We heard slow shuffling steps inside the apartment and a long moment later my mother opened the door.
"Bonsoir, Maman," Joe said.
I just stared at her.
She was very thin and very gray and very stooped and she looked about a hundred years older than the last time I had seen her. She had a long heavy plaster cast on her left leg and she was leaning on an aluminum walker. Her hands were gripping it hard and I could see bones and veins and tendons standing out. She was trembling. Her skin looked translucent. Only her eyes were the same as I remembered them. They were blue and merry and filled with amusement.
"Joe," she said. "And Reacher."
She always called me by my last name. Nobody remembered why. Maybe I had started it, as a kid. Maybe she had continued it, the way families do.
"My boys," she said. "Just look at the two of you."
She spoke slowly and breathlessly but she was smiling a happy smile. We stepped up and hugged her. She felt cold and frail and insubstantial. She felt like she weighed less than her aluminum walker.
"What happened?" I said.
"Come inside," she said. "Make yourselves at home."
She turned the walker around with short clumsy movements and shuffled back through the hallway. She was panting and wheezing. I stepped in after her. Joe closed the door and followed me. The hallway was narrow and tall and was followed by a living room with wood floors and white sofas and white walls and framed mirrors. My mother made her way to a sofa and backed up to it slowly and dropped herself into it. She seemed to disappear in its depth.
"What happened?" I asked again.
She wouldn't answer. She just waved the inquiry away with an impatient movement of her hand. Joe and I sat down, side by side.
"You're going to have to tell us," I said.
"We came all this way," Joe said.
"I thought you were just visiting," she said.
"No you didn't," I said.
She stared at a spot on the wall.
"It's nothing," she said.
"Doesn't look like nothing."
"Well, it was just bad timing."
"In what way?"
"I got unlucky," she said.
"How?"
"I was hit by a car," she said. "It broke my leg."
"Where? When?"
"Two weeks ago," she said. "Right outside my door, here on the Avenue. It was raining, I had an umbrella, it was shading my eyes, I stepped out, and the driver saw me and braked, but the pave was wet and the car slid right into me, very slowly, like slow motion, but I was transfixed and I couldn't move. I felt it hit my knee, very gently, like a kiss, but it snapped a bone. It hurt like hell."
I saw in my mind the guy in the parking lot outside the nude bar near Bird, writhing around in an oily puddle.
"Why didn't you tell us?" Joe asked.
She didn't answer.
"But it'll mend, right?" he asked.
"Of course," she said. "It's trivial."
Joe just looked at me.
"What else?" I said.
She kept on looking at the wall. Did the dismissive thing with her hand again.
"What else?" Joe asked.
She looked at me, and then she looked at him.
"They gave me an X ray," she said. "I'm an old woman, according to them. According to them, old women who break bones are at risk from pneumonia. Because we're laid up and immobile and our lungs can fill and get infected."
"And?"
She said nothing.
"Have you got pneumonia?" I said.
"No."
"So what happened?"
"They found out. With the X ray."
"Found what out?"
"That I have cancer."
Nobody spoke for a long time.
"But you already knew," I said.
She smiled at me, like she always did.
"Yes, darling," she said. "I already knew."
"For how long?"
"For a year," she said.
Nobody spoke.
"What sort of cancer?" Joe said.
"Every sort there is, now."
"Is it treatable?"
She shook her head.
"Was it treatable?"
"I don't know," she said. "I didn't ask."
"What were the symptoms?"
"I had stomachaches. I had no appetite."
"Then it spread?"
"Now I hurt all over. It's in my bones. And this stupid leg doesn't help."
"Why didn't you tell us?"
She shrugged. Gallic, feminine, obstinate.
"What was to tell?" she said.
"Why didn't you go to the doctor?"
She didn't answer for a time.
"I'm tired," she said.
"Of what?" Joe said. "Life?"
She smiled. "No, Joe, I mean I'm tired. It's late and I need to go to bed, is what I mean. We'll talk some more tomorrow. I promise. Don't let's have a lot of fuss now."
We let her go to bed. We had to. We had no choice. She was the most stubborn woman imaginable. We found stuff to eat in her kitchen. She had laid in provisions for us. That was clear. Her refrigerator was stocked with the kinds of things that wouldn't interest a woman with no appetite. We ate pate and cheese and made coffee and sat at her table to drink it. The Avenue Rapp was still and silent and deserted, five floors below her window.
"What do you think?" Joe asked me.
"I think she's dying," I said. "That's why we came, after all."
"Can we make her get treatment?"
"It's too late. It would be a waste of time. And we can't make her do anything. When could anyone make her do what she didn't want to?"
"Why doesn't she want to?"
"I don't know."
He just looked at me.
"She's a fatalist," I said.
"She's only sixty years old."
I nodded. She had been thirty when I was born, and forty-eight when I stopped living wherever we called home. I hadn't noticed her age at all. At forty-eight she had looked younger than I did when I was twenty-eight. I had last seen her a year and a half ago. I had stopped by Paris for two days, en route from Germany to the Middle East. She had been fine. She had looked great. She was about two years into widowhood then, and like with a lot of people the two-year threshold had been like turning a corner. She had looked like a person with a lot of life left.
"Why didn't she tell us?" Joe said.
"I don't know."
"I wish she had."
"Shit happens," I said.
Joe just nodded.
She had made up her guest room with clean fresh sheets and towels and she had put flowers in bone china vases on the nightstands. It was a small fragrant room full of two twin beds. I pictured her struggling around with her walker, fighting with duvets, folding corners, smoothing things out.
Joe and I didn't talk. I hung my uniform in the closet and washed up in the bathroom. Set the clock in my head for seven the next morning and got into bed and lay there looking at the ceiling for an hour. Then I went to sleep.
I woke at exactly seven. Joe was already up. Maybe he hadn't slept at all. Maybe he was accustomed to a more regular lifestyle than I was. Maybe the jet lag bothered him more. I showered and took fatigue pants and a T-shirt from my duffel and put them on. Found Joe in the kitchen. He had coffee going.
"Mom's still asleep," he said. "Medication, probably."
"I'll go get breakfast," I said.
I put my coat on and walked a block to a patisserie I knew on the Rue St.-Dominique. I bought croissants and pain au chocolat and carried the waxed bag home. My mother was still in her room when I got back.
"She's committing suicide," Joe said. "We can't let her."
I said nothing.
"What?" he said. "If she picked up a gun and held it to her head, wouldn't you stop her?"
I shrugged. "She already put the gun to her head. She pulled the trigger a year ago. We're too late. She made sure we would be."
"Why?"
"We have to wait for her to tell us."
She told us during a conversation that lasted most of the day. It proceeded in bits and pieces. We started over breakfast. She came out of her room, all showered and dressed and looking about as good as a terminal cancer patient with a broken leg and an aluminum walker can. She made fresh coffee and put the croissants I had bought on good china and served us quite formally at the table. The way she took charge spooled us all backward in time. Joe and I shrank back to skinny kids and she bloomed into the matriarch she had once been. A military wife and mother has a pretty hard time, and some handle it, and some don't. She always had. Wherever we had lived had been home. She had seen to that.
"I was born three hundred meters from here," she said. "On the Avenue Bosquet. I could see Les Invalides and the ecole Militaire from my window. I was ten when the Germans came to Paris. I thought that was the end of the world. I was fifteen when they left. I thought that was the beginning of a new one."
Joe and I said nothing.
"Every day since then has been a bonus," she said. "I met your father, I had you boys, I traveled the world. I don't think there's a country I haven't been to."
We said nothing.
"I'm French," she said. "You're American. There's a world of difference. An American gets sick, she's outraged. How dare that happen to her? She must have the fault corrected immediately, at once. But French people understand that first you live, and then you die. It's not an outrage. It's something that's been happening since the dawn of time. It has to happen, don't you see? If people didn't die, the world would be an awfully crowded place by now."
"It's about when you die," Joe said.
My mother nodded.
"Yes, it is," she said. "You die when it's your time."
"That's too passive."
"No, it's realistic, Joe. It's about picking your battles. Sure, of course you cure the little things. If you're in an accident, you get yourself patched up. But some battles can't be won. Don't think I didn't consider this whole thing very carefully. I read books. I spoke to friends. The success rates after the symptoms have already shown themselves are very poor. Five-year survival, ten percent, twenty percent, who needs it? And that's after truly horrible treatments."
It's about when you die. We spent the morning going back and forth on Joe's central question. We talked it through, from one direction, then from another. But the conclusion was always the same. Some battles can't be won. And it was a moot point, anyway. It was a discussion that should have happened twelve months ago. It was no longer appropriate.
Joe and I ate lunch. My mother didn't. I waited for Joe to ask the next obvious question. It was just hanging there. Eventually, he got to it. Joe Reacher, thirty-two years of age, six feet six inches tall, two hundred and twenty pounds, a West Point graduate, some kind of a Treasury Department big shot, placed his palms flat on the table and looked into his mother's eyes.
"Won't you miss us, Mom?" he asked.
"Wrong question," she said. "I'll be dead. I won't be missing anything. It's you that will be missing me. Like you miss your father. Like I miss him. Like I miss my father, and my mother, and my grandparents. It's a part of life, missing the dead."
We said nothing.
"You're really asking me a different question," she said. "You're asking, how can I abandon you? You're asking, aren't I concerned with your affairs anymore? Don't I want to see what happens with your lives? Have I lost interest in you?"
We said nothing.
"I understand," she said. "Truly, I do. I asked myself the same questions. It's like walking out of a movie. Being made to walk out of a movie that you're really enjoying. That's what worried me about it. I would never know how it turned out. I would never know what happened to you boys in the end, with your lives. I hated that part. But then I realized, obviously I'll walk out of the movie sooner or later. I mean, nobody lives forever. I'll never know how it turns out for you. I'll never know what happens with your lives. Not in the end. Not even under the best of circumstances. I realized that. Then it didn't seem to matter so much. It will always be an arbitrary date. It will always leave me wanting more."
We sat quiet for a spell.
"How long?" Joe asked.
"Not long," she said.
We said nothing.
"You don't need me anymore," she told us. "You're all grown up. My job is done. That's natural, and that's good. That's life. So let me go."
By six in the evening we were all talked out. Nobody had spoken for an hour. Then my mother sat up straight in her chair.
"Let's go out to dinner," she said. "Let's go to Polidor, on Rue Monsieur Le Prince."
We called a cab and rode it to the Odeon. Then we walked. My mother wanted to. She was bundled up in a coat and she was hanging on our arms and moving slow and awkward, but I think she enjoyed the air. Rue Monsieur Le Prince cuts the corner between the Boulevard St.- Germain and the Boulevard St.-Michel, in the Sixieme. It may be the most Parisian street in the whole of the city. Narrow, diverse, slightly seedy, flanked by tall plaster facades, bustling. Polidor is a famous old restaurant. It makes you feel all kinds of people have eaten there. Gourmets, spies, painters, fugitives, cops, robbers.
We all ordered the same three courses. Chevre chaud, porc aux pruneaux, dames blanches. We ordered a fine red wine. But my mother ate nothing and drank nothing. She just watched us. There was pain showing in her face. Joe and I ate, self-consciously. She talked, exclusively about the past. But there was no sadness. She relived good times. She laughed. She rubbed her thumb across the scar on Joe's forehead and scolded me for putting it there all those years ago, like she always did. I rolled up my sleeve like I always did and showed her where he had stuck me with a chisel in revenge, and she scolded him equally. She talked about things we had made her in school. She talked about birthday parties we had thrown, on grim faraway bases in the heat, or the cold. She talked about our father, about meeting him in Korea, about marrying him in Holland, about his awkward manner, about the two bunches of flowers he had bought her in all their thirty-three years together, one when Joe was born, and one when I was.
"Why didn't you tell us a year ago?" Joe asked.
"You know why," she said.
"Because we would have argued," I said.
She nodded.
"It was a decision that belonged to me," she said.
We had coffee and Joe and I smoked cigarettes. Then the waiter brought the bill and we asked him to call a cab for us. We rode back to the Avenue Rapp in silence. We all went to bed without saying much.
I woke early on the fourth day of the new decade. Heard Joe in the kitchen, talking French. I went in there and found him with a woman. She was young and brisk. She had short neat hair and luminous eyes. She told me she was my mother's private nurse, provided under the terms of an old insurance policy. She told me she normally came in seven days a week, but had missed the day before at my mother's request. She told me my mother had wanted a day alone with her sons. I asked the girl how long each visit lasted. She said she stayed as long as she was needed. She told me the old insurance policy would cover up to twenty-four hours a day, as and when it became necessary, which she thought might be very soon.
The girl with the luminous eyes left and I went back to the bedroom and showered and packed my bag. Joe came in and watched me do it.
"You leaving?" he said.
"We both are. You know that."
"We should stay."
"We came. That's what she wanted. Now she wants us to go."
"You think?"
I nodded. "Last night, at Polidor. It was about saying good-bye. She wants to be left in peace now."
"You can do that?"
"It's what she wants. We owe it to her."
I got breakfast items again in the Rue St.-Dominique and we ate them with bowls of coffee, the French way, all three of us together. My mother had dressed in her best and was acting like a fit young woman temporarily inconvenienced by a broken leg. It must have taken a lot of will, but I guessed that was how she wanted to be remembered. We poured coffee and passed things to each other, politely. It was a civilized meal. Like we used to have, long ago. Like an old family ritual.
Then she revisited another old family ritual. She did something she had done ten thousand times before, all through our lives, since we were first old enough to have individuality of our own. She struggled up out of her chair and stepped over and put her hands on Joe's shoulders, from behind. Then she bent and kissed his cheek.
"What don't you need to do?" she asked him.
He didn't answer. He never did. Our silence was part of the ritual.
"You don't need to solve all the world's problems, Joe. Only some of them. There are enough to go around."
She kissed his cheek again. Then she kept one hand on the back of his chair and reached out with the other and moved herself over behind me. I could hear her ragged breathing. She kissed my cheek. Then like she used to all those years before she put her hands on my shoulders. Measured them, side to side. She was a small woman, fascinated by the way her baby had grown into a giant.
"You've got the strength of two normal boys," she said.
Then came my own personal question.
"What are you going to do with this strength?" she asked me.
I didn't answer. I never did.
"You're going to do the right thing," she said.
Then she bent down and kissed me on the cheek again.
I thought: Was that the last time?
We left thirty minutes later. We hugged long and hard at the door and we told her we loved her, and she told us she loved us too and she always had. She stood there and we went down in the tiny elevator and set out on the long walk back to the Opera to get the airport bus. Our eyes were full of tears and we didn't talk at all. My medals meant nothing to the check-in girl at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle. She sat us in the back of the plane. About halfway through the flight I picked up Le Monde and saw that Noriega had been found in Panama City. A week ago I had lived and breathed that mission. Now I barely remembered it. I put the paper down and tried to look ahead. Tried to remember where I was supposed to be going, and what I was supposed to be doing when I got there. I had no real recollection. No sense of what was going to happen. If I had, I would have stayed in Paris.
