“Give one of those doughnuts to Tracey,” Celeste told Kristina, motioning at a rumpled woman with shaggy hair who sat off in a corner in St. David’s day room.
“Here,” Kristina said, holding out the box to the woman. “Help yourself.”
Appearing dazed, her eyes clouded with tears, Tracey glanced up at her, pulled out a frosted doughnut and placed it beside her. She said, “Thank you,” but never took a bite. Something in the way Tracey looked, devastated by life, tugged at Kristina. “I felt sorry for her,” she says. “She just hung her head and sobbed.”
The black and white notebook Tracey used as her journal at St. David’s reflected the pain that haunted her. On the first page she wrote:
In the name of Jesus, shame & fear & doubt must leave.
Jesus, give me peace in the storm. Calm my fears.
Perhaps what touched Kristina was Tracey’s desperation. It was a stark contrast to Celeste’s attitude since arriving at St. David’s.
Despite the seriousness of her diagnosis—depression and suicidal ideation—Celeste acted more like a hotel guest than a patient since the first day she entered the hospital. She’d held a gun to her head, saying she was in so much pain only death could bring relief. But she treated the staff not like professionals she prayed would help her but as servants charged with doing her bidding. She even refused to eat the food, insisting that the teens and Steve bring her meals. At breakfast, Kristina stopped at IHOP for carryout waffles, pancakes, or eggs. That wasn’t enough. In addition, Celeste wanted doughnuts for the other patients. Kristina did as she was told.
Steve brought lunch. If he couldn’t, Justin, who took classes across the street from the hospital at Concordia College, filled in. In his heart, it wasn’t for Celeste, but for Kristina. By then they’d grown to be more than friends. They were in love, and Justin wanted Kristina to do well, something Celeste rarely paid attention to. Due to their mother keeping the twins from school, both were behind and wouldn’t graduate that May. Instead they hoped to attend summer school to graduate in August. The turmoil of the hospitalization and Celeste’s demands threatened to make even that impossible. “She didn’t seem to care about what was important for them,” says Justin.
Evenings, Steve arrived with dinner. Tracey saw his round, robust figure lumbering through the hallways with a plastic carryout box or a dish from home. She wondered about the old man and his young wife. They seemed such an odd pairing.
At home, Jen was relieved to have their mother away. But the hospitalization devastated Kristina. She worried about her constantly. She barely ate and couldn’t sleep. “Kristina was genuinely frightened,” says Anita. “She had a hard time concentrating on anything else. She was devoted to Celeste, and having her sick threw her into a panic.”
Meanwhile, Celeste displayed no such qualms about her own health. Within days of her arrival she acted as if she’d forgotten the suicide attempt that had brought her there. Instead, she spent much of her day avoiding therapy and complaining. Along with the quality of the food, she disdained the housekeeping service. “I ought to bring in my maid,” she told a nurse. “The place is a fucking pigsty.”
Tracey and the other patients laughed as Celeste ridiculed the staff. At times she imitated the way they walked or talked. “She just honed right in on people,” says Tracey.
As always, Celeste flaunted Steve’s money, bragging that instead of insurance, like the other patients, she was paying cash. Somehow, she convinced the nurses and orderlies to look the other way as she disregarded the rules. Visitors weren’t allowed in patient rooms and treatment areas, but when Justin and the other teens arrived, they were waved through the electric security doors. “I heard one of the nurses say, ‘Those are the special kids,’” says Justin. “Celeste said she’d made arrangements.”
Suspicious of the way she was acting, one day Justin asked Celeste why she was there. She didn’t mince words, replying, “I spent so much money, I don’t know where it went, and I’m worried about Steve leaving me.”
At St. David’s, patients’ days were devoted to therapy, working through the crises that brought them to the brink of suicide. An acute care facility, it emphasized stabilization. “They tried to maintain us until they could get us into another facility,” says one patient. “It was emergency care, not long-term therapy.”
In between sessions, patients who smoked congregated outside in a fenced yard near construction for a new medical office. It was there that Tracey and Celeste talked for the first time. Tracey noticed Celeste’s little girl voice, with its soft lisp and the way she clipped off each word. Later, Tracey would say that even during that initial conversation, Celeste flirted openly with her. “She came on strong,” she says. “We were both on heavy meds, but even then the attraction was there.”
Curious, Tracey asked why Celeste was there, and Celeste told her about her suicide threat, then blamed her depression on Steve. She described him as overbearing and abusive. When Tracey asked why she stayed with him, Celeste said she was afraid to leave: He had power and money, and—despite the fact that he was the one threatening divorce—she insisted that he told her that he’d never let her go. “I never thought he’d live this long,” Celeste complained. “I despise him.”
Celeste went on to tell her that she had first married Steve after he helped her get custody of the twins. “I thought that was noble, that she’d given up her life for her daughters,” says Tracey.
While Celeste was a distraction at St. David’s, Tracey continued to wrestle with her own demons. A week after arriving she wrote in her journal: “I’m being treated now with antipsychotic drugs and tranquilizers to try to quiet the voices in my head. They are very insistent about suicide …I am afraid what I would do if left to my own devices.”
While Tracey fought to reclaim her sanity, Pat talked with the owners at BookPeople, making sure they’d keep Tracey’s job open for her. They agreed, and then Jane searched for a long-term facility for Tracey, one where she could finally unburden herself of her past. For her part, Tracey had heard of Hazelden, a Minnesota facility that specialized in treating patients with addictions. She was distraught when it turned her down, judging her too great a suicide risk. “I am in the depths of sorrow and despair,” she wrote.
In group sessions, Tracey talked of her childhood, including the sexual abuse, and listened sympathetically as Celeste recounted her past. “We seemed to have a lot of shared experience,” says Tracey. “I never questioned those things had happened to her.”
In St. David’s, Celeste’s allegations mushroomed. Now, not only did she contend that her father sexually abused her, but also that she’d been raped by one of her brothers and Craig. “It was a lie,” her brother Cole would say later. “Just like the things she said about our dad. The most that ever happened was the normal show-and-tell stuff little kids do.”
Photos from St. David’s would later document the bond that developed between Celeste and Tracey. Reclining on a couch in one, Celeste had her legs stretched across Tracey’s lap. In another, Tracey’s arm draped over Celeste’s shoulder. “When we’d visit, Celeste spent most of her time talking about Tracey,” says Kristina. “She’d talk about how they were friends, how funny Tracey was. She said she was gay.”
One day, Tracey would later say, the relationship took a turn. “Celeste followed me into my room,” she says. “She kissed me on the lips.”
Tracey kissed her back. From that point on there were stolen moments behind cabinets, in their rooms, wherever they had a moment of privacy. They kissed and touched, Tracey slipping her hands over Celeste’s breasts. “Celeste didn’t pull away,” says Tracey. “She touched me back.”
At other times they simply talked, telling each other about their lives, much of Celeste’s conversation centering on Steve. “He’s smothering me,” she told Tracey. “He’s the biggest issue in my life. I can’t breathe with him watching everything I do. At times I think my only escape is suicide.”
Growing to hate a man she’d only seen in passing, Tracey told her not to give up. “He’s not worth it,” she said. “And one day he’ll be gone and you’ll be free.”
A week earlier, Tracey had entered St. David’s a shell, so empty she hadn’t wanted to live. Without realizing it was happening, Tracey was quickly filled by Celeste with expectations for the future. It was obvious to Pat and Jane that Tracey was entranced. When they called, she spent little time talking about therapy, just Celeste. “She’s gorgeous,” she told them. “Smart and funny. I want you to meet her.”
Jane cautioned her, telling Tracey to consider where they’d met and that she needed to realize she and Celeste were both not well. “Concentrate on getting better, on your therapy,” she said. “Not on this woman.”
Her advice went unheeded. Days later, Tracey and Celeste had passes to leave St. David’s for a dinner out. Pat and Jane pulled into the hospital parking lot to pick them up. When they saw a flashy woman in a fur coat and big jewelry smoking a cigarette near the door, Jane said, “I bet that’s her.”
Pat shook her head. “Can’t be,” she insisted.
Minutes later Tracey appeared and took the woman by the arm to bring her over to the car. “I want you to meet Celeste,” she said.
Dinner was strained. Other patients from St. David’s joined them in the small restaurant, and Pat felt ill at ease surrounded by people who appeared heavily medicated. She found Celeste amusing if odd. Much of the night she complained about Steve, calling him names and saying that he controlled her life.
Days later Celeste and Tracey made another public appearance, this time at BookPeople. On day passes, Tracey wanted to show her around the store, a place she loved. As soon as they entered, a small group of her floor managers gathered around. They hadn’t told the staff that Tracey was in a psychiatric hospital, only that she was ill, and they didn’t want them to see the drug-dazed look in her eyes. An argument ensued and Tracey’s voice rose, until Celeste grabbed her by the arm. As the others watched, Celeste drew Tracey to the side and chastised her. Afterward, Tracey, looking embarrassed, apologized, and then both the women turned and left.
Soon, rumors spread through BookPeople and Austin’s gay community that Tracey Tarlton had a new lover, a tall, beautiful, rich, married woman named Celeste Beard.
If Celeste initiated the relationship, Tracey latched on quickly. If nothing else, Celeste was a tantalizing distraction from the crisis that had brought her to St. David’s. At times, Celeste entertained her with stories of the things she’d done to Steve. He was a despicable man, she said, one who deserved to be drugged and given Everclear. When she described how he’d once passed out in the closet, she imitated him so comically, splayed out and bloated, Tracey laughed as Celeste chortled wildly at the memory. “When I get frustrated, I cut myself. I’ve tried to slit my wrists,” she said. “Steve’s an old man and he’s going to die soon, but not soon enough. If I can help him along, that’s a good thing. When he dies, I get it all, all the money.”
“I thought you didn’t marry him for the money,” Tracey replied.
“I didn’t, but he’ll never let me go until he’s dead,” she said. “If he dies, at least I’ll be a rich woman. And if that doesn’t happen, I’m just going to kill myself. At least if I kill myself, I’ll be some trouble for him.”
Pain was something Tracey understood. On Sunday, March 14, she wrote:
“I think that my left arm goes numb as a response to bad memories. I’ve noticed two times that were associated with some kind of Mickey behavior. Once when a girl on our unit wailed and another time when I noticed a cigarette burning in an ashtray, a long cigarette just left there to burn down. I wonder if she shook me by my arms—I seem to remember she did that often, or at least when I was little, but I can’t bring it up clearly.
“MY SHAME AND MY SELF-BLAME BLOCK ME FROM MY GOOD SELF.”
Despite the insights, Tracey’s future remained uncertain. Jane told her about the Menninger Clinic, a renowned treatment center outside Topeka, Kansas. They accepted her, and two weeks after arriving at St. David’s, on March 6, Tracey was released into Pat’s care. Before she left, Celeste kissed her good-bye and promised to convince Steve to send her to Menninger as well. “The plan was that we would be roommates, free to explore the relationship,” says Tracey.
On the plane to Kansas City she was heavily medicated and talked little. At one point she turned to Pat and asked, “Do you think this is the right thing for me?”
“Yes,” Pat told her. “It is.”
But when they drove up to the clinic, Pat grew worried. The facility reminded her of the haunted hotel in the old Jack Nicholson movie The Shining. In a rural setting, the hospital looked dreary and depressing. Inside, patients shuffled down the halls. “It felt foreboding,” she says. “I hated leaving Tracey there.”
By then Celeste had left St. David’s and returned home to Steve and the girls. Her mood seemed little improved by her time away, and she and Steve argued bitterly. “She didn’t want to be there,” says Jennifer.
With the girls, she initiated the “Rule,” an edict that banned them from being gone from the house at the same time. “We had to make sure one of us was home every evening and on weekends,” says Kristina. “Celeste didn’t want to be alone with Steve.”
On March 8, two days after Tracey checked into Menninger, Celeste met with her psychiatrist, Dr. Michele Hauser, a prim and perfectly coiffed woman with dark brown, chin-length hair. A graduate of Tufts University Medical School, Hauser had served her residency at Atlanta’s esteemed Emory University. After assessing Celeste, Hauser diagnosed her as narcissistic and histrionic and agreed with a former diagnosis that Celeste displayed a cluster of personality disorders.
Two days later Celeste returned to Hauser for another appointment. “I’m afraid Steve will commit me and divorce me,” she told her doctor, crying. Unsaid was that if that happened, she would be left with nothing beyond her half share of the houses and personal property. There would be no big settlement and no alimony.
That night, Kristina found Celeste in a stupor. She hurriedly called 911, fearing her mother had downed a handful of pills. Again, for the second time in a month, an ambulance pulled in front of the Toro Canyon house. At midnight, after her stomach was pumped, Celeste was again checked into St. David’s. Once there, she shrieked that she wanted the nurses to call Dr. Hauser. She screamed at Kristina, and then, at 1:30 A.M., announced, “I’m going to shower now. That’s just the kind of bitch I am.”
The next day in Menninger, Tracey wrote in her diary: “Celeste is back at St. David’s. She tried to kill herself.” Tracey would later say that she knew so quickly because Celeste called once or twice a day. But by then Tracey was battling her own wars. Compared to St. David’s, Menninger seemed a bleak place that aggravated her depression. “It was just a bad match,” she says. “I wanted out.”
In Austin, Celeste was quickly released from St. David’s. At her first meeting with Hauser after the suicide attempt, she told the physician she believed she needed inpatient therapy and asked about Menninger. She failed to mention that she had a relationship with a woman already there. By then Steve, too, had apparently come to the conclusion that the only hope for Celeste was an intensive program where she could work through her problems. Despite all she’d put him through, he hadn’t given up on her.
That night on the phone, Tracey explained how much she hated Menninger. She described it as depressing, cold, and unfriendly. If not Menninger, they would need another alternative. Celeste brought up a posh Houston clinic, but Tracey had been there in the eighties, when she first quit drinking, and she didn’t want to return. Then Celeste told her about Timberlawn, a clinic Steve had found outside Dallas. Tracey had heard of the facility and knew it had a good reputation.
“Celeste and I made a pact; I’d transfer to Timberlawn and she’d join me there,” says Tracey. “If all went well, we’d be able to share a room.”
Weeks earlier, Tracey and Celeste had been strangers, but by mid-March 1999 their lives were melding. On March 14, Celeste sent Tracey a card. The front bore a rising sun and the note: “You’re in my thoughts.” Inside, in her fluid half printing, half writing style, Celeste scrawled a note: “It’s hard to think of something to write because I speak with you so often. My hopes are to see you soon and explore our friendship! You are in my thoughts and please take care of yourself. Love, Celeste.”
In the days that followed, Tracey made arrangements to transfer to Timberlawn. Finally, on March 19, Celeste went to her Austin travel agent’s office and purchased two e-tickets between Kansas City and Dallas for Tracey and an attendant from Menninger, charging them on her credit card. Considered a suicide risk, Tracey wasn’t allowed to travel alone.
Arriving at Timberlawn buoyed Tracey’s spirits. While Menninger felt oppressive, Timberlawn’s parklike campus— a white Georgian colonial main building surrounded by satellite centers—gave her a sense of peace. Founded in 1917, the hospital began at a time when the chronically mentally ill were being released from prisons to long-term treatment centers. Eighty years earlier the stately white building had been a half day’s buggy ride outside of downtown Dallas. By the time Tracey arrived, the city had grown up around it. Timberlawn had a national reputation for its post-traumatic stress disorder program. Begun after World War II to treat vets, it catered to patients suffering from all forms of PTSD, including the trauma of early childhood abuse.
“I’ve had issues since childhood that have manifested into substance abuse,” Tracey told her admitting counselor on March 20, 1999. The diagnosis she brought with her from Menninger listed PTSD and bipolar disorder, in which moods swung rapidly from euphoria to depression. “Before St. David’s, I was playing Russian roulette for five nights straight,” she said. She then added that her problems had started in 1998, when she’d begun drinking again. Tracey described her clash with Reginald Breaux, the man she’d picked up at the convenience store. Instead of relating the incident as an accident, she said, “I tried to run him over with a car.”
As she listened, the counselor assessed the exhausted, frightened patient before her. On the admission forms, she noted that Tracey was neatly dressed, a cooperative woman with above average intelligence. She wrote: “Patient reports mother verbally assaulted her and her brothers and father …Patient says mother sexually molested her from the age of eight to sixteen. Verbal abuse continued until mother’s death.”
The counselor listed Tracey’s goals as “to understand her suicidality and lower her suicide ideology, to begin to like herself and process the shame she feels.”
Judging her state of mind as dangerous, the counselor put Tracey on a suicide watch, and before she was brought to her unit, two women staffers searched her for contraband: razors, cigarette lighters, and drugs. Nothing was found. The night nurse gave her two Trazadone, and she quickly fell asleep.
The next day, Tracey made her first journal entry at Timberlawn, writing: “Jane and Celeste love me & care about me & think that I am worthwhile.” She drew a thick black box around her words, as if to give them the weight she wanted them to carry within her own soul. On the same page, she took notes during a group session: “When perpetrator is bad, child sees it as child being bad to maintain attachment. Something happens and you feel little and helpless.”
That afternoon, a nurse watched Tracey pace the halls, as if waiting for something or someone. She told her to calm down, but that was impossible; Tracey was waiting for Celeste. “I thought she’d be there that day,” she says later. “That was our agreement.”
That night on the telephone, Celeste explained that Steve was still making arrangements. Barely holding on to her resolve not to kill herself, Tracey felt the disappointment keenly. In her turmoil, she saw Celeste as a lifeline. Before she hung up, she asked for Celeste’s birthdate and time of day. Tracey noted them in her journal: “2/13/63 and 7:15 A.M.”
“That night on the phone was the first time Celeste said she loved me,” Tracey says. “Before we hung up, I said I loved her, too.”
Minutes later Tracey dialed another number. Lisahn Golden, an astrologer friend in Austin, answered. Years earlier, Tracey had been attracted to Golden, a straight woman with a husband. Golden had rebuffed her, but they remained friends. “I’d like you to do a couple’s chart for me and a woman I’m seeing,” Tracey said, giving Lisahn her own birthdate and time and Celeste’s. “We’ll come out and you can give us our readings.”
Her life on full throttle once Celeste was involved, Tracey would never keep that appointment, but Golden would not forget the chart she drew, linking the two women’s destinies. “They fit together like puzzle pieces,” she says. “Celeste was Pisces in the twelfth house squared, self-centered, a woman totally without love, who cared about absolutely nothing more than money. Tracey desperately wanted to take care of someone. But it went beyond that. Apart they were troubled. Together, they were incredibly dangerous.”
“I’m here for depression, and because I keep trying to kill myself,” Celeste told the admitting counselor on March 24, 1999. She went on to elaborate the direness of her situation, saying she rarely slept and had lost twenty-five pounds in the last four months, sweated heavily, had a decrease in concentration, energy, and libido. She said she’d spent $250,000 in the past year, and that she was obsessive about cleanliness and organization. “I have panic attacks three times a day,” she said.
Celeste’s description of her alleged sexual abuse changed again. This time she claimed it had started at age four. She described herself as a college graduate. Celeste denied any imminent plans to kill herself, but said, “I just wish I was dead.” The counselor judged her not a high risk of suicide—like Tracey—but a moderate risk, and wrote down her admitting diagnosis: Personality disorder, borderline and narcissistic.
“She denies any homicidal ideation,” the counselor noted.
Steve, sitting beside Celeste, answered questions as well, saying that he tended to give in to Celeste whenever she wanted things. Celeste described their relationship as “good” and “safe.” Steve kissed her good-bye, then left, and Celeste was searched then escorted to her room, where Tracey waited for her.
“The minute the door closed, Celeste kissed me,” says Tracey. “We were both euphoric. Everything had worked out just like we’d planned it. We were together.”
In their journals that day, Celeste recorded notes from a class on how suicidal thoughts begin, drawing a diagram that led from stress to anxiety to suicidal ideation. Meanwhile, Tracey attended a class on relapsing addictions and the twelve-step problem so integral to AA. “Relapse begins when you start thinking about it,” she wrote.
Still, Tracey spent much of the day dreaming about being alone with Celeste. Her preoccupation caught the eye of a nurse who noted on her chart at nine that evening that Tracey paid an unusual amount of attention to her new roommate. “Patient is having trouble maintaining her boundaries with her peer,” the nurse wrote, adding that she’d cautioned Tracey against excessive touching.
Finally alone in their room that night, Celeste took off her shirt and lay on her stomach. On the bed, Tracey stroked and rubbed her bare back. “We’d been kissing,” says Tracey. “It was foreplay.”
When Tracey noted fine hair on her lower back, Celeste’s face took on a pained expression. “That’s from the chemo,” she said, claiming she’d had ovarian cancer and had taken chemotherapy to treat it. Celeste’s pain further endeared her to Tracey.
As they were becoming more intimate, a night nurse walked in and discovered them. She ordered them to stop and told Celeste to get dressed. She then explained that touching a peer was strictly forbidden. That night, the nurse’s notes on Celeste’s chart said: “Patient was cautioned about appropriate touching and boundaries. Patient stated that she didn’t know that ‘massaging wasn’t allowed,’ and was very apologetic.”
“We knew if we were caught again they might separate us,” says Tracey. “From that point on we were more careful.”
“Celeste didn’t want to play by the rules,” says Samantha, one of the patients. “From the beginning, she ordered people around, and she refused to attend sessions. She told us her husband was paying cash and she didn’t have to do anything she didn’t want.”
For many, Timberlawn was a last resort. With its strong reputation, patients often waited for months to be accepted. Others, those without insurance, saved money to pay for care they hoped could turn their lives around. “It’s a place, if you’re serious about working, you’re going to get the opportunity to take a good look at yourself and make changes,” says Samantha. “It’s a place where you can get real help.”
In group sessions, Tracey peeled back the layers of her pain. At times she cried. “She spoke her mind,” says Samantha. “She was out there, in the open.”
Celeste, on the other hand, skipped groups whenever possible, and when she did attend, sat off by herself, acting as if she had no need to be there. On the rare occasion when the group leader cajoled her into the discussion, Samantha never saw what she believed to be a window into Celeste’s soul. “I never saw any real emotion. It all seemed canned,” she says. “I thought she hid behind a mask.”
The PTSD program focused on cognitive behavioral therapy, a theory that function could be improved by reason. Desperate patients seeking help came from as far away as New York and California. A major tenet was that as adults such patients often fell into one or a combination of three groups: perpetrators, victims, or caretaker/rescuers. Within days of Celeste’s arrival, Tracey’s therapist, Susan Milholland, worried that her patient had become her roommate’s rescuer.
It was as if Celeste had patched Tracey into the role Kristina filled at home—her entourage and staff. When Celeste wanted something, Tracey ran to the nurses’ station to ask. The day a nurse reprimanded Celeste for wearing a tight sweater with a revealing neckline, Tracey sprang to her defense. During her sessions with Milholland, Tracey worried about Celeste, not concentrating on her own therapy. “Patient defensive in response to encouragement that she focuses on her own issues not peer’s, going on and on with repetition about what her roommate needs,” Milholland wrote in her chart.
In her journal, Tracey pondered the way others perceived her relationship with Celeste. She knew that if the staff discovered they were lovers, they’d be separated. One thing particularly vexed her: A patient blurted out in the meeting room that when she and Celeste teased each other it sounded like “a lover’s spat.” It didn’t help that later that day a nurse walked into the day room and found Celeste stretched out with her bare feet on Tracey’s lap. “Patient was reminded of her boundaries,” the chart read.
In Celeste’s journal, Tracey wrote a note of encouragement, trying to convince her to participate: “You have a lot of anger you are not in touch with. You are afraid of your anger because you are afraid of the power you will have when you feel less vulnerable and you will have more personal power. Please participate; just TRY.”
That day, both women were given assignments—to write about their abuse.
Tracey wrote about her father. In four handwritten, highly emotional pages, she repeatedly asked why he hadn’t stopped her abuse, why he’d turned his back on his own children and left them at the mercy of a madwoman. “Why didn’t he do something to protect me?” she wrote. “He probably didn’t know about the sexual abuse, but when I would lock myself in my room he would allow her to beat on the door with a baseball bat.”
Celeste’s letter was typed on a computer she’d had Steve send. It came to one and a half pages, a rambling and not always truthful account of her life. In it, she charged that Craig had raped her twice, that her marriage with Harald had ended not because of her wanton spending and temper but because she’d had two tubal pregnancies and ovarian cancer. She said she’d been unable to accept Jimmy’s love. When it came to Steve, she accused herself of ruining the marriage: “I freeze, withdraw, and manipulate any situation to avoid conflicts …I see my father on top of me. I feel him touching me. I feel him making me touch him. I can’t take it anymore. I can’t make it stop.”
When Tracey read Celeste’s letter, she was deeply touched. Yet, she disagreed with her characterization of her relationship with Steve. If Steve was as Celeste described him, he was at fault. They argued, Tracey contending that around Steve, Celeste made herself powerless. “Well, screw you,” Celeste said. “I don’t need this at all.” For days they didn’t talk. When they did, Celeste told Tracey: “Let’s just be friends.”
Despondent, Tracey agreed. Then, days later, Celeste kissed her on the mouth. “I forgive you,” she said.
On Fridays the twins drove the three and a half hours from Austin to Dallas. As soon as they arrived, Celeste put them to work. She ordered them to buy things, to smuggle banned goods onto the unit: razors, a cell phone, even cigarette lighters. More than once the items were later discovered, leading to arguments between the patients. “It was awful,” says Jennifer. “Here we were smuggling in razors to a unit where people were suicidal.”
One week the girls left Austin late, and Celeste was furious when they arrived. She ordered them to go to a convenience store. She had a cigarette order from the other patients and wanted a carton for each charged to her credit card. For Easter she sent them to Wal-Mart for baskets and candy eggs. They spent that night making fifteen baskets for Celeste to give the other patients. The next day they handed them out in the day room, and the patients with multiple personalities responded by acting like small children.
For all the complaining she did about the clinic, Celeste seemed to be having fun at Timberlawn. Often Kristina longed to be at a place like that, where she could rest. Between school and commuting to Dallas to do their mother’s bidding, both the girls were exhausted. The one time Jennifer and Kristina told their mother that they didn’t want to run her errands, that they’d spent hours driving to see her and didn’t want to be shuttled off, Celeste cursed at them, saying they didn’t understand all she’d been through, what it was like to have been abused as a child.
“You don’t love me!” she screamed, sending shivers through them both.
After they left, Celeste changed her visitor list. They weren’t allowed to return for nearly two weeks.
At home, Justin and Jennifer worried about Kristina, who’d lost twenty pounds and was down to a size two since her mother’s hospitalization. “We’d be eating dinner with Steve and everyone would be laughing, then the phone would ring,” says Justin. “Kristina would pick it up and it would be Celeste. When she hung up, Kristina was crying.”
Kristina was struggling with a confluence of emotions. She worried about her mother, and yet since childhood, she’d had dreams of a life with a different family, one where she’d be happy and not burdened by her mother’s constant demands.
Yet, as ever, Kristina was devoted to Celeste. When Steve made disparaging remarks about her, Kristina lashed out at him. They argued, and he blustered at her, perhaps taking out on the daughter all the frustration he felt toward his wife. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Kristina said. She stormed out the door. When Kristina called, Celeste told her to stay at Jimmy’s house until things cooled down.
For his part, Steve told few people where Celeste was; he said she was visiting friends. During the week, he often flew up for counseling sessions with Celeste and her psychologist, Bernard Gotway, a plump, gray-haired, bespectacled man; and her psychiatrist, Howard Miller, a short, quiet man with dark glasses and penchant for brightly colored suspenders. On weekends Steve arrived on Saturday, as the twins were driving home, and then left again on Sunday nights. Gotway and Miller noted on Celeste’s chart that she did well during Steve’s visits, as they discussed the problems with their marriage. But after he left, Celeste complained bitterly to Tracey. “She told me Steve smothered her. Just seeing him made her feel like killing herself,” says Tracey. “And there he was, showing up, involved in her therapy. How could she get better?”
When Steve visited, Tracey carefully watched the man whose very existence she’d grown to believe threatened her lover’s life. He appeared as Celeste described him, big and boorish. Only once did they exchange words, and it unleashed a storm from Celeste. That day, Celeste argued with an attendant who wouldn’t allow her and Steve to go to the lobby together. Steve turned to Tracey and said, “She has a hard time following rules.”
Shocked that he’d said something to her, Tracey nodded, replying, “Yes, I’m afraid she does.”
Later, Steve told Celeste what Tracey had said. Livid, Celeste tracked Tracey down on the smoking porch and screamed, “Why don’t you mind your own fucking business!”
“Fine,” Tracey replied, but inside she felt like something was waning. Later that day she wrote in her journal, “I have lost my infatuation” and “MIND YOUR OWN FUCKING BUSINESS!!! Stay out of Celeste’s shit.” Then she scratched it out. The next day Celeste kissed her as if nothing had happened.
The days ground on, some better than others. Both the women were heavily medicated, everything from pills for depression, to anxiety, to ones to help them sleep. Over the weeks, Celeste threatened to sign herself out, and Tracey begged her to stay. Later, Tracey would say that their relationship progressed in surges: “We’d be close one day, and the next we were hardly talking.”
While many noticed the unusually close relationship between the two women, it was Celeste’s psychiatrist, Dr. Miller, who seemed troubled by it. More than once he brought it up to Tracey, asking her to explain their bond.
In Celeste’s journal, during one group session, they wrote each other notes:
TRACEY: “I told Dr. Miller that I have no sexual interest in you. So, I lied. But you should, too. He said as long as we follow the guidelines for touching (physical contact) & respect the room rules, there shouldn’t be any problem. He had no problem with our being close as long as it doesn’t interfere with our therapy. He says trauma abuse patients are prone to making impulsive, life-altering decisions while in treatment.”
CELESTE: “Did he bring it up—or did you?”
TRACEY: “Me—he asked if there were other issues & I told him I was really pissed off about the report from the night nurses [about the backrub incident]. By the way, I absolutely do have a sexual interest in you—He asked if we had a special relationship—he defined that as a relationship with more to it than other random patients—I said yes—He said that is not a problem. They don’t discourage this unless it gets in the way therapeutically. We just need to go outpatient.”
Celeste ended by writing: “Quick!”
Timberlawn’s outpatient program was waiting for them at the end of their inpatient stay, when they’d spend days at the clinic for therapy, then be free to do as they wished in the evenings. Tracey and Celeste already had plans. Steve had rented a room, number 103 at the Sumner Suites, across from the clinic, for $69 a night, for him and the twins to use while in Dallas and for Celeste to stay in when she graduated to the day program. There, Tracey and Celeste could explore their sexual relationship without fear of discovery. “Celeste told me she’d never been with a woman,” says Tracey. “She said she didn’t like sex with men and couldn’t have orgasms. She wanted me to teach her.”
At Timberlawn, Celeste and Tracey clutched together often, so much so that therapists noted it on their charts. Their journals were filled with affirmations: “Believe in Ourselves! I am worthwhile! I am loved! I don’t deserve all this self-hate. This self-blame. Helplessness becomes powerlessness. Be willing!”
Tracey wrote: “I want love …I want to be held …I want a safe attachment to someone.”
Yet, for weeks, Tracey made little progress, suicidal thoughts slipping in and out of her consciousness. Milholland pegged the stumbling block as her inability to place the blame for the abuse on her mother, not herself. It wasn’t until a session in early April that the therapist felt she was making headway.
“Sometimes I think about going to hell to find my mother,” Tracey told her that day. “When I find her, I hand over all the responsibility for what happened to her. I say, ‘This was your fault, not mine. I was only a child. You were the adult.’”
“What do you worry about?” the therapist asked.
“I worry that I won’t be able to leave, that I’ll be stuck in hell forever with my mother,” she answered, crying.
By early April, Tracey’s insurance money was drying up, and she faced discharge to Timberlawn’s day program. Her meds were still giving her problems. At times her speech was slurred and she appeared to be drunk. Yet, Milholland assessed the risk of her committing suicide as having decreased from a ten, on a ten-point scale, to a six. “I’m not free-falling to suicide anymore,” she told the therapist. Tracey didn’t say why, but much of her new peace centered on her relationship with Celeste, which, at the time, she says, was flourishing. She did, however, tell Milholland that they planned to room together again, off-campus, during the outpatient program.
“What’s your relationship like?” the therapist asked.
“Just friends,” Tracey answered.
Days later in Celeste’s therapy, Dr. Miller questioned the wisdom of such a plan. “Patient offended at being confronted on friendship with homosexual peer,” he wrote in her chart. He advised Celeste that rooming with Tracey during outpatient sessions wasn’t a good idea. As he saw it, Tracey was too possessive.
Tracey would later say that Celeste told her something very different that night—not that Dr. Miller questioned the wisdom of their plan, but that the clinic staff contacted Steve and made him aware of their friendship. “He doesn’t want us to be roommates,” she said. “He has money and power. You’ll see. He’ll get what he wants.”
Frightened that she was losing the woman she’d made the linchpin of her recovery, Tracey panicked. The next days, she waited anxiously, hoping Celeste was wrong.
Two days later Miller brought up Celeste’s discharge plans again and urged her to break off the friendship with Tracey. “Counseled against rooming with peers when discharged. Discussed boundaries, caring but saying no,” he wrote on her chart. It was decided Celeste would break off the entanglement with Tracey, but the clinic would help.
The following morning Tracey was called in for a meeting with Celeste and Melissa Caldwell, the art therapist. During the session, Celeste told her that she didn’t want to room with her during outpatient treatment. Tracey was devastated.
That afternoon with Susan Milholland, Tracey bared her heart.
“Where did you see this relationship with Celeste going?” Milholland asked.
“My dream was only to have an affair with her,” Tracey said. “Right now, I want to drink a bottle of beer, break the bottle, and kill myself with the glass.”
As they talked, Tracey admitted she was reenacting an old pattern, falling in love with a straight married woman. Eventually, Tracey did something to end the relationships, drinking or acting out. “I force them to leave me,” she told Milholland.
In her journal the next day, April 7, Tracey wrote:
“Celeste has decided to leave me. She had a meeting with her doctor and has already been moved to her new room. She will not room with me, and she will say only that I am too pushy. She wants to take the relationship one day at a time, but I can see she will not be interested in me. I believe that she is strongly attracted to me, and it has a whole tremendous lot of confusion for her.”
In a session with Milholland, Tracey grumbled, “Her husband did this. He has money and influence and he wants me away from Celeste.” The therapist disagreed, saying Steve wasn’t behind Celeste’s change of plans, but Tracey didn’t believe her. Then Tracey said something that forced Milholland to take her very seriously: “My problems would all be solved if a certain person met an untimely death.”
“Are you referring to Celeste’s husband?” Milholland asked.
“I’m not homicidal now. I never have been,” Tracey said.
Still, Milholland worried. Despite Tracey laughing it off as a joke, Milholland judged the statement a threat. She argued with Tracey, telling her Steve wasn’t involved, but she couldn’t shake her conviction. “I believed Celeste, and that’s what she’d told me,” says Tracey.
Frightened by Tracey’s comment, Milholland called a meeting to inform the staff, including Dr. Miller. It was decided that the two women would be separated, and Tracey was immediately transferred out of the PTSD unit and into the adult program, for the chronically mentally ill. There, she felt as if she were back in Menninger, surrounded by shuffling, empty shells. By the next day Tracey had worked the transfer over in her mind, until she saw it as further proof of her lack of self-worth.
In between sessions, Tracey pulled Celeste to the side. “If you just want friendship without any sexual overtones, that’s all right with me,” she said.
“Sure,” Celeste said.
But later Tracey wrote in her journal: “Was Celeste just saying that because Celeste didn’t want to say no?”
The rest of the day, Tracey interpreted the actions of patients and staff at the clinic as if they were conspiring to keep Celeste from her. She watched Celeste through a glass door that separated the units and saw her with Steve. Tracey thought Celeste appeared sad, and she wondered if she missed her. “I think it must be about losing me. But if it hurts that bad, why does she want to stay away?” she wrote.
The next day, Tracey checked out of the inpatient program and into room 213 of the Red Roof Inn, across the street, to attend day sessions. Tormented by Celeste’s absence and unable to stabilize her medications, on the pages of her journal she chastised herself for enmeshing herself with Celeste and squandering the time at Timberlawn. She vowed to use the final weeks to straighten out her life, and wrote in her journal: “Dr. Montgomery wants me to realize that I am carved from the same stone as my mother …obviously my mother was very emotional & delusional. How am I delusional? I believe people will always leave me. I have known loneliness and sadness since I was a baby; I know how to live and thrive with these feelings. Turn my recognition into strength.”
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.”