah laughed at her own joke.
“Grandma Lilah, do you want to sit back here under the canopy?” Dad asked. “You’d be out of the sun and you wouldn’t get any spray.”
“No,” she said. “I want to be right here
where the action is!”
Nate, Grandma Lilah, Emily, Ansel, and I sat on the pontoon boat’s two long vinyl-cushioned benches facing each other at the front. Next to me, there was a sink and a little refrigerator. In the middle of the boat, Dad sat at the wheel. Beside him and behind him, Mom and the Baileys spread out on more rows of seats.
“Morgan and Mason will be mad that they went to town with Aunt Pat and missed this,” Emily said, across from me.
“We have the boat all day,” I said. “So they can have a turn this afternoon. I want to ask someone else, too.”
Megan and I might not ever be good friends, or even just good summer friends, but when we got back, I was going to walk over to her cottage and invite her. Because maybe we both wanted to try, and sometimes people are like shooting photos. It takes a bunch of misses before something good happens.
Dad started the boat, and I could smell the fuel as he backed up. Then he turned the bow toward open water and I leaned against the seat, listening to the low rumble of the engine as we cut slowly across the lake.
“It’s like a floating living room!” Grandma Lilah called over the sound of the engine. “Can we go faster?”
Dad nodded. “You bet!” As he increased the speed, spray flew off the sides and our wake fanned out behind us. I reached my arm over the side, trying to touch the water droplets jumping into the air.
“Ansel likes this better than kayaking,” I said to Nate, hoping he’d say something back, but he just stared out over the water.
Out in the middle, the wind was stronger, sweeping my hair across my nose every time I turned my head. I faced forward again to get my hair back to the sides. People were talking, but Grandma Lilah was looking ahead. “Can we go over there?” she asked, pointing to the cove where the loons had built their nest.
“We can go anywhere you want,” Dad said.
I took a few photos for Nate to add to Grandma Lilah’s scrapbook, but then I put my camera away. It was hard not to capture everything, but after a little while, something amazing happened. I simply saw it. Not to share. Not to capture. Just to live what was around me.