Wide Blue Yonder by Jean Thompson

intentions on Harvey, imagined his simple gratitude. She had imagined that she would fix him somehow. She was irritated at Josie for frisking around and playing the favorite (if she only knew the effect she had!), and at Harvey for not being fixable. She couldn’t decide exactly how to worry about him, what might happen to him, or perhaps what he might take it into his head to do.
    Once they were driving away Josie said, “What did he do before the Weather Channel?”
    “I have no idea. He didn’t really talk to you, did he?”
    “Sure he did. You were in the kitchen. They had this thing on about famous hurricanes, and he said, ‘Harvey’s on the list.’ I said did he mean the list of hurricane names, and he said yes.”
    Elaine wasn’t sure what to think. Everything would be so much easier if there was some way to get through to him. “I don’t suppose he said anything else.”
    “He said, ‘It’s a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the little dog.’”
    “What in the world?”
    Josie shrugged. “Don’t ask me.” She reached for the radio, then thought better of it and slumped back in her seat. “What happened to him anyway, or was he always nuts?”
    “He had a nervous breakdown.”
    “What exactly does that mean? Is it like a computer crashing?”
    Elaine glanced over at her, but Josie was peering through the windshield, her forehead puckered and serious. Perhaps they could manage an actual conversation. She said, “I wasn’t there. It was a long time ago. Your father was just a kid too, so this is what they told him and he told me. Harvey had a job driving a taxi. I know. Imagine. He must have been in his late twenties then. He drove the cab to St. Louis and ended up at the police station there, saying he was lost. Crying and blubbering. No clue that he’d driven a hundred miles. Couldn’t remember where he lived. So your grandpa had to go to St. Louis and bring him back, and when he didn’t calm down or get better they sent him to the hospital at Manteno and that’s where he stayed for twenty years.”
    “No way.”
    “I don’t know what they’d do for somebody like Harvey now. Back then it was electric-shock therapy and big doses of thorazine. I don’t imagine the family went to see him much. It wasn’t encouraged. Then …” Elaine sighed. She felt as if she were recounting the history of an old sad war. “Times changed. The big push was to deinstitutionalize, that was the word, mental patients. Put them back in the community and make counties and towns responsible for their care. Except they didn’t get any care. Harvey’s one of the lucky ones. Your father’s family bought him a house. A lot of them just ended up walking the streets.”
    “Yeah, but what
happened
to him?” Josie demanded.
    Not having listened to a word she’d said. Let it go, Elaine told herself. Trust your daughter to let you know when you were being a total bore. “Your father’s folks just said he was always weak in the head. That’s the way they talked.”
    The car was quiet then. Elaine thought of other things they might talk about, conversations that, in some ideal world, you might imagine having with your nearly grown daughter. Whatthings made them happy and what things made them afraid. Advice about college, boys, the future. And how you seldom realize you are making a choice, an important turning down some forked path, even as you are trying to be watchful of that very thing. Like trying to see a clock’s hands move or trying to catch yourself growing older. Maybe you could see it from outer space, but not close up. Maybe only after you lived a life could you stand back and see its shape and pattern, everything you’d been staring at all along, like those magic eye prints that were so popular a couple years back. Here was knowledge or happiness or desire, whatever it was that knit everything together, here was your name written smaller and smaller, good-bye, good-bye …
    There was traffic