She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [78]
“We didn’t like it,” says Justin. “But we didn’t say anything. None of us did.”
One morning in Ogden, Utah, Celeste ordered Kristina to smash up sleeping pills for her to slip into Steve’s food. Kristina refused, but Celeste kept after her. “Just do it!” she screamed. Finally, Kristina did as she was told, sobbing as she ground them down to a powder. At the breakfast table, while Steve went to the rest room, Celeste poured some of the white powder into his orange juice.
When he sat down and took a sip, he grimaced. “This tastes funny,” he said, looking for a waitress. “I’m going to send it back.”
“Don’t be wasteful. Drink it,” Celeste cajoled him.
Steve looked at her and drank it down. “Happy now?” he asked.
“Yes, thank you,” she said.
Minutes after they got in the car, he fell asleep. At lunch at a Red Lobster, she mixed more of the powder into his cottage cheese. This time Steve passed out at the table, and Justin and Christopher had to help him to the car. Barely coherent, he urinated on himself. When Celeste saw the yellow stain on his pants, she ridiculed him.
Later, they’d remember the trip in the snapshots Justin took, especially one of Steve taken along the side of a road, leaning against a railing. He’d just woken up from a drugged sleep. “We had dinner at a Sizzler, and Celeste gave him more pills,” says Justin. “He passed out again.”
By the time they reached Seattle, Steve was convinced there was something wrong. He called his personal physician, Dr. Handley, who blamed it on altitude sickness. “You have to get to a lower altitude,” he said. “You’re not getting enough oxygen.”
At the airport, as Steve waited for a plane to Phoenix, he handed Celeste a wad of cash and a Shell credit card for gas. She’d left Austin without her credit cards or driver’s license. She tucked it in her purse, kissed him good-bye, and, when they walked out into the parking lot, shouted with exhilaration. “He’s gone,” she screamed. “The fat old fuck is gone. Now we can make some time.”
Inside the Suburban, she tore the paper dealer’s license plate off the back window and dropped it on the floor. “If we get stopped, tell the cops it fell off,” she told the kids. Then she sat in the driver’s seat, stepped on the gas, and they were off, speeding along the mountain roads, with the teens laughing nervously and looking over the edge to see the steep drop to the valleys below.
In Stanwood, north of Seattle, they drove to the storage shed. Although retrieving Craig’s possessions was the reason for the trip, once there, Celeste was eager to leave. The girls had looked through their father’s things for only minutes when she shouted, “Let’s go.” Each grabbed small mementoes, and then they were back on the road, headed toward the ferry to Victoria, Canada. On the way they stopped at Craig’s old workshop at Twin City Foods. “Here, there’s a bunch of junk in there, old tools,” Celeste told one of his old friends, throwing him the keys. “You can have them.”
Kristina and Jennifer wanted to shout at her, telling her that wasn’t junk but all they had left of their father. Instead they said nothing.
On the way to Canada, Celeste pulled into an outlet mall. The wad of bills Steve gave her in Seattle waited to be spent, and she intended to do just that. In a Coach Leather shop, she bought shopping bags full of purses, spending nearly everything she had. Once they were hers, she threw them into the back of the Suburban, as if they meant nothing. At home she had hundreds more stacked in boxes, many with the tags still on. From that point on they ate