Sex. Murder. Mystery(180)
She also had fits of tears about her father's cancer. Her reaction was somewhat perplexing to the Fish twins. They too had known John Schmitz was battling cancer—and had been for some time. When Mary Kay first told them back at the condo, she was calm about it. Almost indifferent. All of a sudden the reaction was emotional.
“I don't want all these family stories coming out,” she said, refusing to elaborate.
Only one of Mary Kay's children saw baby Audrey that summer and by then, of course, there was no hope that any of her children could be raised with her love child. Even before the baby was born it was inevitable that she would be a symbol of what had gone wrong with their parents' marriage. But she was also a sister.
Only Steven Letourneau, that summer between sixth and seventh grade, would see his baby sister.
Mary told Amber and Angie Fish about how she had picked up her oldest son at SeaTac Airport. Audrey was asleep in a car seat.
“You know Steven,” she said, “he was awkward and hardly talked to me. I know he's very upset with me. I know he's very mad at me, but when I put his luggage in my trunk, I sneaked a peek at him as he lifted up the blanket and saw Audrey.”
Mary Kay cried as she told the story.
When she got behind the wheel, Steven turned to her and said, “That's a cool little girl you have, Mommy.”
The story made the twins cry. They felt so sorry for Steven and his siblings. Sorrier than they felt for Mary Kay and her mixed-up future. Steven, they felt, had an especially heavy cross to bear. Steven had been around Mary and Vili during the previous summer and fall.
“Steven knew. He knew from the beginning. He knew everything,” Amber said later.
Ellen Douglas once called herself a “Que Sera Sera” type person. Stuff happens. It just does. The idea that a teacher and a student could fall in love was not so impossible for Ellen to understand. She could see how it might happen with one huge reservation. The age difference was too bizarre to accept. She just couldn't see it. Maybe in a high school setting, but not an elementary teacher and her young student.
Whenever she tried to rationalize what had happened between Mary Kay and Vili Fualaau, she always came back to the impact on the children involved.
She never considered Vili part of that group.
“That child was never a child like Mary Kay's son and my son,” she told a friend. “That was not a little boy playing Legos and G.I. Joe [action figures] and wearing little Ninja costumes and running around the neighborhood like our two little boys were.”
Vili Fualaau, as Ellen saw him, was not in the same league as other kids that shared his chronological age—at least none that she knew. It seemed that the seventh grader did what he wanted, whenever he wanted to. Obviously, with a father in prison, his family life was outside the norm of suburban Normandy Park kids. Since he was too young to drive, someone must have brought him over to the Letourneaus and left him there—at all hours and overnight. Ellen was convinced that members of the boy's family were aware that something was going on between Vili and Mary Kay.
“His family knew,” she contended.
It also became apparent to Ellen and others that a true double standard was evident in the Mary Kay Letourneau saga. The fact that it was a woman perpetrator and a young male victim, though novel and shocking, probably had less lasting impact than if the roles had been reversed.
“A thirteen-year-old girl getting pregnant is a heck of a lot different physically than a thirteen-year-old boy getting someone else pregnant. The physical difference of what happens to that child's body is different. It is a double standard. We are not equal.”
Introspection comes easily to a teenage girl's heart, but so does the willingness to believe in someone or something when the most obvious evidence points in another direction.
Katie Hogden had felt so very close to Mary and Vili and had seen the signs of their closeness—the looks, the fleeting touch of their hands—that she was not surprised later when she learned the two had been intimate or had “hooked up.” It was always in the back of the sensitive girl's mind like a closed door, she later imagined when she tried to explain it. A door that she had chosen to leave locked and boarded up. Always there, but always hidden. For Katie, keeping that door closed probably meant never getting hurt.
Later, Katie considered that all that she believed had been going on was a teacher trying to save a boy from his family, his past, and a future that was dark and without room for all that he could be.
“She wanted to help him because he needed the help and she needed the help. He could help her and she could help him. And their souls just like matched. He was her best friend and she was his best friend. Look at them talking… it was just perfect. Once-in-a-lifetime thing”