03.She.Wanted.It.All.2005 (42 page)

In contrast, at the Gatesville Unit, Tracey sauntered calmly into the visitor’s area to meet me. Her hair cropped close to her ears, and her uniform clean and neatly pressed, she smiled. Although she hadn’t been on medication for many months, she appeared bright-eyed and well. Looking back, she said, she thought it was the alcohol more than anything else that had led her to thoughts of suicide five years
earlier, when she’d met Celeste in St. David’s. “It’s easy to say I was mentally ill. I was in a psychiatric hospital,” she said. “But that’s a label, and it was more than that. I’ve come to realize that there were lots of loopholes in my thought processes. I was willing to believe that there were situations when it was permissible to take another person’s life. I now know that’s not true.”

Although only seven years remained before she’d be eligible for parole, she insisted she thought little of that. Instead of planning a future, she said prison had taught her to live in the moment. In the laundry where she worked five days a week, just the folding of a shirt gave her a sense of satisfaction. She’d learned to enjoy the small moments in life and to cherish the few family and friends who’d stood by her.

When she talked of Celeste, her voice rang with sadness. “I think she’s numb. No one can make her feel. She sees only her own needs,” she said. “She kept throwing men, women, money, and things into herself to try to fill up, but she couldn’t feel any of it. No matter how much she had, she was still empty inside.” Often, she said, she thought of Steve Beard and the night she pulled the trigger of her shotgun while he slept. When the sadness came, she envisioned a cloud and let the pain float away.

“I can’t change this,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. “I did a horrible thing. I’m not angry about being in prison. I understand why I’m here. I walked into Steve Beard’s bedroom and shot him in his sleep.”

The twins, too, remembered Steve.

In many ways, they’d picked up the pieces of their lives, working and returning to school. Kristina, still with Justin, moved out of Austin to Houston, for college and the anonymity of a big city. Jen kept her job selling insurance
and shared the twins’ triplex with a friend. Their mother wanted only pain and suffering for them, but they had to fight the urge to feel sad for her. “We talk sometimes about what it must be like for her in prison,” said Jennifer. “She can’t go out and enjoy the sun on a beautiful day, or take car trips and eat junk food, just the dumb stuff she used to love to do.”

“But then she’ll say something to someone and it will get back to us. Something hateful,” said Kristina. “And we remember that she never loved us or Steve. We’re forced to think about how wicked she really is.”

“I wish our mom was different, but she isn’t,” said Jen. “We were never really people to her. She was never really our mother, because she didn’t love us the way a mother loves her children. She’s incapable of loving anyone.”

Still, they struggled with all that happened. Although they both understood their mother was behind bars, for them, Celeste was all-powerful, and they continued to fear her. Kristina was afraid to venture out alone at night, afraid Celeste lurked in the shadows. “I check my rearview mirror,” she says. “I’m afraid I’m being followed.”

Jennifer still grieved over losing two fathers, one to suicide, the other to murder. Their mother continued to stalk her in nightmares where Celeste waited unseen for an opportunity to take vengeance. “I’d like to go on with my life,” she says. “But so far, I just can’t.”

Neither planned to ever see or speak to their mother again. “She doesn’t deserve us,” says Kristina.

In yet another twist, in the fall of 2004 Kristina and Jennifer were reunited with their long-lost sister, the baby girl Celeste had put up for adoption. A college freshman, she’d looked for her biological family and found her father dead
and her mother in prison. Only Kristina and Jennifer were there to tell her all that had happened. “She looks just like us,” says Kristina. “We recognized her the moment we saw her.”

At Christmas, the twins have a ritual. In Austin, Jennifer and Kristina gather at a church with other victims of violent crimes and their families to decorate a tree of remembrance. In honor of Steve, they hang an ornament, an ethereal gold angel. The ceremony, surrounded by so many others who have lost loved ones, gives them a sense of community and a moment of peace.

“We don’t have much family left,” says Jennifer sadly. “And we want to make sure Steve’s not forgotten.”