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.