03.She.Wanted.It.All.2005 (16 page)

Yet, this time Tracey’s expectation of abandonment
wasn’t destined to come true. As Celeste had with Craig, Harald, and Jimmy, she had thrown Tracey away. What Tracey didn’t know was that as Celeste had with the men in her life, she intended to reel her back in. Days after Tracey’s discharge, Celeste, too, left Timberlawn for the day program.

“I was in my motel room when someone knocked,” Tracey says. “I opened it, and Celeste was there. She walked inside and kissed me. She apologized and asked me to forgive her. Celeste closed the door, and we sat on the bed together. I asked her if she was sure, and she said she was. Then we consummated the relationship.”

A
s April passed, Tracey’s time at Timberlawn drew
to a close. Her insurance was running out and she had to return to Austin. Days before she was scheduled to leave Dallas, she found a new therapist, Barbara Grant, a middle-age, kindly faced woman with graying hair. Milholland seemed pleased with the progress she was making, but Tracey was apprehensive at the prospect of reclaiming her life. Not only was she worried about relapsing, but she feared the repercussions of leaving her new lover. The relationship, as she saw it, was as brittle and volatile as Celeste, whose moods surged and subsided as quickly as a changing breeze. Tracey thought the reason lay with Celeste’s unfamiliarity with a gay relationship. “I thought she was conflicted,” she says. “But I never felt like I was forcing her to have sex. With the separation looming, she was even more passionate, saying she didn’t want me to go.”

There was, however, a recurring issue with their sex life. “I could feel Celeste pull back before orgasm,” says Tracey. “I worried about that. I wanted her to enjoy it. She said she
felt guilty about enjoying any type of sex, because of her abuse.” Understanding as only someone who has suffered such abuse as a child can, Tracey held Celeste as she sobbed, crying over what she described as the horrible violation of her childhood.

As sympathetic as she was, however, this was an issue on which Tracey wouldn’t bend. “I wasn’t interested in a platonic friendship,” she says. “If we were lovers, I expected it to include sex.” At times, when Celeste rebuffed her advances, Tracey grew angry, threatening to cut off the affair. When she did, Celeste apologized and pledged her love. Losing Tracey would send her into a spiral, Celeste said, since she counted on their relationship to keep her alive. “I loved Celeste,” Tracey says. “I didn’t want her to die.”

As Tracey got ready to leave for Austin, Celeste checked back into the day program. She told her therapist, Bernard Gotway, that she hadn’t been able to sleep. When he saw her, Gotway wrote in his notes:
“Patient presents rather superficial and avoidant, saying that the anxiety is manageable. She is irritable and focusing on extraneous issues.”

“Structure your days at home,” Milholland told Tracey that same day. After a phone conference with the owners at BookPeople, Tracey was near panic at the prospect of returning to work. She feared she’d be unable to maintain her tentative hold on calm in the outside world. The voice was quiet and her medications seemed to be working better than they had, but she still suffered tremors and fits of anxiety. Would her meds keep the voice still? Although she hadn’t told her counselors, she was drinking again.

“Work, walk your dog,” the therapist said. “Don’t give yourself free time to panic.”

The next day, armed with prescriptions for lithium, Wellbutrin, Neurotin, and other drugs, she said good-bye to Celeste. She was going home to Austin. “We didn’t know how
much we’d see each other,” Tracey says. “We were both worried.”

In Austin, Steve tried to keep the twins’ home lives stable, watching over them, checking to make sure they did their homework. He looked into colleges, visiting one or two, and resurrected a tradition from the years he raised his first brood: Wednesday hamburger nights. One night a week they were allowed to bring friends home. He grilled burgers with all the fixings, and they spent evenings talking and catching up. It was easy to see he enjoyed the occasions. When his banker, Chuck Fuqua, stopped in for a burger, Steve was in good humor, laughing and telling stories about the years when he was just getting started in business. “He looked like a single dad with a houseful of kids,” says Chuck.

In his black leather family date book, Steve faithfully recorded Celeste’s arrivals and departures. For much of 1999, she’d been gone, living at St. David’s, then Timberlawn, then the Sumner Suites and attending day sessions at Timberlawn. He’d married Celeste for companionship, but she was rarely with him. Instead, he had the twins and their friends filling the house. If the marriage ended, he didn’t want to lose them all.

“If your mother and I divorce, will you live with me?” he asked one morning.

“I will,” Jennifer said readily.

For Kristina the decision was more difficult. Since childhood, she yearned for a mother’s love. So much so that she’d chosen Celeste over their father. Now, with Craig dead, that decision haunted her. Yet, she couldn’t free herself from Celeste’s grasp. “You’re the one I love,” her mother had told her. “Jennifer doesn’t love me the way you do, Kristina. We’re more than mother and daughter.”

In her heart, Kristina believed that; in fact, she wanted it
to be true. Yet such faith came at a terrible cost. Celeste forced her to lie and cover up for her, to not acknowledge the pain she caused. Kristina loved Steve, and now, as Celeste had with all her other husbands, she was being unfaithful. And Kristina said nothing.

When it came to money, Kristina understood only too well that Celeste was ruthless. Despite having access to all the money she could need, Celeste pocketed the little Kristina made working at her part-time job as a mail girl. “Lend me a little,” she said. Kristina did, but her mother never repaid her. The only way Kristina kept any money was to open a bank account and have it automatically deposited. The teenager even went so far as to find a bank that put her picture on her ATM card so Celeste couldn’t use it.

No one doubted the damage the conflict inside Kristina was doing to her. Jennifer and Justin worried about her, as she lost so much weight her collarbones protruded. With each visit to Timberlawn, Kristina came away more disillusioned. For a mother who said she loved her more than anyone else in the world, Celeste treated her like a servant.

Jennifer and Steve were both waiting for her to answer Steve. If he divorced Celeste, would Kristina stay with him or choose her mother, as she always had in the past?

It was then that Kristina realized Steve had given her the one thing she’d always wanted and never had: a stable home with a loving parent.

“I’ll stay with you, too,” Kristina told him, marshaling every particle of courage inside her. Then she and Jen hugged the man who’d truly become their father.

Life was less tranquil that week at Timberlawn. While they’d let her transgressions slide in the past, a nurse discovered Celeste had a cigarette lighter, and in a facility with suicidal patients, it couldn’t be ignored. Instead of apologizing, Celeste
cursed the nurse and fumed at being caught. She threatened to leave the program and go home to Austin, but returned to the day program. From then on she flitted back and forth between the resident and day programs. It seemed Celeste had no desire to return to Austin and Steve. The arrangement, in fact, suited her well.

During the day, she attended sessions at the clinic, taking voluminous notes like a high school student studying for a test:
“Beliefs create expectations. Feeling better does not equal getting better. Consciousness is the only game in town. If I can learn from my mistakes, it is more probable that the future can change.”
And at night she did as she pleased. She had her suite at the hotel, her freedom, and her credit cards. She even had the cream-colored Cadillac with gold trim Steve had bought her. It had every amenity, from leather seats to an OnStar navigation system. When it was dusty, she asked another of the day patients to take it to the car wash for her. When they returned, she handed them a tip, a crisp $100 bill.

Although Timberlawn’s patients often remained only weeks in outpatient care, Celeste arranged to continue for months, rotating in and out of the hospital, with one crisis after another. With Steve paying the bills, there was no worry that insurance would be cut off. In her chart, a therapist noted that Celeste would be staying on for an unspecified period “to work on the hard issues.”

Just days after she left Dallas, Tracey returned to BookPeople. At the store, she bought Celeste a note card with a jumping dog.
“You are so beautiful,”
she wrote. “I
think about your long, silky body and your incredible long legs and I just can’t stand it. And then I think of your incredible face and I want to get in my car and drive to Dallas …please take care of yourself, do your work, and get better. I love you, T.”

Despite Tracey’s fears, it would turn out that their separations were short.

In the leather family date book, Steve wrote “Celeste Home” on Saturdays. He didn’t know she actually left Dallas on Fridays. When Celeste flew into Austin, Tracey picked her up at the airport and brought her to her house for the night. The following morning, Kristina came for her, telling Steve she’d picked her up at the airport. One morning, when no one at Tracey’s answered, Kristina used a key she’d been given to watch over the cats while Tracey was at Timberlawn. She’d often asked her mother where she slept at Tracey’s—since only one bedroom had a bed—and Celeste always answered on the couch. But that day Kristina found the two women in bed and under the covers together; her mother, who always wore pink pajamas at home, had bare shoulders and her head on Tracey’s shoulder.

After a lifetime of looking the other way, Kristina found it a hard habit to break. “I tried not to think about it,” she says. Her mother had told her that Tracey was in love with her. “She’s a bull dyke,” Celeste said, laughing like it was the most hilarious of jokes.

Saturdays in Austin, Celeste ran between appointments, having her nails and hair done and shopping. Evenings, she had dinner and cocktails with Steve. After he passed out, she left, driving herself or having the teens drop her at Jimmy’s or Tracey’s.

On Sundays she flew back to Dallas for another week of sessions at Timberlawn.

In many ways Celeste’s life was increasingly complicated. Where in the past she’d only had Steve and Jimmy to juggle, Tracey was now added to the mix. To keep track, Celeste kept a purse-size date book far from Steve’s eyes. On the calendar pages, she scribbled her plans, the ones that didn’t
include him. She also recorded appointments she made for Tracey:
“Tracey haircut 4:00, Tracey dermatologist 1:15.”

At Tramps, Denise, Celeste’s hairdresser, put highlights in Tracey’s hair, and Terry Meyer, her manicurist, preened her nails. Tracey’s staff noticed the change. Their bohemian leader started showing up with manicured nails, carrying a purse, and in freshly pressed Ralph Lauren shirts. More than one noted that they were pink, not knowing that since childhood that had been Celeste’s signature color.

Her gay friends, too, started talking about the changes in Tracey when she and Celeste attended a beer garden fundraiser for Project Transitions, an AIDS hospice. Decked out in a Dale Evans cowgirl outfit with a flared skirt, Celeste had bought Tracey a matching cowboy shirt with pearl snaps, something Tracey would have ridiculed in the past. Throughout the evening, she fawned over Celeste, lighting her cigarettes and running to get her drinks. “It was like Tracey was putty and Celeste was rebuilding her,” says Pat Brooks. “She didn’t even look like Tracey anymore.”

As usual, Celeste entertained the table. Wielding an imaginary spatula in one hand and a glass of vodka in the other, she blew out her cheeks to look fat and mimicked Steve flipping burgers. The entire time, she tittered with delight at her own cleverness.

On the weekends, however, when Celeste sat in Denise’s chair, it wasn’t Steve she ridiculed, but Tracey. “That dyke’s in love with me,” she told Denise, laughing. “I told her, I don’t eat at the Y.”

As summer descended on Austin, bringing with it blinding sunshine and intense heat, the twins and their friends wondered about Celeste’s new relationship. Christopher, Amy, Justin, and Jennifer had all seen the signs, the way the
two women looked at each other, the way they touched. “It didn’t look platonic,” says Amy.

The two boys, in particular, worried. They both had sinking feelings watching Celeste that summer. She seemed to be running too hot, as if she were headed toward a fall. “Save your money and I’ll pay for things,” Christopher told Jennifer. “You never know with Celeste when you’ll need it.” After all she’d been through with her mother, Jennifer didn’t doubt that he was right. For months she’d worked part-time at Anita’s investment firm. From that point on she deposited every dollar she made in a secret bank account.

Of them all, it was Kristina who couldn’t bring herself to address Celeste’s relationship with Tracey. In a sense, she told herself, it just didn’t matter. From the beginning she’d liked Tracey more than Jimmy or many of the other men Celeste had paraded in and out of their lives. It seemed to her that Celeste’s other friends only cared for her because she showered them with expensive gifts. Tracey, on the other hand, didn’t appear to want anything material from Celeste. “She just seemed like a sad but a good person,” says Kristina.

So, one night when Celeste called from Timberlawn saying Tracey had a gun and was threatening suicide, Kristina didn’t hesitate to drive to Tracey’s house in the family Expedition to stop her. When she arrived, Tracey sat at the kitchen table with two pistols beside her.

“I’m depressed,” she told Kristina. “I’d really just like to end it and die.”

They talked until Tracey went outside to smoke a cigarette. Judging that was her opportunity, Kristina picked up the guns. When Tracey returned, Kristina said good-bye, and quickly left. Before driving home, she found a squad car with two officers along the side of a road. Keeping her hands on the steering
wheel, she said, “I have two guns on the floor that I took away from a woman who was threatening suicide.”

They confiscated the guns, and Kristina went home to bed.

The first weekend in May was the girls’ senior prom. That evening, Celeste and Steve stood together on the driveway in front of the house to wave as the girls left with their dates. To the world, they looked like proud parents watching their daughters depart on one of the most memorable events of their young lives. But as soon as Steve passed out, Celeste left, this time to Jimmy’s. The next morning, when the girls picked her up, she bragged about the sex. “Jimmy had me up all night,” she said. When Steve asked where she’d been, she told him she’d spent the night with the twins at the lake house.