Lee Child - The Enemy

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 sixin 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 Odéon. 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 Sixième. 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. Chèvre 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 hadcoffee 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 wokeearly 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 girlwith 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 leftthirty 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 Opéra 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.