Half a Chance

by Cynthia Lord

  “Wow,” he said. “He really blends in with the tree trunk.”

  I nodded. “But his eye doesn’t blend, and that leads you right to him. This is one lucky shot.”

  “No one who sees it will think that. They won’t know you took a bunch of shots to get that one. Is there a contest word you could use it for?”

  I took out my page and scanned through the choices. “It could be ‘a closer look.’ Or ‘texture.’ His skin is amazing, and the tree trunk has a different texture, but they work together well.”

  “‘Texture’ is a harder word,” Nate said. “You can look closer at anything.”

  “You’re right. Okay, this is ‘texture.’”

  As we walked, I couldn’t help turning the camera on a few times and looking at the toad again. I thought it was a great shot, but what would Dad say?

  The higher we climbed, the cooler the air became, but the faster I heated up. My T-shirt stuck to my skin, and I longed to take off my backpack so my shoulders could have a break from being pulled backward.

  Three miles hadn’t seemed too long in the trail parking lot, but it felt like forever as the trail grew steeper. Every time I’d see a steep section ahead, I’d get excited to reach the top, only to find another steep section beyond it.

  Thank goodness Grandma Lilah hadn’t come. We’d left the mud behind, but she never could’ve climbed over all these big rocks.

  “Am I going too fast? Do you want to stop?” Nate asked.

  “Sorry. I’m not used to this.”

  “That’s okay.” He sat on a big rock. “I’m glad to take a break. I don’t understand people who hike like it’s a race. What are they, excited to go back home?”

  Sitting next to him, I was glad to let my breath catch up with the rest of me. Straight ahead was a screen of bare tree trunks, their only leaves high overhead, shivering in a breeze too far away for me to feel.

  From off in the woods I heard a snap. A moose? I looked hard into the trees, but how could a moose even fit in between all those trees? It was probably a squirrel. In the quiet, everything sounds bigger. “I can’t believe you and Grandma Lilah hiked up here.”

  “We did it every year for a while, but the last time we did it, she stepped between some rocks and fell. She didn’t break anything, but she got scraped up, and Dad said that was enough.”

  “That’s too bad,” I said. “I could tell last night that she loved this hike.”

  Nate nodded. “I hate telling her no about anything, but it’s harder for her to do lots of stuff she used to do. After my grandpa died, she moved in with us, but she still came to the cottage every summer by herself. This year, Mom was worried she might fall and no one would know. So Mom said we’d come, too, to make sure she’s okay. We’re doing all her favorite things. Loon Patrol and ice cream and cookouts and watching old movies.”

  “That sounds great.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t know if my parents will even try bringing her next year. So it’s kind of sad, too. I start having fun, but then I remember this might be her last summer here. It’s like I’m missing things that aren’t even gone yet.”

  I sighed. “It’s too bad you can’t make everything exactly the way you want and then freeze it to stay that way.”

  Nate nodded.

  “It’s one of the things I love about photography,” I said. “It’s always ‘now’ in the picture. Even if everything else changes.”

  “If I could freeze time, I’d pick the last summer Grandma Lilah made it all the way up and down Cherry Mountain without falling and could go on Loon Patrol by herself.” Nate paused. “Except then I’d be eight years old forever, and this summer has already had some good parts to it.”

  I glanced at him, wondering if meeting me was a good part. But he was digging in the pine needles at his feet with a little stick. “So maybe I’d freeze a day this summer when Grandma Lilah was doing well — even if she couldn’t climb a mountain or get into a kayak.”

  “Can we freeze a day this summer that hasn’t happened yet?” I asked.

  “Sure. Why not?”

  “Then I’d freeze a day this summer when Dad is home and Grandma Lilah is happy. With no thunderstorms, because Ansel doesn’t like those.”

  Nate looked up from his stick. “We’ll freeze a sunny day.”

  “With a breeze so there are no mosquitoes.” And Megan is somewhere else for the day. Like Antarctica.

  “Sounds perfect,” Nate said. “Are you ready to hike again? We don’t have far left to go.”

  As we continued upward, I thought about how adults sometimes complain that kids only think about ourselves, but it’s not true. We care a lot about other people, but most times, we don’t have the power to change things for them.

  At the top of yet another steep climb, the trail widened and I could see patches of blue sky between the trees ahead, all the way to the ground.

  “Almost there!” Nate said over his shoulder.

  As the trail spread outward, I saw farthest-away first.

  The sky.

  Some white clouds.

  The lightest blue mountains.

  As I neared the summit, rows of closer mountains appeared, a darker blue. Blue upon blue upon blue, above a carpet of trees.

  I imagined myself with a hang glider, speeding down the trail and jumping right off the ledges and out into all that air.

  And from somewhere deep inside me, I found the extra push I needed to run the rest of the way.

  From the top of Cherry Mountain, there are mountains in all directions, rippling like a rolling sea, wave upon wave. Wide open and windy, the summit cooled me off so fast it didn’t seem possible that I’d been hot and sweaty only minutes before. I made my way carefully around the ledges and between the shrubs and small trees, looking for views to photograph.

  But no matter where I stood, I could only fit a fragment of the mountains in the frame. And when I checked my shots, none of my photos compared with the real thing. They just couldn’t show the hugeness I felt. The frame was too small.

  Above the trees, everything seemed so close and touchable, like I could step from mountain to mountain and sit the tiny houses in the valley on the tip of my finger.

  “That’s Mount Washington,” Nate said, pointing to the tallest peak, with its weather towers spiking up like tiny knife blades. “That summit’s probably full of visitors and climbers on such a good day.”

  We waved to them, even though they couldn’t see us.

  Up here, everything looked wilder than it did from below: the forests, the bald patches of cliffs, the curving rivers, and the odd-shaped puddles of lakes. My knees felt shaky. It was weird to be in real wilderness. No guardrails, nothing to keep you safe. You had to do it.

  “Don’t get too close to the edge, or you might — ahhh!” Nate jumped off the ledge.

  I gasped, but then I saw him standing on another step of ledge a bit below the first, looking pleased with himself. “Not funny!” I said.

  He looked really happy for fooling me, though. As he was climbing back up, his phone chimed.

  “It’s Megan,” he said. I watched his fingers typing back a response.

  “What does she want?” I asked, trying to sound totally normal.

  “She asked if I wanted to come over. I told her I’m on top of Cherry Mountain.”

  As he typed, I wondered if he was telling her that he was hiking with me. And if that would give Megan one more reason to dislike me. But Nate had come over to my house that morning, not the other way around. So really, if Megan was mad at someone, it should be him.

  His phone chimed again, and I didn’t even want to watch him reading his message.

  “So are you and Megan good friends?” I asked.

  “We’ve known each other since we were little. Usually I only see her for two weeks in the summer, though.”

  That sounded like regular friends, in-a-group friends, not best friends. But maybe Megan thought that since Nate was here all summer thi
s year, they’d do all kinds of things together. Maybe she had thought they’d be best friends, even if Nate didn’t think that. I opened my backpack and started taking out the snacks I’d brought so I wouldn’t have to watch him answering her.

  “Food! That’s great. I’m starving.” Nate put his phone in his pocket.

  “Don’t get too excited, okay? We haven’t done much grocery shopping yet. So all I could find were some graham crackers and peanut butter and stuff to sprinkle on top.” I pulled out unsalted cashews, a box of raisins, a little bag of granola, Christmas-colored sprinkles, shredded coconut, candy Red Hots, and dried cranberries. “Sorry. All we had was weird back-of-the-cupboard stuff that moved with us.”

  Nate reached for the crackers. “We can make graham cracker sandwiches. Like s’mores, only not!”

  “We can call them ‘No Mores’!” As I loaded up my peanut-butter graham cracker with raisins and coconut and sprinkles, a chipmunk darted from between the rocks. He rose on his hind legs a few feet from us — like a tiny striped prairie dog. “How does a chipmunk live up here? It must be cold in the winter.”

  “Chipmunks hibernate,” Nate said. “So they miss the worst part of the winter.”

  “I wish I could do that,” I said, tossing the chipmunk a chunk of my graham cracker sandwich. “I’d like to wake up and have skipped over the whole school year.”

  The chipmunk ran over and smelled the cracker, then used his tiny paws to pack it into his cheek.

  “Me, too,” Nate said. “The other kids think I’ll have it easy because Dad’ll be one of my teachers, but I won’t. He’ll be harder on me than anyone else.”

  “I have to be ‘the new kid’ — again.” I sighed.

  “I have an idea. Give me your camera.” When I handed it to him, Nate sat next to me and held the camera to face us. “Hold up your ‘No More’!”

  I held up my cracker as Nate took a photo of us together.

  “There!” he said, handing back my camera. “You said a photo would let you freeze time, right? So when you look at this photo, it’ll be now again.”

  I turned on my screen. In the photo we were grinning like good friends. “Thanks.”

  “These ‘No Mores’ aren’t bad,” Nate said, making himself another. “This time I’ll try the Red Hots.”

  I smiled. “Don’t give any of those to the chipmunk. He might explode!”

  We ate the whole package of graham crackers, except for a few bits I threw to the chipmunk. Then it was time for our secret plan. “Let me see the photo of Grandma Lilah and you.”

  Nate opened his backpack and took out the framed photo, wrapped in a navy T-shirt. “You won’t wreck it, right?”

  “Of course not,” I said. “But I need it out of the frame. The glass will reflect too much.”

  Out of the frame, the photograph looked flimsy. I held it tight as it fluttered in the breeze. In the old photo, Grandma Lilah and Nate were sitting a bit off-center in a space between two big granite rocks. A small tree was at the left edge of the photo, with only blue mountains stretching across the background. “We have to find the exact place you were sitting,” I said. “Let’s look for these big rocks with a small tree next to them.”

  “The tree’s probably bigger now,” Nate said.

  In the picture, Grandma Lilah was wearing a white baseball cap. There was a logo of some kind on it, but I couldn’t read the words. She wore a yellow nylon coat and khaki shorts, her muscular legs disappearing into knitted socks and hiking boots. But it was her smile that my eye went to — bright and full of happiness. And beside her was Nate, small and giggling, in the circle of her arm.

  “You had really short hair,” I said. “And I love the Spider-Man T-shirt.”

  “I was five,” he replied flatly.

  “You look cute,” I said. “It’s a good photo. Did someone take it or did Grandma Lilah use a timer?”

  “She had a timer, and we kept messing up when it would go off. She’d set up the camera and we’d rush over and sit down and then wait and wait. Just when one of us would give up, it’d go off. This was the only good photo. I wish she’d saved the others, because they were funny.” He smiled, but his eyes looked sad.

  “I wish I had taken more photos of the regular things from the places we’ve lived. They didn’t seem important enough to shoot, but I miss them the most. You think you won’t forget them, but you do.”

  Nate nodded. “When I take photos, I use my phone, but then I almost never look at them again.”

  “I’ve taken a few photos with my phone so far, but I can control things better with my camera. I can set the aperture and shutter speed. That lets me do special things like motion blur.”

  “Maybe I’d look at my photos more if they were as good as yours,” Nate said.

  Talking about photography made me wonder what Dad was doing. I hoped he was thinking about me.

  Nate and I walked all over the summit, looking between the photo and the view around us. “I think this is the right direction,” he said, stepping carefully over the ledges. “Grandma Lilah wouldn’t have taken me anywhere too dangerous. Wait! Let me see the photo again. These might be the big rocks!”

  Sure enough, they were the same two rocks. The little tree was taller now, but not a lot. The wind had kept it small. I held the photo out in the air in front of me. “If I line up the mountains in the photo and then include some of today’s view around the edges in my shot, it’ll look like the old photo continues into the new one. It’ll be like we brought her with us.”

  “But won’t your hand be in the photo?”

  “Yeah, but that’s okay,” I said. “Though maybe it would be better with your hand? Since you’re in the old photo.”

  It was a great idea, but much harder than it seemed. To make it work, Nate had to stand completely still holding the photo in front of him in his left hand, but lean his head far to the right so I could shoot over his shoulder.

  I reached around to move Nate’s arm a little bit at a time until it all lined up with my eyes, and then I checked through the lens. The camera wouldn’t be forgiving, and every time Nate wiggled or the wind shook the photo, we had to realign it all. Before long, I was practically hugging Nate from behind. I bit back a giggle.

  “My arm is killing me,” Nate said.

  “Just a few more, okay?” It took lots of tries until I had one where the mountains lined up almost exactly from the new photo to the old one. And in the center Grandma Lilah and Nate looked so happy.

  “Whew!” Nate said when I told him he could put his arm down.

  “I can make a print,” I said, showing it to him. “And we can give it to her.”

  “It’s a cool photo, but —”

  A sudden puff of wind took the old paper photo out of his fingers. It all happened so fast that I only had time to gasp. The photo landed on a bush on the edge of a ridge. “Be careful,” I said as Nate raced down the rocks to get it.

  “Let’s go home,” he said, snatching it off the bush.

  My head hurt from that close call. What if the wind had been just a little stronger? The photo could’ve vanished forever in a second.

  “I’m sorry.” Trying to make it fun again, I joked, “But when we give Grandma Lilah the new photo we can tell her she had an adventure and nearly blew off the mountain in the wind.”

  “I wish she could’ve come with us, but I know she can’t,” Nate said. “I did have an idea about Loon Patrol, though, and how maybe she could do that for real.”

  “What was your idea?”

  “She can’t climb into a boat or a kayak anymore, but I’ve seen motorized rafts on other lakes.”

  “An inflatable raft?” I asked.

  “No, these are regular wooden swimming rafts. Just like the ones people anchor out in the lake or attach at the end of their docks. They’re usually square and have a ladder and maybe a diving board. But these rafts have a motor on one end. So you can just pull up the anchor and use the motor to drive it a
round the lake. If we had something like that, we could park it up against our dock and Grandma Lilah could just walk from the dock onto the raft. We could even put a chair on it for her. I mentioned it to Mom, but she said those rafts cost too much.”

  As Nate returned the old photo to its frame, I was amazed at how much he’d already thought this out.

  I’d only been doing the contest for something fun to do with Nate and maybe to show off to Dad when he got home. But I already had some photos I was proud of: the loon on the nest, the kayak with Nate’s cottage in the background, and the toad on the tree trunk. Would five hundred dollars buy a raft?

  I wasn’t sure if my photos would be the best. But if I did win and didn’t use the prize money for myself, Dad might be more okay with me winning. He likes making a difference with his photos. How could he complain if I was trying to make a difference with mine?

  As I considered it, I walked around the summit taking some photos. If I was really going to enter, I had to make the most of every chance now.

  A tiny flower growing bravely in a crack in the rocks (“Hope”).

  The trail disappearing back into the dark woods (“Journey”).

  Nate from behind, taking a last look at the mountains around us (“On Its Own”). As he started down the trail, I took one more photo, trying to capture the dizzying drop-off, the heart-bursting vastness of it all (“Beyond Reach”). But I just couldn’t make the photo compare with the real thing.

  The person looking at this photo would just see what was there. They wouldn’t know what was missing, but I’d know.

  I took out my phone and texted Dad.

  When you’re shooting, do you ever find there’s a scene that no matter what you do, the photo just isn’t as good as the real thing?

  Nate was already out of sight on the trail when my phone chimed with Dad’s answer.

  Every day. Sometimes you just have to live it, instead of shoot it.

  Putting the camera down, I took a deep, cold breath, pulling it all inside me — the trees, the mountains, the sky — and held it as long as I could.

  Then I gave up and turned for home.