Ellen's daughter, Jennifer, didn't get it completely, either. When Audrey was born the little girl asked her mother if they could go see the baby. Ellen knew it was important for Jennifer to see Audrey because the infant was her daughter's best friend's new baby sister. The difficulty for Ellen was the fact that she was a schoolteacher in the Highline District and she saw the pain that had resulted there—because of Mary Kay's relationship with her former student.
Concern for her daughter won out. Ellen picked out a lovely little outfit as a baby gift and the pair went down the street.
Cradling her newborn, Mary Kay welcomed mother and daughter inside. The house was eerie in its emptiness. Boxes and cartons bordered walls smudged by children who no longer lived there. A child's easel and plastic pool had been left behind in the carport. Talk centered on the baby's delivery with no mention of the disintegrating family or the acts that caused it.
“We knew someone was there,” Ellen said later, “because she was not allowed to be alone. That was what the law said. She told us that it was her friend from California. We never saw the person. We were there twice. She said her friend was sleeping. The other time the shower was running the whole time we were there.”
Ellen later wondered if Mary Kay really had someone there, or if perhaps someone who wasn't supposed to be there was hiding out waiting for the visitor to leave.
Not long after Audrey was born, Mary Kay called Amber and Angie Fish to see if they could watch her newborn. She was required by the court to participate in some evaluations and treatment—and she wasn't happy about it. The twins were elated about the prospect of seeing the baby, partly because they loved Mary Kay, but also because their mother was so convinced that Audrey wasn't Steve Letoumeau's.
Mary Kay was running late when she breezed into the condo. Her baby was in an infant carrier hidden by a blanket.
“Audrey's asleep,” she said, dropping the diaper bag. “Here's her formula. She should sleep for a while.”
Then she left, leaving the baby covered up.
Amber would never forget that visit and how she and her sister were dying to take a look under the blanket.” We were all peeking under the blanket, but no one wanted to touch it. The minute she walked out the door, 'Oh my God!' ”
There was Audrey, an adorable baby with a cap of black hair. Audrey didn't look anything like Steve, or even Mary Kay, for that matter. The girls wondered if the baby's father had been black.
With the coast clear and the moment too good to resist, Amber got out the video camera.
“To show my mom,” she said later.
The girls called a few friends to tell them about the baby's coloring.
“Can I come over to see Mary Kay's baby?”
When Mary returned later, the girls hedged about what they really wanted to ask, and commented on Audrey's black hair.
“Doesn't she just have the greatest, darkest hair?” she said.
“Yes,” Amber said. “What is she?”
Mary didn't bat an eye. “Samoan,” she said. “Her middle name is Lokelani.”
The girls were still in shock, and later were unable to recall what Lokelani meant, though Mary explained the name's meaning and how it was perfect for her daughter.
Neither did Mary say who the father was. She said nothing about the boy, whom she still did not name for the girls.
For as long as the Fish twins had known Mary Kay and Steve Letourneau, they had been on a quest for the perfect couch. The one they had in Carriage Row was typical of many young couples—before a house full of children—it had once been white, but after time it turned an unseemly, dull gray. Of course at the Normandy Park address, such a battered sofa would never do. Mary Kay told the twins that she had finally found her dream piece of furniture and special-ordered a custom fabric. It was a floral tapestry with some pinks and blues and even some yellows. It wasn't cheap. Before it was shipped, Mary Kay said the furniture maker had told her that so many people commented on the unprecedented use of that fabric and how it came together with the style of the couch so magnificently. “They couldn't believe it,” she said.
“She was in love with the thing,” Angie Fish said later.
Good thing. For the summer of 1997, the sofa-sleeper was Mary Kay's home base. She arranged it at an angle in the den, a small carpeted room that had three exits and clear sight lines to outside of the house, the front door, and the hallway. The room was dominated by sliding glass doors to the patio. She never closed the sofa—the hide-abed was never hidden.
“Everything was around her bed,” Amber recalled. “Diapers, dirty diapers sitting there and she didn't get up to throw them away. She just kind of tossed them to the side.”