She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [77]
When Tracey considered ending the affair, she worried that Celeste would have no one to talk her through the dangerous times. One day, for instance, Celeste drove down the road with the twins in the car, on their way home from the lake house. She screamed—why, they didn’t know—and drove across lanes and onto the shoulder. Furious, she called Tracey. “Do you have a gun?” she shouted. “I’m coming over, and we’re going to kill ourselves.”
At the Toro Canyon house she told Steve, “I don’t have to take shit from these girls. I’m going to kill myself.” She left, and Steve paced the house, waiting for her to return.
At her house on Wilson, Tracey poured her lover a vodka from the bottle of Stoli she kept for her on a shelf and listened to her rave. When Celeste returned home the next morning, she acted as if nothing had happened.
Despite the turmoil she’d brought to her life, like Steve, Tracey thought Celeste was worth the effort, and she was willing to work to try to make the relationship better. When she told Celeste she wanted the two of them to go for counseling to work through their problems, Celeste agreed. Within days Tracey had a couple’s session scheduled for July 21 with Barbara Grant, the therapist she’d gone to when she first left Timberlawn.
“I don’t think I’m really a lesbian,” Celeste told Grant that day. “I have to drink to have sex with Tracey.”
In the therapist’s office, Tracey listened. For months she’d been sexually involved with Celeste, and now her lover questioned whether she was attracted to her. Instead of anger, Tracey just smiled. She’d been in relationships with straight women before. “Was Celeste a lesbian? I don’t know,” she says. “What I knew was that she was sleeping with me.”
Tracey explained that she worried about their relationship. “Neither of us have good track records. Both of us have been through lots of partners,” she told the therapist. “We’ve got a lot invested emotionally. And I think we both want this to work.”
Complicating matters, Celeste had plans to be gone much of the summer and fall, first on a driving trip to the Northwest with Steve, the twins and their boyfriends, then to Australia with the girls as a graduation trip, and in October, the month in Europe. “Celeste said when she got back, things would change,” says Tracey. “Celeste was always promising things would get better, and I always believed her.”
The trip to Washington State had a special purpose for Celeste: to comb through a storage shed in Stanwood that held Craig’s possessions, where the girls hoped to retrieve mementoes from their father. Steve had outlined a route from Austin, through Salt Lake into California, up to Oregon and into Washington. Then, after completing their task, they’d loop up to British Colombia and backtrack through Phoenix to Texas and home. At first they planned to drive in two cars, the teens in the Expedition and Celeste and Steve in his Cadillac. That was something Celeste didn’t want.
“I can’t be alone with him,” she told Kristina. “This isn’t going to happen.”
Somehow she convinced Steve to trade in the Expedition for a white Suburban equipped with a television and VCR. He had it parked in front of the house when his neighbor, Dr. Dennison, sauntered over to take a look. “It’s got all the bells and whistles,” Steve said proudly. “One hell of a machine.”
They left early the morning after Celeste and Tracey’s counseling session. Steve, Celeste, Jennifer, Christopher, Justin, and Kristina were in the brand new truck with their luggage in a rooftop carrier. On the road, Celeste moaned that Steve drove too slowly. “Speed it up,” she said. “We’ll never get there.”
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