Always, the same handsome white man in old-fashioned clothes. A man with eyes like Uncle Root, but the man was a stranger, who led her to a gingerbread house like in a fairy tale. Lydia could even smell the gingerbread. It made her mouth water, but when she walked inside the fairy-tale house, there was nothing but claw-foot tubs, and little girls standing beside them. Little, light-brown girls dressed like the dolls Lydia’s granny kept on her bed. Little girls wearing dresses with lace and petticoats, and grown women’s buns fastened at the back of their necks, and then the little girls stepped into the bathtubs and lay back and closed their eyes and the water closed over their heads—
“Lydia, baby, come on now. It’s time to get up.”
Her mother was calling her name, telling her she should take a bath and get herself cleaned up. Lydia hesitated at the door, until Mama told her she’d sit in there with her, right on the blue fluffy toilet cover. She thought her daughter might want her privacy while she bathed, but if she didn’t that was all right. She was Lydia’s mother. She’d seen everything she had already. Mama laughed. After Lydia’s bath Mama helped her dress in clean underwear and a bra and then a shirt and jeans. She kneeled down and slipped socks and tennis shoes on her daughter’s feet. She weaved Lydia’s hair into four long braids.
Uncle Root was with them for the drive to Atlanta, past the city and out to one of the counties where only white folk lived. A building that sprawled, and a white lady at the front desk who said that Lydia had to sign the forms herself. She was an adult, and Mama was hugging her, and Uncle Root was hugging her, and the white lady at the front desk was taking her back through the doors. She introduced herself as Dr. Fairland, and apologized for patting Lydia down and told her she had to go behind that curtain and take off all her clothes, so they knew she wasn’t bringing drugs into the facility. Please forgive her, and Dr. Fairland had to search through Lydia’s suitcase, too. But she had a smile in her voice as she stuck her hand through the curtain with Lydia’s clothes and underwear. She told Lydia that she was so proud of her. No contraband. This was a great first step! And she sounded even happier when Lydia asked, could she have some juice or maybe something to eat? She was really hungry.
*
In their early days, when the patients came into the center and were detoxing, some wept, giving over to depression. Others wanted to fight, and they jumped at the television, the only valuable object in the room. When days passed, their shame would tip into the space. In group therapy, the patients would repeat their apologies to the counselor. “I’m sorry” and “I didn’t mean it,” and Dr. Fairland would nod sympathetically. She was in charge of Lydia’s group, one of four in the center. She was Lydia’s personal counselor, too. It wasn’t enough to have a daily group therapy. There had to be one-on-one confessions as well, and she listened to Lydia’s issues for sixty minutes every day. The lack of sleep. No privacy. That strange, red-haired chick who was Lydia’s roommate and asked her throughout the day, did Lydia want to hear about her soul, in that candy-coated southern drawl.
About halfway through her monologue, Dr. Fairland would ask, “Why do you think you did it, Lydia? Why’d you start using drugs?” Lydia envisaged her trying not to look at her watch, calculating how much money this crack fiend was providing for her mortgage and car note. The facility was nice. She knew her parents were paying plenty money.
After her cravings and panic attacks stopped, she was relieved. But when she was forced to confront her feelings, her cravings started again. So Lydia kept quiet in group therapy, and watched the other patients, a passive witness. Except for one Black guy, the rest of the patients were white, and open with their agony, their anger, though Lydia had been raised to keep her composure around white people, to never drop her guard. Just because she was addicted to crack didn’t mean she had an excuse to forget her home training and act any kind of way in front of these people. It had taken her five days in the group session to admit that she was an addict. On that day, she quietly stated, yes, it was true. She had been far gone, after only a few weeks of smoking primos, before she moved on to rocks.
There was approval around the circle, even from that one Black guy whom Lydia had nicknamed “Brother Patient” in her mind. When Lydia had casually called him “brother” during the snack break, letting her cadence move into a rhythm, he’d looked at her, his eyes surprised, then assessing. The look of recognition: he saw it now. That she was a Black woman and not Puerto Rican, or maybe from the southern part of Italy. Then his eyes moved past her to another spot. He wasn’t interested in communion. He’d thought he’d bumped into something strange, but now he wanted to get away from the familiar. But Brother Patient did give her a grudging smile. A quick nod. That’s right. Lydia was doing the work. Good for her.