The Enemy by Lee Child Page B

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 Saint 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 backwards 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 metres 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 fourteen 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 travelled 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 per cent, twenty per cent, 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, ayway. It was a discussion that should have happened a year 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 bigshot, 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