The floorboards behind Murat creaked.
Catherine wore a black silk robe, its tie loosely knotted in the front. Her smooth, bare legs revealed themselves up to the thigh as she approached him, as if with each step her body was suggesting a first naked movement from behind a curtain. Her lean stomach was exposed and her small breasts cupped against the silk. She was a mother but had sacrificed no part of that body for her child. However, on closer inspection, her husband could see that this wasn’t true—her depression had taken a physical toll. Her eyes were red rimmed, though she slept more than her child did. Her cheeks were gaunt and pallid, as if she had lost every nutrient in her blood. Dim as the nursery was, she was squinting—the room she had come out of was far darker.
Catherine crossed her arms and glanced into the crib. “Don’t let him ruin your father’s watch,” she said, observing her son, who now gummed on the white-gold case of the Patek Philippe.
“The watch has always been broken,” said Murat. “What else can he do to it?”
Six o’clock on that morning
Peter opens his apartment door barefooted. Catherine steps over the threshold, clutching William, who is asleep with his cheek cradled against her shoulder and his arms hung behind her neck as limp as a pair of heavy wet ropes. Peter helps her into the living room, where they lay the sleeping boy gently across the sofa. She has managed to carry William from the taxi up four flights of stairs. Catherine stretches her back and Peter watches the curving, upward articulation of her body. Neither of them says anything, not wanting to wake him. Peter then disappears down the hallway and returns with a blanket. Catherine tosses her black silk blazer across the arm of the sofa where Peter’s camera bag hangs by its strap. The two of them creep into the bedroom. They sit on top of the mussed sheets where they have lain through many afternoons insensate from lovemaking with the sun pouring in from the westerly window across the bed. But now, in the morning, the room is dim.
“Just a day,” she whispers, “enough time for me to get William some clothes and to book a flight to the States.” Her voice accelerates as she speaks, becoming exasperated. “Murat says he’s going to file divorce papers here and then it’ll all be over, then I’ll have to stay. Not even a day, really, just enough time to get us sorted out, to get William out of here with me. Is that okay? Not even a day—”
Peter raises a hand to quiet her. Catherine’s nervous hedging, asking for something while she insists that she asks for nothing, is about to wake William.
“Get cleaned up,” whispers Peter. “Then let’s talk this through.”
Her eyes fix beyond the bedroom door, to where William sleeps. The two of them return to the living room. She kisses William’s head and tucks the blanket up around his shoulders. She then walks into the back of the apartment. The shower turns on.
Peter sits in a chair across from the sofa. William begins to stir. Beneath his eyelids strange images seem to flicker and die. He appears to be dreaming, floating or falling through some world contained entirely inside him. He kicks away Peter’s blanket and now his feet poke from its bottom. They hold the large, awkward promise of how much the boy has left to grow. A familiar twist of anxiety cinches down in Peter’s stomach. He had never wanted to meet William because he had never wanted to obligate himself. He could know Catherine and keep her at an arm’s length, but he couldn’t treat a boy that way.
William tucks his knees to his chest. His feet disappear under the blanket.
Peter sits very still in his chair. Past the window a gray mist lingers in the already gray streets. Satellite antennas jut from the baked, broken angles of the rooftops. Clotheslines sag heavily with yesterday’s wash. The morning is becoming brighter. As Peter begins to draw the shade, allowing William to sleep a little more, a muezzin calls the prayer from a minaret a few blocks away. When the first thin note crackles from the speakers, a small flock of birds leaps from their perch several houses down. They fly straight and then all at once make a sudden turn, wheeling over the street and disappearing into the glare from the sun, which sweeps across the rooftops.
William wakes up.
Lying on his back he stretches his limbs. Then he opens his eyes. His gaze rebounds through the room and lands on his mother’s blazer slung across the arm of the sofa. He crawls over and snatches it to his chest. This knocks Peter’s camera bag to the floor. “She’s just in the back,” he says, nodding deeper into his apartment. William glances down the hall, but keeps his stare cautiously fixed on Peter, who slowly, as if trying not to spook a skittish animal, picks up his camera bag. “Why don’t you let me hang that up?” Peter points to the silk blazer William clutches to his chest. The boy lets go and Peter crosses the living room and drapes it on a coatrack by the apartment’s entry. He notices William glancing at the camera bag. “Take it out,” says Peter. “It’s the one I showed you last night.”
William opens the bag’s canvas flap. He stares inside but doesn’t reach after anything. Peter sits next to him on the sofa, removes the Nikon and places it in the boy’s hands. To turn the camera on, the shutter release and power button have to be held down together. The manufacturers implemented this cumbersome sequencing to keep the battery from inadvertently draining, but the result is a camera that requires practice if one is to use it for quick-action shots. William has to awkwardly stretch his fingers so that they can simultaneously reach the two buttons. “Hold it like that,” says Peter, as he wraps the boy’s small grip around either side of the Nikon. “Now press.”
The flash goes off, surprising them like an accidental gunshot.
“I’m sorry,” says William. He is sitting up, his bare feet hanging off the side of the sofa, the elastic from his pajamas cuffing his ankles.
“With a little practice, you’ll get very quick with it.” Peter steps to the living room window. He draws open the shade and motions for William to follow. The two of them gaze out across the cityscape. The sun has risen and its glare has subsided and no longer sweeps the rooftops. The light is clear and the birds Peter had noticed before are perched in long single rows on the windowsills and gutters of the adjacent apartment buildings. Peter points them out to William. “See whether you’re quick enough to catch a photo of a bird as it either takes off or lands.”
William stands at the window, the camera strap looped around his neck, his grip stretched across the Nikon so that only the very tips of his fingers brush against the edges of the power button and the shutter release. When a garbage truck passes beneath them, its heavy engine spooks a half dozen birds, which take flight and swoop in parabolas above the street. William snatches up the camera, but doesn’t manage to push the two buttons in sync with one another. Nothing happens and the boy misses the shot.