She shrugged. Gallic, feminine, obstinate.
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‘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 kind of things that
wouldn’t interest a woman with no appetite. We ate pfit 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.’
9O
‘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 night
stands. 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 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
91
about as good as a terminal cancer patient with a broken leg
and an aluminum walker can. She made fresh coffee and put the