We knocked and waited.
Chapter Six
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.