Amanda Reilly CWA 2011

Creative Writing Award Winner - 2011

Class of 2011

Amanda J. Reilly graduated Summa Cum Laude from the University of New Hampshire with a BA in Psychology and a Master’s of Education. She was a mental health school counselor for 12 years. A member of Phi Beta Kappa, Phi Kappa Phi, Golden Key National Honor Society, and Sigma Theta Tau, she is the recipient of numerous awards for academic excellence. Amanda will graduate in May as a Psychiatric Nurse Practitioner.

Transcript of the reading:

Paint-by-Numbers

Just last week by chance you ran into Jessie’s old track coach downtown. Standing in line at the local coffee shop, your mother-pride swelled as Coach P recounted the meet in which Jessie set a new school record for the high jump. “Such a nice kid too. It’s a rare combination these days,” he said wistfully. You demurred, of course, but inside you took the smallest bit of pleasure knowing you had raised him well, prepared him for the good life ahead.

Now, in the dull patina of worn linoleum tiles and mint green walls once deemed soothing, amidst the incongruous din of canned laughter from the day room television, you search for your coachable sweet boy. The son who once pulled tulips from Mrs. Sweeny’s garden as a present for you, and mollified her ire with his dimpled grin and quick apology. She still asks about Jessie, still tells the tulip story with gruff indulgence and about all the times he shoveled her walkway without even being asked. Inexplicably, Jessie is here now, in the hospital, in a locked psychiatric unit. He is recognizable in his hooded sweatshirt and faded jeans, but he is somehow all wrong, a paint-by-numbers darling brushed now with neon hues.

Jessie came to us from his nearby college campus, where he had been found shouting, gleeful, ready to fly from his perch mid-way up a thick-trunked maple tree. After assaulting the emergency room physician, he arrived to our unit tethered at each limb, his stretcher as parade float. He grinned and made introductions on his way by the nurses’ station, charming but for the pressured edge just beneath his cheerful, restricted wave. His immediate freedom was mine to determine, professional judgment—the so-called art of nursing—my only guide. He assured me he was in control, his ER fisticuffs a big misunderstanding. But Jessie was in no condition to give a reliable forecast of his dangerous impulsivity and I could not know what would come next. This could go very wrong. 

Someone could get hurt. But I unlocked his restraints anyway, his autonomy—the least restrictive alternative—my ethical imperative. I wished I could know, wished for a sure formula. And if I made the wrong choice, the more experienced nurses would shake their heads: “What was she thinking?” As if they could have known what I did not. Clairvoyance in hindsight is easy.

You stood there helpless, your own hands bound by love and fear. “He’ll be ok, won’t he?” Your wet, tired eyes pleaded for my assurance, narrowing at once the chance I might offer any comfort, belying perhaps your expectations of my role. “Because,” you continued, “all of this…it’s not…he’s really a good boy.” I nodded, understanding. I believed you. Indeed, I thought to myself, all of this might be easier for you if he hadn’t always been so amiably uncomplicated, if you were somehow a bad mother. Not easier, maybe, but less shocking or more like a culmination you could have at least retrospectively seen coming. I noticed your eyes tracking the unshaven man shuffling by in his lace-less sneakers and ill-fitting clothes. I understood your wordless entreaty for me to see the difference between your son and this other patient. It would not have helped for me to say that Henry used to teach English at a local community college, that his life had also taken an unexpected turn, that there are reasons no one is allowed a razor or shoelaces here. You were not ready for that.

“Jessie was always very creative. And fearless. That’s what made him so good at the high-jump.” Somehow this non sequitur pulled you back together and explained everything. “He climbed every tree in our yard as high as he could go, sometimes with my red apron flapping on his back. He called it his ‘crusader cape,’ which always made us laugh. We never knew where he learned that word, crusader. His magic-markered letter J is still there no matter how many times I’ve washed it. I was forever telling him not to climb with that cape, worried he would strangle…” You clapped your hand over your mouth, the echo of danger still in the air, an ex post facto warning. You looked panicked, suddenly redefining Jessie’s childhood innocence with shades of new significance. “I mean,” you began. “It’s ok,” I interrupted, “I know.” 

You needed so much for me to understand, to normalize what I could not. “It must be hard to see him this way,” I said, immediately hating myself for resorting to such a textbook response at a time like this, and yet not knowing what else to say, what else you might be able to hear. Your husband, silent until now, put his hand on your shoulder, “Honey, you know this is different…he’s talking about going to the White House and letting people write words of protest on his naked body…he’s saying all kinds of crazy things.” Your husband looked guilty, quickly apologizing for using the word ‘crazy.’ You looked defeated. Your tears spilled over, your voice just above a whisper. “But…”

“What did we do wrong?” you continued, voice stronger. A question in which I thought you really meant to say: “Please tell us what we have to do to make this right.” Because of course no one wants blame really, just control. And what mother wouldn’t want to tighten the reins, even in the best of times, to tether young Icarus to the ground so that his falls would result only in a scraped knee or two, so that his flight would not end in flame. You had only just learned how to let go, only just sent him away to college, and I saw how you looked at your husband, as if to say: “See, this is what can happen.”

“He’s a good boy,” you said again, your apparent talisman against emotional chaos, of loss, your recipe for his success. I thought I understood then just how much was at stake for you, how precarious your sense of order, your illusion of control. Somewhere, in the space between hope and despair, agency lives. We work hard to be good enough, to cheat the timeworn truth that bad things happen, even to the best of us. Our magical thinking stops short of donning capes, of believing we can fly, but sometimes only by the smallest margin. Who among us doesn’t try for paint-by-numbers calculability when it really matters? Who hasn’t counted on ritualized crossed fingers? But I didn’t know how to put this into words for you then. So instead I said, “He is a good boy,” and I hoped, for all of us, that being good would matter.