She'd rather do anything then dredge up the past, Leslee thought.
She was also very protective of the baby's father, telling Leslee that she would “not have his name get into the news.”
You're so smart, but you haven't a whit of common sense, Leslee thought. This is the nineties, we're talking talk television, the Internet city. They're gonna dig it up.
There were no tears. She was defiant. She had no clue where this was headed.
Leslee was mystified about Mary's father, not only his advice, but also the very fact that he had been alive to offer it. She thought he would have died years ago. Mary had told her that he had terminal cancer back when she was finishing up her degree at Seattle University. She remembered when her mother, Natalie, and Mary discussed natural products that might help buy John Schmitz more time, or even stop the cancer.
They visited a bit longer, Mary telling Leslee that she and Steve had talked with their priest, who agreed that a quiet divorce would be the best solution. Mary said that the plan called for shared custody of Steven, Mary Claire, Nicholas, and Jacqueline—though they would live with Steve for the school year.
“We wanted to keep this to ourselves,” she said. “If it became public, it would ruin the lives of our children.”
It was clear that she still hoped that the plan that had been put together by the priest would still work out. Leslee didn't have the heart to tell her that she thought it was too late.
Mary didn't reveal Vili's name; again choosing to preserve his privacy, she called him “the boy.” She said she was close to the boy's parents. The relationship with the boy was real, deep and lasting.
“Why can't Steve just accept it?” she asked, still supine on the couch.
Leslee didn't have an answer, and Mary didn't allow for one. She went on to tell her about some writings that Steve had found.
“I made a mistake in leaving out my journal,” she said, before correcting herself and adding, “But that really wasn't a mistake, I guess.”
Mary was worried about her children. She told Leslee her sons and daughters were back East with her family. The children were all that kept her from running.
“If it weren't for them, I'd get on a plane and never come back,” she said.
Years later, Leslee pointed out the irony of Mary's statement.
“She said she could not bear being in a place where she could not see her kids. Unfortunately, look what happened.”
The healing took less than an hour. Mary closed her eyes as Leslee moved her hands slowly over her body while imparting her energy and soothing a broken soul. Mary fell asleep, as most of Leslee's clients do. It surprised Leslee. Mary was in dire straits—“the head of the school of hard knocks”—so that such complete relaxation would have been more difficult.
Leslee Browning and her mother, Natalie Bates, talked over coffee and tea in their cluttered kitchen at Carriage Row after the healing. Leslee was convinced that there had been a pattern of sexual abuse in Mary's life. Leslee could see it from her own personal experience, having survived sexual and physical abuse from a family member.
“Mary is the classic sexual-abuse child. Everything she's doing. Maybe within the family, maybe within the church. I don't know why. She was so adamant about hating it… there was something that happened in the church or school.”
A couple of years later, Leslee remained troubled by those books and the bipolar diagnosis.
“There's a part of me in the gut that believes that the manic-depression part was researched on her part and she found someone to diagnose her. I'm not saying she's not manic, but it is weird. Maybe she was researching to see if she really was manic, but I don't know,” she said.
Chapter 55
NONE OF HER friends were in her position—and none ever could be—but all were in agreement with the idea to dump her lawyers. Mary Kay waffled on the subject over the course of the summer of 1997. She was scared and isolated, sitting on her hide-a-bed in the house in Normandy Park. She didn't think David really knew what he was doing. She told friends that the only sex case that he'd ever handled concerned a father who raped and molested his daughter for six years. And he was basing her case on that, she said. Even so, she felt David's heart was in the right place.
It wasn't his heart that worried Kate Stewart. She was a bit more practical than her college friend was. She didn't want to see Mary Kay go down for the count and spend the rest of her life branded as some kind of sex pervert.
“What am I going to do?” Mary Kay asked, phone pressed against her ear.
Kate was direct as always: “You need a new lawyer.”
Like Michelle, though not to as great an extent, Kate had also gone to work to find a new solution for Mary Kay's legal troubles. She talked to other lawyers. Friends. Anyone with a germ of an idea about what could be done for Mary Kay.