The chandelier above them turns on.
William is holding her hand and he can feel a jolt course through his mother’s entire body. She squeezes his palm in hers.
“Where are you taking him?” His father has appeared at the top of the stairs.
She backs up into the table. “We have to leave,” she tells William.
The boy won’t look at her, or his father. He stares only at the white orchids in the blue-and-white vase. Murat descends the stairs two at a time. Catherine moves briskly toward the door, taking her son with her, but she never breaks into a run. It is almost as if she wants Murat to catch her. Her husband places himself between her and the door.
“Tell me where you’re going?”
“I don’t know where,” she says.
“You know it’s no use.”
“Move aside.”
“Then take some of your things.”
“These are all your things.”
Catherine steps around him, trying to pass through the door. Murat grabs William by the elbow. In the strength of that grip, the boy can feel his father’s desperation. William thinks to snatch his arm free but doesn’t. He allows his father to hold on to him, though it hurts, until, slowly, he feels the grip release. Murat crouches next to his son, as he had done before, when the two of them had stopped to look at the vagrant lying in the street and he had tried to explain to William the many debts he owed.
Catherine holds her son’s hand, but he is gently pulling away from her. Murat looks as if he has something to ask the boy. William waits for whatever that thing is and he won’t move from where he stands, not until he hears it. He isn’t yet ready to follow his mother, so he gives his father this last moment.
Murat says nothing.
Catherine takes her son and leaves. But when she tries to close the front door behind her, Murat won’t allow it. He sticks his foot in the jamb and makes certain that the door will remain open.
* * *
Dawn strikes all at once and the day sets in. The water trucks have already made their rounds, their sprinklers tamping down the morning dust. William and his mother stand at the bottom of the gravel driveway, on the edge of the street. The passing, indifferent traffic crowds them from the curb. Eventually, an off-duty taxi stops out of courtesy, or curiosity. When the driver rolls down his window, he gives Catherine a pitiful look, his eyes seeming to ask: Who is this stranded woman with her child wearing nothing but his pajamas? When Catherine and William climb into the backseat and the taxi pulls onto the road, the driver leaves his meter off.
Catherine gives him an address. She puts her arm around William, whom she has again covered with her blazer. As she holds him, she slips a hand into its pocket. In her rush to leave she has brought nothing other than her phone and wallet. She dials a number. It rings and rings. No answer. She taps out a text message. Then she dials the number again. Voicemail picks up. “Hi, it’s me,” she says, and then she swallows away the emotion that threatens to overtake her voice. “I don’t know where you are … I need to come over … something’s happened. And I have William. Please call.”
She hangs up and clutches the phone to her chest as if it is a rope that she has ascended halfway but no longer has the strength to climb.
“Where are we going?” her son asks.
She cradles his head in her lap, and then bends over and kisses its top. Above them, big thick clouds hurry east, toward the country’s interior. William gazes up, tracking their navigation across the sky.
PART II
2006 through 2013
July 25, 2006
Murat held a paper ticket in his hand. It read 319, his number in the queue. He sat in a row of four metal chairs bolted to the linoleum floor in the consular services waiting area. A digital counter hung on the wall and a television played Hollywood comedies on mute with a ticker of subtitles. A few people watched. Nobody was laughing. Every minute or so, the digital counter advanced by one. Murat wore a khaki summer suit, which he had found at a Brooks Brothers outlet while attending university in the States. It was many seasons out of fashion and seldom left his closet. The jacket needed to be let out and also the pants, and although the suit no longer fit he thought it was the right choice for an appointment with an American embassy official.
He had come on behalf of his newly adopted son. The boy was ten weeks old, but they had had him for only two weeks. Murat looked forward to a month and a half from now, when the boy would be sixteen weeks and one day old. That’s when he and his wife, Catherine, would have had him for more than half of his life and in Murat’s mind they would then be majority shareholders.
Murat’s secretary had made this morning’s appointment for him online. The consulate’s website had assigned him a single time slot—10:30 a.m.—over which he had no say. He had a conflicting appointment, a meeting with a potential investor. He had called the consulate personally to request a different, more convenient time. After he’d been placed on hold for what he felt was unreasonably long, an operator had connected Murat with an official in Immigration Services. Before requesting another appointment, Murat liberally aired his grievances about the wait. When he eventually did make his request, the official predictably refused.
The morning of his appointment Murat’s driver dropped him as close as he could to the consulate’s entrance, which still didn’t prevent Murat from having to walk through a vast serpentine of concrete barricades until he eventually encountered a Turkish security guard who wore the navy blue uniform of a private contracting firm and who stood, with metal-detecting wand in hand, grumbling to Murat that regulations prohibited foreign nationals from carrying cellular devices on the premises. The security guard then took Murat’s phone and handed him a plastic token, like those used for a coat check. Without his phone and stranded in the waiting room, which had no clock, but only the red digital counter, Murat had no way of telling the time. A Filipina woman sat next to him, her arms crossed over her chest. He asked if she had a watch.
She glanced at Murat’s wrist. He wore a slim white gold Patek Philippe on an alligator-skin band with two indentations from the clasp. The first indentation was for a very substantial wrist. The second indentation, which was where Murat wore it, was on the slightest setting. While he was alive, Murat’s father had never given him the watch. It had come later, as a de facto inheritance, gifted without any parting message that might have validated it as an heirloom passed from father to son. He held its face to the woman, to show her that its second hand didn’t move. And although the watch was broken, Murat put it on each morning. A few jewelers had examined it for him. If it would ever again tell time, the entire internal mechanism would need to be replaced. This would leave behind only the original casing and watch face. Murat preferred the old parts, even if none of them worked.