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Writers: This is the final chapter for Non-Killer Celeste which, because of its length, I have

to give you in three parts. Below you will find the first installment. Thank you for your

time and feedback.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Celeste 2015 Oregon

Celeste felt every uneven ridge of the rickety wicker chair into which she was gingerly settling

on the back deck, a comingled sense of relaxation and pain threading the muscles of her neck and

upper back. She let out a short groan, a sound that drew Starling’s attention from the kitchen. Her

daughter’s head emerged from the sliding glass doors, curly brown hair blowing out like a knotty

banner, picked up by the light wind that strayed across the field behind the house. “You okay?”

“Yeah. Better than okay. I’m just, aah, relaxing.” Celeste adjusted in her seat, briefly

closing her eyes. “Ooh, it hurts so good.”

Starling frowned. “Mom, you’re kind of dirty,” she said, and slid the door closed.

Celeste laughed. After five weeks of combining work and grad school, she was almost

giddy with her sense of well-deserved freedom. Of course even freedom had its limits; there was

a short stack of textbooks piled on a wrought-iron table next to her. But the combined smells of

chicken smoking on her tabletop charcoal hibachi grill and the spice scent of the woods in

autumn—leaves and needles nestled on the grounds under and surrounding the deck, curling and

drying in the grass—stirred something in her that felt almost primal, a reminiscence unattached

to any images or events, as if her cells themselves conjured memory of things that had never

actually occurred. A paper birch grew next to the deck, its white bark peeling off in rolls. The

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birch’s jagged-edge yellow leaves rustled in the breeze that had stirred Starling’s hair, flapping

against the yellowing needles of the Western larch and the bright red oval leaves of the Pacific

dogwood in the garden, the wind weaving together all the incense woodsmoke smells that must

have raised her bewitching false memories.

She bent to the barbeque that rested on the wood slots of her deck and with a pair of

tongs turned the chicken, sending a shower of grease into the charcoal and eliciting a short burst

of flame that shot through the grill. Recoiling, she leaned back in the chair, replaced her tongs,

and lifted her textbooks in turn, examining their jackets.

Essential Skills for Social Work Practice.

Current Approaches to Trauma.

Group Facilitation.

The latter course was a concession to her overwhelming work and school schedules: one

easy class, something she could slide through, that she herself could probably teach after six

months of running two groups a day at the clinic.

She’d gone back for her graduate degree in September, just as Amy started sophomore

year at her hippie college in Vermont. Celeste’s first evening on campus—nerves and mind

electrically alive even after nine hours at the clinic—had called up the memory of the first day of

her bachelor’s program at East Oregon University, almost a decade earlier. A five-year-old and a

nine-year-old at home with Lucy, their favorite babysitter. Sam had driven her to school and

she’d felt like a kindergarten kid being dropped off on the first day by her parents.

“You’re going to do great,” Sam had told her, holding her hand before letting her out of

the car. “You’re going to lead your class. You remember that, because what I’m saying is going

to come true.” Boosted by his faith in her, she maintained a 4.0 GPA, drawing on resources she

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knew she possessed but sometimes doubted her ability to extract from her body and brain, and

indeed always remembered Sam’s words, and held him partially responsible for her success, her

summa cum laude graduation.

Sam had offered to drive her again on this new first night, but she turned him down. Now

she knew—not just a theoretical knowing but an understanding based on experience—what she

was capable of. Not to mention that she was working in the field, which gave her a more than

abstract understanding of the concepts under review. She’d already worked eight hours at the

clinic, but as she locked her car and stepped onto campus all the fatigue of the day dissipated in

the faint chill of the September night, cool air flushing her brain. That biting purity of mind

accompanied her on her walk through the quad, to the bookstore, and to the three far-flung

buildings where her first-semester classes would be held. Dimly she was able to articulate the

sharp feeling that drove itself like ice up her spine and propelled her through the night, uncoiling

her tiredness into tatters that fell away in her wake: a sense of being for once in her life in the

exact right place at precisely the correct time. Of straying, as if by accident, onto the path she

was supposed to have been treading all along. Like meeting her own doppelganger, that version

of herself that had always eluded her, waiting in the shadows for her to somehow sense its

presence and call it into the light of day. That conviction, of doing exactly what she was meant to

be doing—or at least, absent a belief in actual fate, the thing her mind and character and heart

were most suited to—possessed her with an astonished sense of unexpected and maybe even

undeserved triumph, like winning the lottery, or bumping into her soul mate by chance on the

street.

Which led her to her one disquieting thought of that electric night: Sam, whom she was

coming to strongly suspect was not that soul mate. And of course, her possibly predestined road

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had its toll: after five days of working, two nights in class and weekends spent studying and

doing a rudimentary version of her usual chores and tasks, she had to preserve enough energy to

give Starling the attention she deserved.

Which left her with nothing remaining for anything but the most superficial pursuits.

Specifically it left her with no time for Sam, who seemed to demand more and more of her time

and mental and physical energy, even as her schedule permitted less and less of it.

As if on cue, the rhythmic lute ringtone of her LG Android began to sound from the table,

where it was tucked beside her books. She picked it up. Sam’s picture, holding Gypsy’s reins in

the ring at Shadow River Ranch, his tanned face, grizzled hair gathered into a ponytail at the

nape of his neck, the plain aquiline features she had always found somehow uniquely beautiful.

Not now. She turned the phone over to silence it. The irony—that she didn’t even have

time to tell Sam she didn’t have time to talk to him, because she knew he would draw out even

that conversation for at least twenty minutes—made her grimace. One of these days, she would

have to decide what to do about Sam.

Tonight, she didn’t want to even think about it.

Celeste went into the lobby to call Leslie—her last client of the day—back to her office. “Come

on back,” she said, and watched the older woman slowly heave herself from the waiting room

sofa to a standing position. Leslie trudged behind her in the hall, soft footsteps the very sound of

ambulatory fatigue, as if the act of walking itself was almost too much for her.

Celeste shut her office door as Leslie sat on the slipcovered sofa. “Hey,” she said by way

of greeting. “What’s up?” Celeste often used this kind of salutation instead of the more standard

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how are you, wanting to avoid the standard answer I’m fine, which served only to delay the

eventual conversation, which usually centered around the theme of not-fineness.

“Ah. Y’know.” Leslie shrugged. “Not much.”

“Right.” Celeste sat across from her client, behind her desk which was open at the side.

Leslie was only ten years Celeste’s senior but today she was carrying herself gingerly, like an

elderly person, as if afraid her body would break apart if she didn’t continue to monitor it.

“You don’t look so hot today, no offense,” Celeste observed. She and Leslie knew each

other well enough for this kind of familiarity. Today Leslie’s patrician features wore an air of

washed-out lassitude or lethargy, face almost blanched against her curtain of shoulder-length

brown hair, the faint haze of sleeplessness filming her eyes. Normally Leslie came to the clinic

directly from the Public Defender’s office in the Box Elder County Courthouse in Wendover,

where she had worked for the past twenty years. And normally too she arrived wearing what she

called her uniform: one of several tailored suits in black, wine-red or forest-green, carefully

designed to shatter the stereotype of a public defender as overworked and overwhelmed, juggler

of a thousand hopeless cases. Leslie’s dedication to her work was similar to what Celeste felt

about her own, a sense of calling, of vocation, instead of mere livelihood, but far more

impressive because she’d been at it for decades rather than mere months.

This morning Leslie was uncharacteristically garbed in jeans, boots and a thin sweater

and hoodie. After seating herself she drew back her hair in an unruly ponytail, which spotlighted

the numerous faint threads of gray growing at her temples. Celeste noticed that her thin lips,

usually carefully enhanced with makeup, held an almost bluish tint.

“Are you all right?” she asked, when Leslie did not respond.

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“Yeah.” Leslie lifted her eyes to meet Celeste’s gaze directly. “I’m leaving Tim.”

Celeste lifted her eyebrows, then nodded slowly. “I know that idea has been…percolating

for awhile,” she said.

“Right.” Leslie twisted her mouth into a half-smile, half-grimace. “I guess it’s been

percolating for about half the length of the marriage.”

Celeste posed a question she asked with some frequency: “Why now, then? Why today?”

Leslie slumped in her seat, bending her neck back to let her eyes stray to the ceiling.

“Why today,” she repeated. “I don’t know. Why not today. It’s got to come some time.”

“Okay. Then let me ask it in the opposite way: why now and not a year ago?”

Leslie shifted in her seat. “I guess…I guess I’ve just been hoping I could tough it out.

Permanently. Tim is the only family I have.”

Celeste nodded. Leslie’s parents had died of cancer each within seventeen months of each

other half a decade earlier, precipitating a period of complicated bereavement that devolved into

two brief affairs with coworkers and a foray into gambling addiction. Leslie had no siblings, and

Celeste knew that the central tragedy of her life in her mind was her inability to have children.

“The marriage has been dead for a long time,” Leslie said. “I kept trying to bring it back.

Give it—some kind of conjugal CPR.” She laughed a little, a breathless, bitter sound. “Then, you

know, I just tried to live with it. The way you live with things that are broken. Just the way my

parents lived with their marriage. They barely even spoke to each other, had no interests in

common, but they limped along together until the day they died.”

“So the thing that’s kept you holding on all this time has been…?” They’d been over all

this before, but Celeste wanted to follow Leslie through the psychic byways that had led her to

this moment of clarity.

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Or, possibly, impulsiveness.

Leslie stared at the floor. Celeste had a sense that she could see her client’s mind

working, like the inner springs of a clock turning gears to put its pendulum in motion. “I think

it’s a vow I made to myself as a child,” she said finally. “I was always lonely as a kid. I was an

only child.” She looked up, meeting Celeste’s eyes, and gave a thin, clearly unamused smile.. “I

think it should be against the law to have an only child.”

Celeste nodded. “Amen.” How different her own childhood might have been with a

brother or sister, someone to whom, if nothing else, she could turn for affirmation: Tell me, am I

crazy or is it them?

“My parents were so insular, so antisocial. We never invited people over, not even for

holidays. Not even cousins or aunts or uncles. Once my grandparents died, that was it. It was just

us. I used to fantasize a big Christmas dinner with relatives, bringing their kids over and having a

whole kids’ table like some other kids at school talked about. I was shy as a kid because I wasn’t

used to having other people around. That ended in high school when I started dating and then--”

she laughed, “—I turned into a giant slut, but still. I remember vowing that I was going to

create something different when I grew up. A huge family. I wanted like nine kids. I dreamed I’d

be in the center of this wonderful family life, kids and grandchildren and big Sunday dinners.

That’s what my life would be.”

“Right.” Celeste nodded. She could see and hear and feel the image Leslie had conjured:

a long table, food and warmth and noise and the heat of the kitchen, the smells of hot bread and

garlic, the warmth and denseness of people, Leslie in the center of the maelstrom, buoyed

upward into a state of light and succor.

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“I grew up holding onto that. It was like my, my guiding star. Then, I found I couldn’t

have children. And Tim wouldn’t even consider adoption. And that was like a death.”

Celeste waited. “Did you ever grieve that death?” she asked finally.

Leslie frowned. “I think I did. It was a process of letting go. But it helped that for the

most part I liked my life. I loved law school, I loved my work. So many people have asked me

why I didn’t join a firm, open a private practice, something lucrative instead of hanging in with

the public defender’s office. But they don’t get it. This is what I want to do. This is my dream,

not a condo in Miami and a cabin cruiser and two Range Rovers in the driveway. Summer in the

Berkshires. Whatever. Do you know what I’m saying?”

Celeste nodded. “I know exactly what you’re saying.” Sometimes she felt that she should

have lived decades earlier, in the sixties, maybe, so disconnected did she feel from the consumer-

driven society her peers seemed to thrive on. She wanted enough money to transcend the

necessity of scraping and worrying about rent or bills, but beyond that she maintained a certain

detachment from the pursuit of upward mobility.

Or maybe she was just naive. She was sure a lot of her friends saw her in that light.

“So I was married,” Leslie said, “and for years it was an okay marriage, not perfect but

we cared about each other. I considered him my best friend. We even had a good sex life.”

Celeste laughed. “Maybe that’s because you didn’t have children. When you start calling

each other mommy and daddy, that’s the death knell for sex.”

“Right.” Leslie laughed. “I guess there is an up side to everything. Even being barren.”

She blew out her breath. “And we had friends, we’d have them over for dinner and so forth, we

went camping, we’d go to the coast on vacation, there were a lot of good things. But…it’s

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different now. Tim and I have grown so far apart. Our interests diverged. Our values are

different.” She fell silent. “I don’t know that I even like him anymore.”

Celeste nodded. “It’s hard, over a long period, for two people to always grow in the same

direction.”

Leslie balled up one hand on the arm of her chair, then, stiffly, straightened her fingers. “I

see so many couples living together in a state of…resignation. This is it; this is the rest of my

life, oh well, I give up. But I don’t want to give up. I feel like, even if I never get with anyone

else, being alone would be better than being married and still lonely.”

Celeste nodded, raising her eyebrows. “That’s a pretty brave way of looking at things.”

“But if I do end up alone, here’s the thing,” Leslie said. “It’s the end of my dream. That

immersion in a big family. And that’s a sense of, I don’t know, failure. Finality. I’m not sure I

can live with that. At least if I stay with Tim there’s some illusion of belonging.”

“And for some people,” Celeste said slowly, “that illusion is enough. For others it’s not.

You have to decide for yourself, which way you go on that. In any choice there’s a loss. Which

loss is the one you can live with?”

Leslie bit her lower lip. “I visited an old friend of mine in Eugene two weeks ago, I

stayed with her and her husband a couple of nights. After dinner, her husband made coffee and

we all sat around the table talking. It was such a simple thing, but for me it was almost

revolutionary. A married couple, and they talk to each other? With us, after dinner, Tim

immediately goes into the living room and sits in front of the tv for the rest of the night. I do the

dishes and so on, and then either I watch tv with him or go into the study and read or God knows,

I bring work home a lot of nights. It’s like we’re on separate planets, revolving around each

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other. And that weekend, that simple thing with Nancy and her husband, it just drove home to me

how empty my marriage is.”

“I know that you’ve asked Tim to go to counseling.”

“Yeah, and he said, literally, I don’t want to work on it and I don’t want to fight for it. I

think it should just happen on its own. Where do I go with that?”

Celeste shook her head. “Where do you go?”

“I feel trapped. Like I’m being buried alive. Sometimes I dream of living alone, having a

little house to myself, a garden, a balcony, some place that’s just mine.”

“But?”

“But it means giving up the dream. It’s that nail in the coffin.”

Celeste leaned forward slightly, frowning. “You know, that dream…you came up with

that when you were a child.”

“Yes.”

“So, as a child, you had a very limited array of things you could imagine for your life.

You wanted a feeling of warmth, of inclusion, belonging, and in your child’s mind the way to

achieve that—the only way—was a big family. The opposite of yours. But what I’m wondering

is—is there a way you could still attain that feeling, that sense of community, of kinship? Even

without being married or in some standard version of a family? It’s the feeling you’re after, not

the thing itself. As an adult, can you conceive of other ways to reach that place? Ways you didn’t

have enough experience of the world to even imagine as a child?”

“Hm.” Leslie nodded. Her gaze resettled on the carpet and she pushed her thumb against

her bottom teeth. Finally she said, “I haven’t thought about it in those terms. I always just…

accepted that vision as the ultimate. The only way I could be happy.”

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“I mean, it’s sort of like, I’m sure you’ve read The Great Gatsby. I’m not a fan of it, by

the way.” She could never resist injecting a literary judgement. “But for our purposes right now:

Gatsby has this dream about the green light, that it embodies his hopes for the future. And it’s

just a chimera, it’s an empty dream. A symbol of a big wonderful life, exemplified by winning

the heart of Daisy Buchanan. He takes the symbol—the green light on her dock--as the literal

reality, his only chance at happiness. Nothing else will do, just this one person who—as it turns

out—doesn’t suit him at all. I wonder if it might be the same for you.”

Leslie cocked her head to one side. She pulled the front of her jacket together. “I don’t

know. I have to think about that.” She paused. “So, okay. What you’re saying is that even if I did

leave my marriage, even if I did end up by myself, I could possibly find that kind of—happiness,

belonging…some other way.”

“There could be dozens of ways.”

“Such as, for instance—I could still adopt?”

“Possibly. You’re financially stable, you have a good home.”

“Or take in a foster child. I’ve thought about it. They might be so damaged, though. It

would be a huge undertaking. Or…expand my social circle? Over the years Tim’s become more

and more like my parents. He doesn’t want other people over. He isolates us. Or…” She cast

about with her eyes. “What else.”

“Only you can say. I can speculate what could bring me into a sense of being part of the

world, in the center of things. But it might be something completely different for you. It probably

would.”

Leslie nodded. There was skepticism in her opaque stare, but also a glint. It was a look

that Celeste experienced like a door opening between her and a client: that moment when she

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said something that registered, however dimly, that moment when two minds touched, a torch

passing a flame. It was the instant when she knew therapy was actually working, that she had

opened a window the faintest crack, allowed someone to see things differently, to reframe his or

her worldview.

Even if the most typical sequelae was that they preferred to stay exactly where they

already were: unhappy, but comfortable.

That night, driving home through the early dusk that heralded winter’s onset, she thought

about her discussion with Leslie. As with so many issues she encountered in the therapy hour,

Leslie’s conundrum reflected something of Celeste’s own. She was hanging onto her decade-

long relationship with Sam, clinging to the dream of family she’d concocted when they had

started dating, that mental leap she’d made: now she had children, now she had a mate, her own

childhood loneliness was all behind her, a state long-abandoned, never to reenter her life. But

wasn’t it true, what Leslie said: that being lonely in the company of another could be worse than

being just outright alone? And was it love that kept her with Sam, or fear?

The idea nagged her as she finished the ten-mile drive. Sam had told her from the outset

that he wanted to be a part of her family, part of Starling and Amy’s lives, but his actions

consistently demonstrated the opposite. So why was she clinging onto the illusion that

miraculously they could become a family, despite the fact that Amy had not only moved out but

hated him, that he consistently ignored her daughters and tried to sideline them, the clear

evidence that it was a pipe dream that had never worked and clearly never would?

How was it that she—a trained therapist and, theoretically, an intelligent woman—had

clung on to this hopeless fantasy for so many years? It was like Leslie with her nine children

around the dinner table, like Gatsby’s green light: a token she had taken for reality.

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Her cell phone sounded as she swung into her driveway. Sam. Again. She turned it off to

silence it, then stowed it in her purse. She had no idea what to say to him.

Late that night, as the phone rang for what was perhaps the sixth time, Celeste finally picked up.

“Hello?” Her voice came out fuzzed and groggy.

“I’ve been calling you all night,” Sam said. She reflected through her mental haze that he

was certainly good at cutting through the crap. Something that even in her hazy state, she still

found sort of admirable.

“Yeah, sorry,” she said. “I turned my ringer off accidentally.”

“You don’t just turn your ringer off by accident.”

She sighed, opening her eyes, and bit back a retort. Since he was actually right, she could

hardly argue the point. “Sorry.”

“Now that we’ve dispensed with your excuses, why didn’t I hear from you tonight? We

talk every night.”

Celeste was aware they talked every night. Interminable conversations, in which he did

the lion’s share of the talking, and she added intermittent comments like uh-huh, and yeah, and

right. After twenty or thirty minutes of this, he would usually turn the tables, abruptly asking

about her day, but by this point she was usually thinking about how to end the call and no longer

had much to say.

“I know we talk every night, Sam,” she said. “I wasn’t aware it was an obligation.”

“It’s not an obligation. I just always want to talk to you.” He gave a short, harsh laugh.

“You’re making it pretty clear that desire is not reciprocated.”

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An inward groan. She stretched her neck on her pillow. “At this moment I’d rather still be

sleeping. That’s not true in general.”

“All right.” His voice had softened. “I didn’t mean to wake you up. I know how hard you

work. I just missed talking to you tonight. I didn’t mean to come on so strong.”

“That’s okay.” Mollified, she rubbed the back of her right hand over her eyes. “What

time is it?”

“Almost midnight. I forget you’re not a night owl anymore. How was your day?”

Since Sam almost never led by asking her about herself, at least in a non-perfuntory

manner, she pushed her head back on the pillow, coming slightly more awake. “It was long,

actually. But I had a couple of really good sessions.”

“Yeah? Good how, tell me about them.”

“Well, I can’t tell you details, you know that. But in my last session, my client was

talking about a childhood dream she has to let go of. And I tried to get her to explore…” She

yawned again. “Sorry. To identify the need that dream was trying to fulfill, maybe find

something that could hone in on that same need, but in a way that’s, I mean, appropriate to her

life as it is now. And it seemed to—actually resonate with her, a little. At least I thought so. It’s

too early to know.”

“You’re a brilliant therapist,” he said. “You know that, right?”

“Uh.” She laughed. “That may be going a little far. I’m coming along. But it’s a good

feeling when you hit on what seems to be the right thing to say. As opposed to my usual, which

is driving away from a session and suddenly realizing the brilliant intervention that I should have

said.”

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“Right.” He paused. “Didn’t you tell me that Starling confronted you about your need to

constantly self-deprecate?”

Now she was fully awake. After starting with a cross-examination, he was now being

nicer to her than he had in weeks. “Is something the matter?” she demanded.

“How do you mean?”

“I dunno, you’re being a little too sweet or something. I suddenly don’t recognize who

I’m talking to.”

A pause. “You wound me,” he said.

She laughed again. “All right, I’m brilliant.”

“You’re a regular fucking Anna Freud. How’s school going?”

“It’s going. I love it. Tons of work.”

A pause. “Am I gonna see you on the weekend?”

She hesitated. “I don’t know. I’ve got so much reading to do, my first paper to write for

my trauma course.”

Another pause. “I hardly see you anymore.”

“Well.” She adjusted the phone to her ear. “I don’t know what to do about that. Short of

having you support me so I can just go to school and not work. I just don’t really have much time

left over.”

“Do you want me to support you?” His tone had suddenly taken on an edge.

“No.”

“Well, that works. Because I can’t.” Now the aggression, the familiar truculence that

tended to emerge unexpectedly and disappear for reasons equally mystifying, was fully present.

“That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

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“Absolutely, Sam. That’s what I want. I’m not interested in my work at all, I just want to

sit home all day watching TV.” She involuntarily shook her head, as if trying to fend off a swarm

of flies. “Now that we’ve established that, can I go back to sleep?”

“I guess you don’t want to hear about my day, do you?”

“Oh my fucking God. Yes. I want to hear about your day.” She tried to adjust her tone.

“Al got on my ass again,” he said. The owner of the Shadow River Ranch, a supervisor

with whom Sam had been butting heads for years. Celeste wondered at times why Al kept Sam

on considering how many customers he seemed to alienate , but the answer was obvioius With

Sam’s background in saddle bronc and bareback riding and his willingness to put in long hours

and physical work and to live adjacent to the ranch grounds, making him more or less constantly

available, he would undoubtedly be hard to replace, even with his abrasive personality. “We

were tacking up for a trail ride, last of the season. And I have this one girl I give lessons to, I’ve

known her for awhile now. She always rides the same horse. Bender. So I tell her go out in the

pasture and catch Bender herself and lead him in and tack him up, because I was doing

everything else. So apparently, get this, the cunt complains to Al that she pays the same as

everyone else but she has to go get her own horse.”

“Please don’t use that word.”

He sighed. “It gets frustrating when you focus on semantics and don’t address my point.”

“Okay. It’s not exactly semantics, but okay, sorry. I dunno, she ever complained about

you before?”

“Yeah, maybe a couple times. But my students like it that I’m hardcore. They learn

everything about riding from me, not just how to canter their horse around the ring. The bitch

should’ve come to me if she had a problem.”’

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“Yeah, well, if she’s a long-time student, maybe you guys could talk it out.”

“I’ve got nothing to say to her.”

“Okay. Look Sam, I really do have to go. I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, just a couple things first.” Apparently Sam had more to tell her about his day. She

rolled over on her back, forcing herself to listen, since she hated it when people were only half-

attentive in conversation. Fifteen minutes later, she interrupted.

“Sam. I’ve got to go to sleep now. I’m waking up at five to start my trauma paper before

work.”

“I know, I’m sorry. I just love talking to you.”

“Okay, me too.” That was a bit of a stretch tonight, but the faintly forlorn sound of his

voice touched her. “We’ll talk more tomorrow.”

“Celeste?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re brilliant. Do you know that?”

“Thanks.”

“No, don’t just thank me. You’re going to excel in school, you know. Again. And if you

can find any time this weekend, even for a late dinner, nine o’clock or something, I’ll take you to

Phat Daddy’s.” Their favorite barbeque place. “They stay open till one on Saturdays.”

“Okay. I love you.”

“I love you too. Don’t ever forget that.”

“I won’t.”

She hung up, exhaustion flooding her. Conversations with Sam had come to feel like

some kind of endurance sport where she had to push through one obstacle after another to finally

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reach the freedom of release. Not for the first time, she wondered what it would be like to come

home after work or school and have only Starling to answer to. Starling with whom conversation

never felt like a triathlon or a mine-studded field.

But even as she contemplated the prospect of her freedom, she sensed something else

tugging at some ragged edge in her body, a fading, a diminishing, a light dying out somewhere.

Aileen.

Aileen was fading out of the world. Celeste knew it. That tie she had always keenly felt,

even in the years they didn’t speak, was twisting and fraying, ready for the final break. Her

premonition of Aileen’s imminent death had only intensified since their meeting last month. And

the impending loss of Aileen felt both inevitable and unbearable, like part of her body tearing

off, her blood and bones getting up and walking away without her.

She knew she couldn’t endure two major losses at the same time. Sam would never be

imbedded in her life as deeply as Aileen but after ten years, he was a part of her too, her body

and mind, even her family, however limited his participation in her family life. And the

impending loss of Aileen made Celeste’s existence feel fragile.

But what about Starling? Wouldn’t her life be better without the frequent presence of

someone who barely tolerated her?

She twisted her head on her pillow. She could reconsider about Sam at another time.

Maybe she was just raw from fatigue, from the meeting with Aileen, from the incessant demands

of work and now school . Maybe she and Sam could work it out.

Or maybe she was just biding her time until she was strong enough for the final break.

Again the nagging question: was she like Leslie, hanging on to something long dead, in

her fear of being alone? That same fear must have kept Lynn with Jerry all those years. Of

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course even Lynn had eventually escaped. But surely it was the coward’s way out to wait years,

or decades, for death to liberate you.

On Friday Celeste saw Adele as her penultimate client of the day and the week.

There were clients she looked forward to seeing, and those others she had to gird herself

for. Adele was in the former camp. The first time Celeste had met her she’d known that she and

Adele could work together, sensing the spark of a familiar, peculiar chemistry. It was not quite

friendship, certainly not attraction, but an indefinable resonance, an alignment that opened the

possibility of change.

Adele sat in the antimacassar-draped armchair by Celeste’s east-facing window. She held

herself in the way Celeste had come to expect from Adele on bad days: tensely, elbows close to

her body as if protecting her bones from bruising.

It was a posture Celeste had grown used to seeing. After giving her two children over to

her ex-husband, who lived five hours away in Portland, Adele had watched helplessly as he took

them with him to Texas when he was transferred to the Houston office of his chemical

engineering firm. Adele had attempted to block the move through legal channels, but since she’d

freely given up full custody, the court ended up siding in Noah’s favor.

“Texas,” she’d said at the time, in a tone at once wondering and acerbic. “The one place

on earth where he knows I could never live again. We lived there a year early in our marriage. I

hated it from the first minute we got there, so much that I think I fell into a clinical depression.

The endless wind, the heat, the scorpions, the tarantulas, the…redneck fundamentalist bigots

who think Texas is the center of the world. I told Noah once that in a choice between hell and

Texas, I think I’d choose hell.”

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Celeste sat down at her desk, somewhat covertly watching Adele. She had refined the art

of minutely examining her clients without making them feel they were under her microscope.

“Hey, she said gently. “What’s going on?”

Adele shook her head, pushing back her long, almost waist-length dark hair. The lightly

tanned skin of her weathered, attractive face accentuated the blue of her eyes Deep creases in her

cheeks remained visible even after her smile faded, normally giving her a look of hopefulness,

openness, generosity. But today she just looked ground down.

“Not much,” Adele responded.

“You look a little tired.”

Adele hesitated and nodded. “My sleep is erratic. I get to bed easily enough, but then I

keep waking up, and I finally spring awake at five every morning. I can’t force myself back to

sleep or even make myself stay in bed.”

“What’s on your mind in the night?” Celeste pretty much knew, but you had to start

somewhere.

Adele tilted her head forward, staring at the carpet. “Tina isn’t doing well,” she finally

said.

“What’s happening with Tina?” Celeste asked.

“Her grades are dropping. She still doesn’t have friends. I flew to Houston two weeks ago

and spent five days with her and Tommy, and I thought it went really well. We had a great time

and Tina and I talked about making friends and how to deal with bullies. I thought she seemed

happier and more hopeful.” Adele’s hand went to the crucifix around her neck. “But then I got a

call this week from her. Well, I get a lot of calls, we talk every day. But on Wednesday night she

called crying, I could barely get it out of her, what was wrong. I finally got her to slow down and

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take a breath. She said she thought she was finally getting a few friends, and she was all excited

about it. But then there was some incident in the bathroom at school, I couldn’t even really make

sense of it she was crying so hard. But I guess a bunch of girls, including all the ones she thought

were her new friends, just turned their backs on her and got into the stalls and closed the doors so

she was left all alone, and they all started laughing. Something like that.” Adele took a long

shaky breath and let it out. “I finally got her calmed down, and I got on the phone to Noah and I

told him I thought she should come back up here. She’d been doing great in school here, she had

a lot of friends. She was an A student. And I asked him if he thought maybe Tommy should

come back too, since he’s been getting into trouble.”

“What did he say?”

Adele shook her head. “He said absolutely not. I sent her and Tommy away, and now he

thinks Tommy’s getting into drugs, they’re both messed up, and it’s my fault. He said he

wouldn’t let either of them go and he’d take me to court. So if I were to try to bring Tina back,

I’d have to put her through a custody battle. Which means my hands are effectively tied. And

you know what the worst of it is?” She looked up, meeting Celeste’s eyes directly. “He’s right. I

did this to Tina myself. Noah was happy to take the kids in when I dumped them on him so I

could be with my loser ex-con boyfriend. I did this.” Her breathing was ragged. “And now my

kids have to suffer.”

“Breathe,” Celeste said. “Adele. Breathe. Slowly, not hyperventilating.”

Adele nodded. She took in two deep breaths, let them out slowly, and closed her eyes, as

if reorienting herself.

She shook her head. “I keep having this memory,” she said. “It—just haunts me. It’s

something where I didn’t even realize the significance of it until much later. But now I

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understand it. It was an afternoon shortly after I told the kids I was sending them to Portland to

live with their dad. And they were just going along with it, I think they were confused by the

whole thing, but they hadn’t made any big protests, so I thought everything was fine. And I was

already making my plans to move in with Billy. On this one day Tina and I were outside our

house, which was on a hill, with a beautiful view over Devil’s Canyon and Nez Perce Lake. And

she just kind of leaned into my side, and looked up at me, and she said, ‘Mom, Bitter Creek is

my favorite place in the world.’ And I know now what she was saying to me.” Adele clenched

her teeth, let out her breath. “She was asking me not to send her away.” Adele clenched her teeth.

“She was telling me in the only way she knew how that she didn’t want to go. And I didn’t hear

her. I was so full of myself, my plans, my plans for me and Billy. And now I, now I just keep

thinking, why didn’t I listen to what my little girl was trying to tell me?” Her face twisted, tears

pulsing into her eyes.

Celeste passed her a tissue, pressing it into her hand with a light touch on her wrist. “I

know,” she said. “Adele, I know.”

Adele took in a jagged,, shuddering breath. She began to breathe shallowly, almost

panting, pressing the tissue to her eyes. “I keep remembering the night she was born. I think it

was the best day of my life. I mean, there was Tommy first, but with him I think I was a little

stunned by labor, by the pain, I hadn’t been expecting it. So I was incredibly happy after his

birth, but also a little bit stuck in the horror of that pain.” She laughed, a sound like gravel. “But

with Tina, I knew what was coming, also I didn’t have an episiotomy, so I just shook off the pain

the minute it was over. Tina was born at ten at night, and afterward Noah fell asleep in the chair

next to my hospital bed. And the unit was quiet. I was up on the fifth floor. We were living in

Portland at the time, I could see out the window over the mist that rolled in over the city and the

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lights just faintly glimmering underneath it. I held Tina in my arms when she fell asleep after

nursing for the first time. And I remember thinking, I’m the happiest woman in the world. I felt

such complete and utter love for this baby, and I knew I would do anything in the world, even

give up my life, to protect her.” She was staring across the room; she looked up, eyes suddenly

refocusing. “I don’t know how we got from there to here. I just don’t understand. I don’t

understand.”

Tears tracked down her cheeks. She brushed them away with the back of her hand. “Do

you know what Noah told me, a month after I sent the kids to live with him? That Tommy, Noah

had gone in to say good night to Tommy this one night, and he could see Tommy was upset. So

he pried out of him what was wrong.” She stopped, then seemed to force herself to start again.

“Tommy wouldn’t tell him and wouldn’t tell him, and finally it all came out at once. The first

week he got there, Tommy found a baby bird that fell out of its nest. He tortured it for a long

time. Then he stomped it to death.”

Celeste nodded slowly. “Jesus, Adele,” she said.

“This is a kid who used to yell at people for stepping on ants. Who would never collect

fireflies in the summer, because he said they didn’t look happy in their jars. Noah said that

Tommy was crying about the baby bird, and Tommy kept saying, I had so many chances to let

him live.” Tears escaped the corners of her eyes again, and she tilted her face up against them.

“Oh my God, my poor little family. My poor little family.” Great heaving sobs came out as if

pulled out of her chest by the giant fist of a beast.

“ Sometimes I don’t want to live anymore,” she said. “It hurts all the time. I don’t know

how to live with this guilt. But what would that do to my kids if first I sent them away, then I

killed myself? So I’m trapped in this.” She had crossed her arms over her ribs, half bent forward.

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“Adele. You said you don’t understand how it came to this. How it happened.” Celeste

paused. “Can you try to let yourself understand?”

“You know what Tommy said to me the last time I saw him? I apologized to him for

sending him away, I was kind of trying to explain myself, and he cut me off and said, Mom, you

can dance around it any way you want. What it comes down to is, you’re just another woman

who chose her bad boyfriend over her kids.”

“Wow.” Celeste felt the reverberation of those words as if she’d experienced them as a

blow to her own gut.

“And you know what? He was right. I chose Billy over my kids. Billy’s condition for

living with me was that I get rid of the kids. And I did.”

She fell silent. It was a silence Celeste knew not to violate, as heavily as it hung over the

room.

“But what I still don’t understand is why. I never loved Billy as much as I loved the kids.

Not for a single second. Why did I choose him? I look back and try to understand myself, and I

can’t.” Her forehead creased. “I do remember the exact moment I made that decision. I was so

tired that day. So exhausted from taking care of the kids on my own and working full-time. And I

was frustrated with Tommy, he was kind of a rebellious kid, not mean or defiant ever, just more

tons of energy, bouncing off in all directions and being loud at school. And I remember thinking

that Noah might know how to deal with him better.” She chewed the inside of her lip. “I’d been

with Billy the night before, and Billy was talking about going camping, how much fun we’d have

if it were just the two of us, and I wanted to live with him so badly. And then this idea popped

into my mind: I could send the kids away to live with Noah. And I’d have a chance to breathe.

To get some rest. I could have my life with Billy. And now I know that that little voice was like

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Satan whispering in my ear. But there was no angel whispering in my other ear. Just Satan. Just

the devil. I accepted the idea unquestioning: Oh yeah, that’s what I’ll do.” She moved in her

chair, seeming unable to find a comfortable posture. “Have you ever had a moment that you

looked back on forever, a kind of pivotal moment where you now realize everything hung in the

balance and you did something—fatally—wrong? Something so horribly wrong that there was

no coming back from it?”

“Yes,” Celeste said. The bench outside the library. Allowing herself to freeze in place.

Abandoning Aileen on the hillside.

“And how do you live with that?” Adele demanded. “How does a person live with that

knowledge?”

Celeste said slowly, “It’s one of the hardest things you could ever deal with.”

Adele was clutching her crucifix again, as if it alone could save her. “It’s eating me

alive,” she said. “It’s killing me.”

“Adele.” Celeste leaned forward. “Would you want any of your students to have to live

through this, what you’re going through?” Adele worked in the Workforce Development office

Bitter Creek Community College, and often spoke at length of the students she worked with, of

her involvement in their lives. “Would you want any of them to do this to themselves?”

Adele shook her head. She was shivering. “No.”

Celeste’s eyes fell on Adele’s hand, clutching her cross, the knuckles white with pressure.

A sudden inspiration seized her. Adele was a devout Catholic; her faith provided one of the few

comforts remaining to her. “Do you want to get rid of this?” Celeste asked. “Not your

conscience, but the thing that’s eating you alive, that’s killing you?”

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Adele stopped. Then she nodded. “Yes,” she said. She was trembling violently. “I just

don’t know how to do it.”

“Ask Mary to take it away from you,” Celeste said.

“Mary?”

Celeste nodded. “Wouldn’t Mother Mary understand the kind of suffering a mother can

go through?”

Adele hesitated. Then she nodded.

“Ask her to take it away. To leave only light in its place.”

“Okay.” Adele’s head nodded, puppet-style. Her teeth were rattling now. “All right.”

“Ask it,” Celeste said. “Ask her out loud. Now.”

Adele caught her breath. She was holding her crucifix in a death grip. “Mother Mary,”

she whispered. “Blessed art Thou among women, and Blessed in the fruit of Thy womb, Jesus.

Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.” Tears slid down her cheeks again. “Take

this pain away. Take this awful pain away from me.” She took in a shuddering breath.

“Ask her to take it away, and to leave you light.”

“Mary, please take it away, and leave only light in its place. Forgive me my sins. Please

forgive me for the horrible thing I did. Help me, and help me to help my children.”

“Let this be a turning point.”

“Let this be a turning point.” She clenched her teeth against the shuddering. “Please help

me in my hour of need.”

. Celeste nodded. “All right,” she said. “All right.”

Adele nodded, still shivering. Her eyes were closed and her tears continued to flow down

her face. Slowly, though, she appeared to settle, the shaking slowly growing less violent.

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“Amen,” Adele whispered.

“Amen,” Celeste said.

She saw, or sensed, a strange clarity that had slowly filled the room during their

exchange. Just as gradually, it began to dissipate, a fine mist fading. A trace of it remained

behind, as if the very air in the room had thinned, refined itself. Adele’s shuddering finally

almost subsided, only a tremor remaining, and her hand finally loosed its grip on her cross. A

look of exhaustion—a look that may have contained a hint of peace—settled over her.

“How are you?” Celeste asked finally, her voice a near-whisper.

Adele nodded.

“I’m okay,” she said. She took in a deep breath, then let it out heavily. “I’m okay. I

think.” She looked up at Celeste.

“Thank you,” she said faintly.

“Don’t thank me.” Celeste leaned forward. “You did the work.” She could feel relaxation

sliding across her back and shoulders, her muscles slowly releasing their screaming tautness.

Adele sat in silence. Celeste noted that the clock had passed its hour mark, and she knew

there was another client in the waiting room. But she also knew she could not disturb the fragile

peace that had settled into the corners of the room.

Finally Adele stirred. “Thank you,” she said again, a hoarse whisper. She cleared her

throat. “Thank you, Celeste. I know I’m over my time.”

“That’s all right. Take the time you need.”

Adele nodded. She let out a long, shaking breath. “I’m good.”

“Are you all right to go home? To drive?”

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Adele managed a faint smile. “I’m fine.” Celeste wondered if she was imagining that an

almost imperceptible calm had settled into Adele’s eyes, that their blue was coming through

more clearly, deeper, then it had earlier in the day.

After Adele’s departure, Celeste sat at her desk for a few minutes. She closed her eyes

and took a succession of slow deep breaths. After an hour that intense, it was impossible to go

immediately into the next session. Necessary to make room in her brain for the next client,

dissolve the vestiges of the person to whom she had just recently been so intimately connected.

Finally she opened her eyes, shook her head, and stood up. She went to the door to call in

Roanoke, who picked up her baby in his carrier and trudged back into Celeste’s office

That evening Celeste sat out on her back deck with Starling, both wrapped in heavy cardigans,

drinking tea as the twilight brought its edge of chill to the air. The brilliant copper and butternut-

yellow leaves of the quaking aspens and Rocky Mountain maple trees near the deck were

starting to fade, curling in at their edges. Celeste had been talking aimlessly about her work, and

Starling, as always, was drawing her out. Celeste had wondered more than once if Starling might

eventually change her projected academic path from languages to mental health, but she never

brought it up. God forbid she try to turn Starling into a little mini version of herself, and anyway

as an interpreter or translator for the US diplomatic service, her daughter would make vastly

more money than she could ever dream of earning in a psychiatric clinic.

Since Starling often pressed her for details, though, Celeste would sometimes talk about

her sessions, eliminating all specifics about the client, just describing the bare bones of the work.

Tonight she mentioned Adele’s session, briefly describing what she’d done.

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“Mom, that’s kind of amazing,” Starling said. “Will it—last? Will it have a, a lasting

impact?”

Celeste shook her head and shrugged. “I won’t know until I see her again. But I somehow

think so.” There had been that indefinable moment in the room when something changed. When

the change was tangible.

“You’re a great therapist,” Starling said.

“Well—yeah, uh, there’s all the other stories I could relate.” Celeste laughed. “Did I tell

you about the woman who kept coming in and telling me the FBI was surveilling her through her

tv? I got all caught up in the most basic mistake of trying to debate a psychotic patient about her

hallucinations. I presented every logical argument I could put forth, about how and why it

couldn’t be happening. It didn’t feel like I was getting through, so I was thrilled when she came

in one day and said hey, the FBI isn’t watching me anymore. I was all prepared to be puffed up

about myself and I asked her how that had come about. She said, well, I just threw my TV in the

dumpster.”

Starling laughed.

“So, a piece of advice,” Celeste continued, “ just in case the situation ever arises. You

will never successfully argue anyone out of a fixed delusion.”

“Got it,” Starling said. “You’re not perfect. But anyway. The client you were talking

about, before that. What kind of counseling would you call that? It’s not cognitive therapy, or

DBT or anything. Right?” The facility with which Starling picked up these details never ceased

to amaze Celeste.

“No.” She paused. “I guess if I had to name it, I’d just say it was spiritual counseling,

within the context of the client’s own belief system.”

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“But you don’t—believe in the Virgin Mary, right? I mean, that she’s real? Or divine?”

“No.” Celeste shrugged “I mean, I don’t know. Who am I to say? I believe there’s

something. Some kind of—spirit. Something—beyond, that we can sense but can’t fully

understand. I’ve always thought God was just a code word for something ineffable. But do I

think there was something in that room? Yes.” She nodded. “There was something at work,

beyond me. Beyond my client. I don’t have to know what it was.”

“But, it’s amazing that you can tap into that.”

“It’s not exactly me.” Celeste frowned. “It’s me and the client together. What Martin

Buber called the I-Thou relationship. It’s a kind of magic that occurs when two people sit

together and open to each other. And both of them take away something from it, not just the

client. Both of them learn. It’s what I love most about the work.”

Starling sat silent, holding her mug. Celeste looked at her profile, the clean line of her

jaw, the mass of curly hair with the faint wind pushing against it.

“You’re going to do great things in the world,” she said.

“How do you know?” Starling asked.

“It’s just something I know about you. I always have.” She thought of her first sight of

Starling. Of Adele holding her infant daughter Tina in her arms right after birth.

The silence, broken only by a faint rustle from wind in the drying eaves, stretched out and

seemed to engulf them. They stayed on the porch until the last light left the sky and the chill

deepened and drove them inside.

PART ONE OF THREE