But mostly, as had been the case for months, she thought of Vili. How she missed him. His voice was deepening and fine black hair made a darkening shadow above his lip. Nothing could keep her from him. Not Steve. Certainly not the police. During the previous spring and summer Mary Kay had been bolder in her disregard of propriety and the law than many were aware—not even Michelle. Her boldness had been vintage Mary Kay. When she was pregnant with Audrey, Vili had accompanied her to her obstetrician's office. They had gone to the movies, even a drive-in theater with her children. She was Rose and he was Jack from Titanic. They had kept no real distance from each other during art classes at Highline, and Mary Kay sensed that some of the others in the class thought they were boyfriend and girlfriend. The couple sipped lattes and mochas at Starbucks and walked arm in arm in downtown Seattle. Mary Kay told a friend later how she and Vili had even sneaked off for a Fourth of July getaway to the Oregon Coast.
“… each question we asked,” she wrote in a poem, “only strengthened the truth we knew… ”
Chapter 64
STEVE LETOURNEAU HAD something he wanted to show Linda Gardner when he came to Seattle for the sentencing. It was a drawing that Mary Kay had done. He never said how or when his estranged wife had done it. It was a picture of the four Letourneau children in front of the house in Normandy Park. All of the kids were sadly waving good-bye. Steve was in the picture, too.
“It had Steve with a really mean face… and then there was me,” Linda said later.
The image haunted her and even scared her a little. She knew that Mary Kay had known all along that it was she who had made the phone call that led to her arrest, but since she never heard directly from Mary Kay, she didn't think she had focused much on that little fact.
But in jail she had time and it made Linda nervous. What if she told one of her little friends where I lived?
The whole world had come to watch Mary Kay Letourneau, the teacher who had sex with her student, when the oft-delayed sentencing finally took place on November 14, 1997. In reality, there was no genuine drama underlying the event. Prosecutors and defense lawyers had already hammered out an agreement and King County Superior Court Judge Linda Lau was expected to go along with it. Six months jail, credit for time served, and three years in a sexual deviancy program. With that, she'd skip the seven-year prison sentence.
The charges were reviewed; the psychologists mapped out Mary Kay's mental problems while the defendant stared ahead, or down at a legal pad. Her hair was up, makeup just so, and the sleeves of a sweater covered her spindle-thin arms.
She later told a friend what she was thinking about at the time. “The truth was that nothing anyone was saying was about me. It had nothing to do with me and I knew it. But when [the psychologist] talked about Audrey, my children, then that was about me.”
Soona Fualaau identified herself as a “very private person” and read a lovely statement about Mary and the fact that it was in the best interests of baby Audrey to keep her mother out of prison. She did not agree with what Mary did, but she did not think her son was a victim of anything.
Mary Kay stood and read from a prepared statement and the sound bite was made, the kind of sound bite that captures a moment and follows a person for the rest of their lives, or as long as the public cares.
“Help us,” she said, her hushed voice cracking, “help us all.”
A crush of cameras and a round of live Court TV commentary and it was over. The teacher/rapist with what one reporter called “soft tendrils” of blond hair faced a few weeks in jail to fulfill the remainder of the six months' time required in her guilty plea. With time off for good behavior, the tearful and seemingly repentant Mary Kay would be free around Christmas. The freedom, of course, would be hollow. There would be no contact with Vili and no unsupervised visits with her children, including Audrey.
Like just about everyone within close range of a television set, Grandma Nadine sat on the sofa in front of the tube watching the news report of Mary Kay's sentencing that November day. Although most were touched by Mary Kay's pleas for compassion, Steve Letourneau's grandmother thought it was a snow job.
You need help all right, Nadine thought. You need a swift kick in the rear and to be sent to the moon.
It made her angry that Mary Kay hadn't publicly acknowledged the impact the relationship with Vili had had on her family. As far as Nadine knew, she never owned up to that.
The seventy-five-year-old woman's loyalty would remain forever with her grandson. She had heard a few things about him that she didn't care to know, but whatever he had done, he didn't deserve the grief his wife had given him.