She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [12]
When he wanted to know why, she cried. Only after he pushed did she whisper her claim that she’d been molested by her father. “Don’t you feel sorry for me?” she asked.
“I did,” says Harald.
After that, when they fought she reminded him of her past and sobbed. Harald felt his anger fade. “I’m not so bad, am I?” she asked, nuzzling against him.
In Phoenix in 1987, Celeste was hired on at Crystal Ice, an ice wholesaler. Claiming to have a junior college degree, she was made head of accounts payable; Lue Thompson was in charge of accounts receivable. Years later, Lue—twenty-two years older than Celeste and married with grown sons— believed she understood how Celeste insinuated herself into her life. “She saw something in me even I didn’t understand,” she says. “Celeste knew I’d spent my life wishing for a daughter.”
First at work then during their off hours, the women became inseparable. “I wish I had a mom like you,” Celeste said that Mother’s Day, when she gave Lue a brightly wrapped box with a dress inside. She remarked on Lue’s acceptance of her gay son, Jimmy, complaining that her own mother would never accept such news. Lue grew sad thinking about all Celeste had been through. Soon she was buying her presents and doing the things a mother does for a daughter, even brushing her long, curly blond hair.
“Mom, I wish you could adopt me. I wish I could really be your daughter,” Celeste told her, and Lue dreamed it, too, that Celeste would truly be hers.
When Celeste and Harald fought, she ran to the Thompsons’. One night she cried in Lue’s arms while Lue’s husband, Gary, listened to Harald’s complaints then ordered him to go home. By morning both their tempers had cooled. Harald, however, still felt ill at ease. Just too much about Celeste seemed suspicious. At times she arrived home hours late. She said she was having her hair done, but it looked the same as when she’d left for work. “Can’t you see it’s different?” she’d say.
On the other hand, Lue believed everything Celeste told her. She worried about her new “daughter,” whose life was constantly in turmoil. Celeste complained often of being ill, once telling Lue she had a virus that went to her heart and could have killed her. She cried about Harald, claiming he abused her. When she said Harald didn’t want the girls, Lue and Gary, who’d often helped children in trouble, offered to take them weekdays.
From the first, the Thompsons fell in love with Jen and Kris. At six, they were miniature versions of their mother, with dark blond hair and large blue eyes. Lue signed up the girls, natural athletes, for baseball, and she and Gary went to the games. Evenings, they gabbed as she cooked dinner. After the years with Celeste, it was a welcome break for the girls. Off and on, for nearly two years, the girls lived with the Thompsons, who grew to think of them as their own.
Financially, Celeste was better off with Harald than she’d been with Craig. They lived in a good neighborhood, and he bought her a car, a yellow Ford Taurus. But from the beginning she hated the car, so much so that she ordered a vanity plate that read: Lemon. One morning she left for work and ran back in the house, shouting that someone had attacked the car. When Harald got outside, the fenders were scratched and the seats slashed. “It was weird,” he says. “The cuts were perfect lines at the seams.”
When police arrived, the officer, too, thought the damage suspicious. “It’s funny they didn’t slash the tires,” he said, mentioning that Celeste could still drive it to work.
“Deep down, I knew Celeste did it,” Harald says. “I couldn’t admit it, even to myself.”
Something else happened that year, something the twins would remember vividly. Sobbing, Celeste told them that their grandmother, Nancy, had died. At the California funeral, the twins stretched on tiptoe to see into the coffin. They hadn’t seen their maternal grandmother since infancy and didn’t recognize the white-haired woman inside.
Along with the stability they found at the Thompsons,’ summers in Washington with their father brought solidity