Death Gets a Time-Out by Ayelet Waldman Page B

played incessantly for a month or two a couple of years ago. My expression must have betrayed my dawning recognition, because he winked and shrugged ruefully before turning back to his book.
    Reese Blackmore was sitting at a wrought iron table on a flagstone terrace that overlooked a swimming pool. He had the most beautiful hair that I’d ever seen, chalk-white, worn long, brushing his collar. It shone in the sunlight, and his skin glowed with the kind of even, honey-brown suntan acquired only under the blue lights of a tanning booth.
    “Can I offer you something to drink?” the doctor asked once we’d joined him at the table. “Some tea? A soymilk chai latte?”
    “I’ll have a coffee. Black,” Al said.
    “Ms. Applebaum?” Molly invited.
    “I’ll try the chai latte. But do you have milk milk? Cow milk?”
    “Nonfat?”
    Was that a comment on the baby fat I was already packing on?
    “That would be fine. Dr. Blackmore,” I began.
    “Please. Reese,” he said, his voice as smooth and even as his skin.
    “Reese. Did you receive Jupiter Jones’s waiver of confidentiality that I faxed this morning?” We had asked Jupiter to sign a paper indicating that his doctors had permission to speak to us, as members of his defense team, about his medical history. Otherwise, doctor-patient confidentiality would have precluded any conversation.
    “Yes. Yes I did. How is Jupiter? I’ve been sick at the thought of him in jail. He’s not the kind of person who can defend himself very well.”
    I nodded. “He’s having a hard time. But his attorney is doing what he can to get him out.” I explained our role to the doctor, and asked him if he could begin by telling us a little bit about his facility, and how Jupiter had come to be a patient there.
    “First of all, we don’t call them patients. They are residents, or clients. While the center is, of course, a medical facility in that its mission is to treat the disease of addiction, we like to view this as more of a retreat, a place for wounded individuals to come, rest, and do their work of healing surrounded by others engaged in the same endeavor. Our system is based on group therapy, group motivation. Every resident is both a patient working on his or her own disease and, in a very real sense, a therapist helping the other residents in their struggles.”
    I delicately and gently stomped on Al’s foot to stifle the groan of disgust I knew the doctor’s speech would produce in my partner. Al doesn’t have a lot of patience with “wounded individuals” unless those wounds bleed and can be bandaged with actual gauze.
    “The center is lovely,” I said.
    “Being surrounded by natural beauty helps our residents. At first many of them don’t even notice the surroundings. And then, after a while, their work progresses, and they become able to focus on something other than their desperate need to alter their consciousnesses. That’s when they begin to take note of the environment, to allow its beauty to givethem pleasure, even a kind of natural high of its own.”
    “Swell,” Al said, and I hoped I could hear the disdain in his voice only because I knew him so well, not because it was so obvious. I didn’t share it. Sure, the doctor was slick enough to have spilled from the hold of the
Exxon Valdez
, but what he was saying made sense to me. When I was a public defender, almost all of my clients had been drug users. Their entire lives were structured around the next high—where they were going to get it, how they would come up with the money. They didn’t commit crimes under the influence of drugs; they committed crimes in order to
get
under the influence. I had often wondered what would have happened if we just gave all the junkies their drugs. They wouldn’t have to steal to support their habits, and if they knew where their next fix was coming from, they would suddenly have all this time to think about something else, like what had become of their lives. I bet