03.She.Wanted.It.All.2005 (14 page)

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.”