She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [63]
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