The Enemy

“Last night,” she said. “It was very peaceful.”

The men in the coats realized who we must be and shuffled out into the hallway. They were very quiet. They made no noise at all. Joe took an unsteady step and sat down on the sofa. I stayed where I was. I stood still in the middle of the floor.

“When?” I said again.

“At midnight,” the girl said. “In her sleep.”

I closed my eyes. Opened them again a minute later. The girl was still there. Her eyes were on mine.

“Were you with her?” I said.

She nodded.

“All the time,” she said.

“Was there a doctor here?”

“She sent him away.”

“What happened?”

“She said she felt well. She went to bed at eleven. She slept an hour, and then she just stopped breathing.”

I looked up at the ceiling. “Was she in pain?”

“Not at the end.”

“But she said she felt well.”

“Her time had come. I’ve seen it before.”

I looked at her, and then I looked away.

“Would you like to see her?” the girl said.

“Joe?” I said. He shook his head. Stayed on the sofa. I stepped toward the bedroom. There was a mahogany coffin set up on velvet-padded trestles next to the bed. It was lined with white silk and it was empty. My mother’s body was still in the bed. The sheets were made up around her. Her head was resting gently on the pillow and her arms were crossed over her chest outside the covers. Her eyes were closed. She was barely recognizable.

Summer had asked me: Does it upset you to see dead people?

No, I had said.

Why not? she had asked me.

I don’t know, I had said.

I had never seen my father’s body. I was away somewhere when he died. It had been a heart thing. Some VA hospital had done its best, but it was hopeless from the start. I had flown in on the morning of the funeral and had left again the same night.

Funeral, I thought.

Joe will handle it.

I stayed by my mother’s bed for five long minutes, eyes open, eyes dry. Then I turned and stepped back into the living room. It was crowded again. The croques-morts were back. The pallbearers. And there was an old man on the sofa, next to Joe. He was sitting stiffly. There were two walking sticks propped next to him. He had thin gray hair and a heavy dark suit with a tiny ribbon in the buttonhole. Red, white, and blue, maybe a Croix de Guerre ribbon, or the Medaille de la Resistance. He had a small cardboard box balanced on his bony knees. It was tied with a piece of faded red string.

“This is Monsieur Lamonnier,” Joe said. “Family friend.”

The old guy grabbed his sticks and started to struggle up to shake my hand but I waved him back down and stepped over close. He was maybe seventy-five or eighty. He was lean and dried-out and relatively tall for a Frenchman.

“You’re the one she called Reacher,” he said.

I nodded.

“That’s me,” I said. “I don’t remember you.”

“We never met. But I knew your mother a long time.”

“Thanks for stopping by.”

“You too,” he said.

Touche, I thought.

“What’s in the box?” I said.

“Things she refused to keep here,” the old guy said. “But things I felt should be found here, at a time like this, by her sons.”

He handed me the box, like it was a sacred burden. I took it and put it under my arm. It felt about halfway between light and heavy. I guessed there was a book in there. Maybe an old leather-bound diary. Some other stuff too.

“Joe,” I said. “Let’s go get breakfast.”

We walked fast and aimlessly. We turned into the Rue St.-Dominique and passed by two cafes at the top of the Rue de l’Exposition without stopping. We crossed the Avenue Bosquet against the light and then we made an arbitrary left into the Rue Jean Nicot. Joe stopped at a tabac and bought cigarettes. I would have smiled if I had been able to. The street was named after the guy who discovered nicotine.

We lit up together on the sidewalk and then ducked into the first cafe we saw. We were all done walking. We were ready for the talking.

“You shouldn’t have waited for me,” Joe said. “You could have seen her one last time.”

“I felt it happen,” I said. “Midnight last night, something hit me.”

“You could have been with her.”

“Too late now.”

“It would have been OK with me.”

“It wouldn’t have been OK with her.”

“We should have stayed a week ago.”

“She didn’t want us to stay, Joe. That wasn’t in her plan. She was her own person, entitled to her privacy. She was a mother, but that wasn’t all she was.”

He went quiet. The waiter brought us coffee and a small straw basket full of croissants. He seemed to sense the mood. He put them down gently and backed away.

“Will you see to the funeral?” I said.

Joe nodded. “I’ll make it four days from now. Can you stay?”

“No,” I said. “But I’ll get back.”

“OK,” he said. “I’ll stay a week or so. I guess I’ll need to find her will. We’ll probably have to sell her place. Unless you want it?”

I shook my head. “I don’t want it. You?”

“I don’t see how I could use it.”

“It wouldn’t have been right for me to go on my own,” I said.

Joe said nothing.

“We saw her last week,” I said. “We were all together. It was a good time.”

“You think?”

“We had fun. That’s the way she wanted it. That’s why she made the effort. That’s why she asked to go to Polidor. It wasn’t like she ate anything.”

He just shrugged. We drank our coffee in silence. I tried a croissant. It was OK, but I had no appetite. I put it back in the basket.

“Life,” Joe said. “What a completely weird thing it is. A person lives sixty years, does all kinds of things, knows all kinds of things, feels all kinds of things, and then it’s over. Like it never happened at all.”

“We’ll always remember her.”

“No, we’ll remember parts of her. The parts she chose to share. The tip of the iceberg. The rest, only she knew about. Therefore the rest already doesn’t exist. As of now.”

We smoked another cigarette each and sat quiet. Then we walked back, slowly, side by side, a little burned