She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [14]
Looking back, it would seem Celeste was incapable of letting go of anyone. As soon as they pulled away, she became frantic to win them back. One night she showed up at a bar where Harald played pool. When he refused to take her back, she dug her long nails into his arm until it bled. Later, he stood on the outside balcony at the apartment. When he looked down, Celeste glowered up at him. Smiling, she popped the lid on a can and poured a Coke over his Camaro. When he turned to go inside the apartment, the door wouldn’t open. “She’d gotten inside and bolted it,” he says.
A little over a year into their marriage, his career in the Air Force was in shambles. Before he’d married Celeste, his reviews had been high. After two years with her, he was barely satisfactory. Why he’d take her back was something he could never explain, even to himself. But he did, weeks later, at the pool at the apartment complex. His roommate said, “She’s here,” and he looked up and saw Celeste.
When he approached her, she held out a box. Inside was a ring she’d bought for him. “I love you,” she said. “I want us to be together.”
They argued, she pleaded, and Harald relented. “I got so deep in a rut with her I couldn’t see above the rut to find a way out,” he says. “I was like a beaten dog. I didn’t want to be confrontational anymore. Looking back, the orders to Iceland saved my life.”
He’d been told to report to Keflavik Air Force Base for a one-year tour of duty a few weeks after they reconciled. On the plane, he felt the sting of separation. “I missed her,” he says. “Even after everything, I still missed her.”
In Phoenix, Celeste moved in with Lue, Gary, and the twins. She quickly had an affair with a bartender and became pregnant. After she lost the baby, she had a hysterectomy. The reason was not clear. Years later she claimed she had ovarian cancer, an insidious disease with few symptoms that is often deadly. Lue Thompson remembers it differently: “Celeste told me she had the hysterectomy because she never wanted to worry about getting pregnant. I never remember her having any type of cancer.”
Two months later Celeste left the girls with Lue and moved into an apartment with Jimmy, Lue’s son, and his male partner. At the time, Celeste was dating a middle-age lawyer she met hanging out at a Phoenix bar frequented by the big-money crowd. He gifted her with something she’d often talked of wanting: breast implants.
When not out with her wealthy beau, Celeste partied with Jimmy and his crowd at gay bars. Because of her giggle, they nicknamed her Silly. “Celeste can be sweet, but she can turn backstabbing,” he says. “There’s something about her that you go back to her.”
Still, their friendship soured. Jimmy complained to Lue that Celeste had come between him and his partner, pitting one against the other. As she had when anyone criticized Celeste, Lue defended her, this time instead of believing her own son.
From Jimmy’s apartment, Celeste, who had a string of jobs from office work to waitressing, moved into an apartment with the girls. By then they’d become her shadows. Jennifer ached to play ball or spend time with friends, but that was out of the question. Celeste wouldn’t permit it. Often they weren’t even allowed to attend school, not when Celeste preferred to have them with her, to follow behind her as she shopped or ran errands. Through it all, Kristina kept silent, rarely complaining. She watched