“That’s okay,” says Peter. “Just wait and try again.”
William glances up at him, and then registers a determined nod.
“Stay there,” says Peter. “I’ll be right back.”
He leaves William by the window and walks deeper into his apartment. He knocks on the shut bathroom door. No answer. Peter can hear the static hiss of the running shower. He lets himself in and takes two steps before he can see Catherine through the steam. She is faced away from the water that jets against her back. She has leaned her arm on the tiles, resting her forehead in the crook of her elbow. Her expression is clamped, the eyes sealed, the mouth shut and the jaw clenched against the shock of the water, whose rivulets trace the contours of her toned shoulders, her full hips, her strong thighs. Watching the water course over the athletic body she crafted years ago, which ultimately failed her artistic ambitions, Peter notices a slight tremor run through her, the only indication that she is crying.
“Peter, please!” She doesn’t turn toward him. Her forehead still leans against her arm. Her eyes remain shut. The mascara she’d worn the night before streaks in jagged lines from her cheeks to where Peter can see it on the edge of her chin.
“William’s awake,” he says, glancing down.
“Okay.”
He stands motionless, his feet fixed to the tiled floor.
“Peter—” she snaps.
He lets himself out of the bathroom and stands in the hallway, still holding the shut doorknob as if trying to hold on to her nakedness, something she has never denied him until this moment. How useless his hands seem. He hides them in his pockets. The shower turns off.
Peter returns down the hall. Light fills the living room. William stands at the windowsill in his pajamas as he fumbles with the camera, straining his fingers around the grip to reach the pair of buttons. Peter leans against the arm of the sofa. The birds from before remain on their nearby perches. William has the camera angled toward them. He watches their jerky movements—the occasional flap of their wings, the spastic craning of their necks—and he waits for them to take flight.
The bathroom door slams shut.
A pair of the birds bounds off the ledge. Like a miracle, one of the birds is completely black and the other is flawlessly white. William snatches the Nikon. His synchronized fingers find the shutter release and power button. He snaps a photo. The two birds extend their wings, catch a gust of wind, and glide out over the gray street, rising in an orbit above the stuttering traffic. “Look,” William says, showing the photo he has taken to Peter, who toggles the camera from color to black and white, observing no discernible change between the two settings. Through either accident or instinct William has managed to create a photograph in which every color and shade stands in equilibrium with every other. The balance is perfect.
“What are the two of you doing?” asks Catherine, who has padded barefoot into the living room. Her hair is drying in a towel that is turbaned around her head.
Peter tells William to show his mother, and the boy holds the Nikon up to Catherine. “He’s getting the hang of this,” says Peter as her eyes dip into the viewfinder. “The photo’s pretty remarkable, every part of it is in perfect balance.” He smiles toward William and looks back at Catherine, who continues to examine the image of the two birds. Watching her, Peter realizes that he has hardly, if ever, seen her without makeup on. Over the run of their two-year affair, or “friendship” as Catherine insists on calling it, she has never once been able to stay an entire night with him, and because of this he has never seen her fresh from the shower, or just awake in the morning. Until last night, he had also never seen her with her son.
When Catherine finishes looking at William’s photo, he raises the camera up to his mother and takes a candid of her. “Please,” she says, and her voice is tight in her throat, holding the same pitch Peter heard when she asked him to leave the bathroom. “Don’t point that thing at me.”
She makes William delete the photo.
He goes back to the windowsill. The pair of birds, which had left their perch together, continues to orbit over the street. Then they turn, beating a few powerful flaps of their wings as they flare backward and come to rest right in front of William. The boy raises his camera. He is ready. He would stay where he was. And he would watch them until they chose to take off.
* * *
They drive to Akmerkez, a shopping mall ten minutes away. When they exit the taxi, it is nearly time for lunch. William still wears his pajamas. He asked to bring Peter’s camera, which Peter has allowed, and so the Nikon hangs around the boy’s neck by its strap. Peter has never shopped for children’s clothing before and he hovers over a glass-enclosed map in the atrium. The mall has many of the same offerings as in the States. It also has most of the same brands. There is a Gap Kids on the ground level.
They ride the elevator down and a family steps inside with them: mother, father, little girl. The girl is about William’s age, with a long dark braid running along her back and her foot planted on a red scooter. William snaps her picture. Catherine holds Peter’s hand. She also keeps stealing glimpses of the other family. When the doors open on the ground level, they head in opposite directions.
From the display table inside of the store, Catherine picks out a few pairs of jeans for William. When presented with his options, he doesn’t like any. She asks him to choose something else on his own, but he refuses. “I want to wear my clothes from home,” he says.
“How about these?” offers Catherine, holding up a pair of khakis.
William creeps away, dipping beneath a rack of sweatshirts, where he sits cross-legged, his elbows propped on his knees and his face cradled in his palms. Catherine continues to browse. “Or these,” she says, crouching low and offering her son another alternative. He slinks into himself, fiddling with his camera, ignoring her.
“Pick something or I’m picking for you.”
He takes a photo of his feet.
She holds up a pair of black jeans and a gray sweatshirt. “Fine, we’ll get these.”
“I don’t like those,” he answers. “Stop choosing for me!”
“Then you choose!” his mother shoots back.
William lifts up the camera and fires off the flash in Catherine’s face. Wide eyed, he looks at Peter as he does it, as if he can’t believe the provocation he’s made toward his mother. This one act of rebellion is all William has to combat the complete reordering of his life.
She lunges toward him. “What did I tell you about pointing that thing at me?”
William scampers deeper beneath the rack of sweatshirts.
Before she can take the camera, Peter intervenes. “What about these?”