As 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.
The weeks were so busy she had little time for Steve. The following Friday she and Tracey met Pat and Jane at the City Grill to celebrate Tracey’s birthday. Celeste brought a present, a beautiful stainless steel watch, and a card. The standard Hallmark variety, the greeting card bore a flowered heart and the words: “A Birthday Message for the One I Love.” The inside verse read: “For bringing love to my world …And happiness to my heart …For making every day seem like a special dream come true …I hope your birthday and the year to come is filled with everything wonderful. Happy Birthday.”
She signed it: “Love, Celeste.”
Celeste gave Pat, who was celebrating her own birthday, a hundred-dollar gift certificate to an upscale hardware store. That night, Celeste and Tracey were animated, talking about their plans to attend Tracey’s niece’s wedding in Atlanta.
“I told her she doesn’t have to come,” Tracey said. “These family things aren’t fun.”
“I want to be there,” Celeste insisted.
That she spent so little time with Steve must have gnawed at him. The next night, he was in a foul mood. When he woke up about 10:00 P.M., the twins were out and, for once, Celeste was home asleep. Nearly every light in the house was on. It was a minor thing, but he was a careful man who had a routine, walking through the house at bedtime to turn off lights and arm the security system. To him, it must have seemed an insult.
Angry and hurt, he shouted at Celeste, challenging her to go back to Dallas. As he saw it, she didn’t intend to spend any time with him. Enraged, Celeste left and drove back a day early. The following morning he called her at the Sumner Suites, saying that if she wanted a divorce she could have one. He was through with the marriage. That day, she wrote him a letter, blaming him for the incident. Although she spiked his cocktails, she wrote, “I think your drinking is out of control.” Then she begged him: “Steve, I love you with all of my heart. If you truly want a divorce, then please tell me on Thursday when we meet with Dr. Gotway. I will have shown him a copy of this letter, so that he is apprised as to our current status. Please don’t have me served while I am in the hospital. Tell me face to face on Thursday. I think I at least deserve that much. Love, Celeste.”
It was a tactic that had worked well in the past. When Harald refused to marry her, she’d taken him to a counselor who had urged him to trust her. The following day, Steve called Gotway, maintaining he didn’t really want a divorce but that Celeste avoided him. Gotway suggested Steve calm down and think about his actions, that perhaps it wasn’t the time to make such a drastic decision.
In Austin, Celeste dominated Tracey’s thoughts. Whether at work or at home with her dog, Wren, she couldn’t get her out of her mind. Days after Steve talked with Gotway, Tracey mailed Celeste a card. On the front were two women and a dog. Inside she wrote: “I woke up missing you with a fever better reserved for the dying. I woke up missing you and nothing I could do would shake it. Feeling like that, I would lie down and die just to smell your skin…I love you. T.”
At BookPeople, Tracey combed the shelves and mailed Celeste books on sex, especially those that discussed putting past abuse behind to enjoy a healthy sex life. In a card, she expressed her discontent with the way Celeste pulled back before orgasm: “I want to be part of your healing as we, together, explore ways to make you comfortable being intimate with me. I love you, T.”
Steve, too, must have wondered about Celeste’s sexuality, but for different reasons. One afternoon, on a weekend when she was home, he came right out and asked her something that must have been percolating within him for months, perhaps because he’d heard her talk so much of Tracey.
“Celeste, are you a lesbian?” he asked.
“I can’t believe you asked me that,” she shrieked. Then she got in the car and left, driving back to Timberlawn, where she didn’t have to answer to him.
The following weekend, on Friday, May 21, Tracey flew into Atlanta and attended her niece’s rehearsal dinner. Celeste joined her the next day. In the wedding photos, Celeste looked prim and proper in a light blue suit with matching buttons. Her blond hair was swept up, bangs brushed her forehead, and tendrils hung down her cheeks. She wore a blue sapphire pendant, and her diamond ring glistened on her hand.
Weeks before, Celeste had taken Tracey to the St. Thomas shop at Austin’s posh Arboretum to choose the black suit she wore that day. An Armani, it cost $1,200, well above Tracey’s budget on her $55,000 salary. “It was an expense the old Tracey wouldn’t even have considered,” says Pat. “But with Celeste, there were no boundaries.”
The wedding went well, and at the reception Tracey felt her family was accepting Celeste as her new girlfriend. But that night, when they went to the hotel bar, they hooked up with a group from the wedding and before long Celeste became the life of the party. She bragged about her rich husband, telling the women that her blue suit cost $2,200, then matched the men drink for drink, until she was visibly drunk. With the men in the bar egging her on, she opened her blouse and flashed her breasts. Embarrassed, Tracey urged Celeste to follow her upstairs to their hotel room. “Don’t worry about these people,” Tracey whispered to Celeste. “It doesn’t matter.”
At BookPeople, Tracey’s staff had come to recognize Celeste, coming and going from the store. When she was in Austin on the weekends, she dropped by often, stopping on the fourth floor, where she’d walk into Tracey’s office and close the door. Often, Celeste called. If someone were with her, Tracey waved them off and closed the door behind them. None doubted that the two women were lovers.
Twice a year Tracey threw a party for her managers. In the past it had always been at her house on Wilson, a casual affair consisting of deli trays and a keg of beer. The talk was about books and concerts, and the mood relaxed. In July, Tracey told Celeste she planned to throw a summer party, and Celeste had an idea.
“Let’s do it at the lake house, and I’ll do it for you,” she said.
Tracey wasn’t sure; a full thirty-five miles from Austin, without speeding, it took nearly an hour down winding roads to get there, and after dark the turns were easy to miss. But Celeste insisted, and Tracey gave in.
Invitations went out announcing: “Tracey’s ‘Fashion-Victim Party,’ Come dressed in your fashion don’t and spend the evening laughing and cavorting with your coworkers. Friday, July 9, 1999, at the Beard Retreat, 101 Bedford Drive, Spicewood, TX.” It was an odd fit for a group that cared more about literature than fashion, but Tracey didn’t question Celeste’s concept. Spending thousands, Celeste hired a caterer, a bartender, and even a photographer. Guests arrived early that evening, and the first found Celeste and Tracey dressing. Another walked in a bedroom and discovered the two women kissing. Without saying a word, she backed out of the room.
Music blared and the hot tub churned as the bartender served drinks and waiters passed trays of hors d’oeuvres. Earlier in the week Celeste had asked Tracey to arrange for one of the women to bring marijuana brownies, even giving her money to pay for the marijuana. When they arrived, she took the plate and placed it on the table with the other food. Fueled by the pot, Celeste was in a grandiose mood. That night, Cindy Light, the same photographer who’d shot pictures at Steve and Celeste’s open house on Toro Canyon, snapped photos of Celeste on Tracey’s lap, a vodka in one hand and a brownie in the other, along with pictures of the two women dancing, nuzzling, and kissing.
About eleven, Tracey and Celeste walked into the master bedroom and locked the door. As their guests partied outside, Celeste whispered, “After Steve’s dead, we can live here together and wake up together each morning.”
It was something Tracey dreamed of: to live freely with the woman she loved.
The crowd had already cleared out the following morning when Kristina and Justin arrived to clean up, as Celeste had ordered. The tables were covered with half-full glasses and overflowing ashtrays. The bedroom door was locked and the house quiet. Wanting to wake Celeste, they opened and closed doors, but heard no one stir, so they left and drove to a convenience store to buy breakfast burritos they ate next to the lake. When they returned, the bedroom door was unlocked. Appearing to be naked under the covers, Tracey and Celeste lay together in bed, their heads touching. Silently, the teens left the room.
Minutes later Celeste and Tracey emerged, Celeste laughing about the party. “I can’t believe I ate all those pot brownies,” she said.
There’d been other indications that summer that the relationship between the two women wasn’t platonic, but Kristina hadn’t wanted to address them. Even the sight of them in bed which she’d seen before, was something she refused to consider. But the night they went to a movie together, she was once again confronted with it.
That evening, she and Justin went with Tracey and Celeste to see The Love Letter, directed by the actress Kate Capshaw. The plot centered on a found love letter. The teens grew bored and left. Later, Celeste and Tracey emerged laughing.
“How was the movie?” Kristina asked.
“The plot was, ‘Oh relax, your mother’s a lesbian,’” Celeste said, and laughed.
“Is that a hint?” Kristina asked Justin when they were alone. For months he’d been prodding her, but she hadn’t wanted to confront what was obvious: that Celeste and Tracey were lovers.
“It could be,” he said.
Not for the first time, Kristina was ambivient about it. She liked Tracey, after all. More than once when Celeste screamed for reasons that included not liking the way she and Jennifer looked at her, Tracey defended them. It cost dearly, as Celeste then turned her wrath on Tracey instead of the girls, but she never backed down. Tracey had grown to respect Kristina, too. She saw her as an old soul, a girl who was more woman than her mother. She also found the relationship between the mother and daughter intriguing. Wherever Celeste went, whether the beauty parlor or her appointments with her therapist, Kristina nearly always checked on her, just to make sure she was all right.
“It was like there was an unsevered umbilical cord,” says Tracey.
In many ways, Tracey made Kristina’s life easier. She was someone Celeste trusted and counted on, filling the space Kristina had always occupied—as her mother’s keeper. With Celeste busy, for the first time the girls did the things normal teenagers take for granted. “Everyone goes to movies, but to us it was a big deal,” says Jennifer. “Mom never gave us the time off to do that before.”
Tracey was also someone who took the responsibility for Celeste’s survival off Kristina. By that summer, although she’d kept her hotel room, Celeste was in Dallas infrequently. At times, when she was home, she’d languish in bed all day, saying she was depressed. When Kristina couldn’t get her up and dressed, she called Tracey. Twice while Steve was away from the house, Tracey went to Toro Canyon to coax Celeste from bed. “I can’t stand living with him. Death would be a relief,” Celeste told her.
Whenever Celeste talked of suicide, Tracey’s chest clamped up, like someone had a stranglehold on her heart.
As July drew to a close, Steve must have felt the end of his days as a single dad were finally in sight. After three months, Celeste was checking out of Timberlawn and coming home. Through it all, she’d maintained that she loved him and wanted to be with him. On Father’s Day she even gave him a beautiful sapphire ring. Maybe he believed she truly loved him, for that summer he told a friend, “All we need is time together to reconnect.”
The Friday she took the twins and Amy to Dallas to help her move out of the Sumner Suites, however, she had no intention of leaving without one last fling. Telling Steve they were spending the weekend at Six Flags, an amusement park with acres of roller coasters and rides, she didn’t mention that Justin and Christopher were going along, or that she’d invited Jimmy Martinez and his two nieces.
The ride there was a wild one; Celeste sped along the highway in the Expedition while Jimmy and his nieces followed. She was in one of her wild, talkative moods, entertaining the teens with stories, then rattling off her ex-husbands’ social security numbers, like the answers to unasked Trivial Pursuit questions. She even dropped an enticing tidbit none of them had heard before: She said she’d had a secret husband—one she had never even told the twins about. “We were married just a couple of weeks and then had it annulled,” Celeste said. The teens were intrigued, yet it was something else Celeste said that day that later resonated for Amy.
“You know, when Steve dies, I’ll play the part. I’ll cry and mourn,” she said, laughing as if the thought of his death filled her with delight. “I’m such a good actress that no one will ever suspect that I never loved him.”
Not long after they returned home to Austin, Celeste called Tracey and asked her to do something for her. “Buy some Everclear,” she said. “Kristina’s bringing Steve’s vodka bottles over. Pour out half the vodka and fill them up.”
At the time, Tracey thought little about it. After all, Celeste had been spiking Steve’s drinks for years, and she wasn’t the one handing him the cocktails. Later, that day would seem more significant. She’d recognize it as the first time Celeste enlisted her aid in her quest to hasten Steve to his grave.