The Enemy

“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 pâté 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 pâtisserie 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.