A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [67]
“How has he been acting?”
She smiled, actually looking at me for the first time. She said, “He isn’t very talkative, is he? When the doctors were working on him, right at first? Well, one of them said, ‘You know, I think he can talk. He just won’t.’ That’s kind of unusual.” She spoke brightly.
I said, “Not for him, lately. Is that all? We can just leave now?”
She lowered her voice. “You can. But I think the police will be calling you. It takes about ten days for the blood level test to come back, though.”
“You mean the blood alcohol level?”
“But you can be thankful he wasn’t seriously injured. He’s just fine, really.” She returned to her spot behind the desk.
He was sitting in the backseat, on the passenger side. After I got in and arranged myself, Ty turned and said, “Ready to go, Dad?” but there wasn’t any response. We turned out of the hospital parking lot and onto the empty avenue of light and gloom that we had just turned off. Each house, large and close to its neighbors, rose like a solid and discreet blossom out of its neat lawn and thick embracing shrubbery. It was nearly midnight. Every window on the long protected block was dark.
My father was so quiet that it was easy to believe that he had learned his lesson, that there would have to be no discussion of keys or drinking or of the whole situation we found ourselves in. It was easy to believe that he was quiet because chastened, even embarrassed. Ty, too, was quiet. Perhaps they had already talked, come to some agreement, and Ty would present me with that when we got home. I said, “Daddy, have you got those pills the nurse gave you?”
The question went unanswered, so unanswered that it got to be like a question that no one had ever expected would be answered. Whether or not he had the pills turned out to be none of my business. That was the answer.
In the silence, it was easy for my mind to drift, and it drifted back to the thoughts of Ty and Jess and my future that I had been thinking a very short time—half an hour—before. With my father in the car, such thoughts took on a new coloring. What had seemed scary but pleasant, even innocent (only thoughts after all), now seemed real and shocking. Even the comfort I had felt in Ty’s and my privacy as we were driving in the dark seemed fugitive, luxurious. I looked again at the houses we passed, now not so prosperous as those around the hospital, and I saw a new meaning in them, in the obvious differences between them—junk on a porch here, two nice cars in an open garage there, a painted swing set and a homemade sandbox across the street. The families who lived here had only the most tenuous links to one another. Each lived a distinct style, to divergent ends. That was what was to be envied, not, as I had thought as a child, the closeness or the sociability, but the uniqueness of each family’s fate, each family’s, each couple’s, freedom to make or find something apart from the others.
My father groaned. I froze, staring ahead. Ty said, “Are you having some pain, Larry? You sure you want to leave the hospital? We can go right back.” To this there was no response either. We were left to assume that our course of action, taking him home, was what he wanted. We drove on. The front end of the car looked higher. I caught myself listening to the engine, as if we were hauling a trailer, as if carrying my father home were taxing more than just my peace of mind.
Ty and I traded a couple of secretive, eye-rolling glances, and he smiled at me. His smile told me what to do—be patient, endure, maintain hope—and I wondered where it came from with him, this endless stoicism. It was so heavy and dumb and good! So foolishly receptive! When would taking it turn into asking for it? Maybe it already had. Maybe if we had conducted our lives differently in the past, had not been so accommodating, nor so malleable—how was it that everyone had left the land and we