If Loving You Is Wrong (19 page)

“I thought it was strange, weird, but how nice. I'm thinking they're safe, going down there after school, helping a teacher and getting involved and interested in education. So, Mary Kay's a cool teacher. What harm could the little thing do? Could be nothing but good for them,” she said later.

Not long after Drew started hanging out in room 39, his twin sister Molly and her friend Nicole joined in. It was only when the girls started coming home late, saying they had stopped off at McDonald's on Ambaum Boulevard, that Danelle's blood began to churn.

“But we're helping Miss Letourneau,” Molly said.

Danelle shook her head.

“I don't care what you're doing down there with her. If she's not giving you a ride home, then you're not going down there to help her.”

And as teenagers do when they can, they ignored their mother and continued to go to Shorewood, but they made it a point to get home on time—or at least closer to the 8:30 P.M. curfew.

Later, Mrs. Johnson remembered how it was that she allowed her children to hang out at the school so late in the evening. She felt as though her kids were safe with their former teacher's unorthodox after-hours help sessions.

“I thought it was good for them. I was worried about their schoolwork. Worried about them going from sixth grade to the seventh. They were getting interested in school. I swear to God, I thought it was a help. I couldn't imagine that anything she could do would be wrong.”

It was sometime after ten P.M. on a school night in October 1996 when Danelle Johnson began to wonder what was really going on at the school. Her son and daughter were in bed and the mother of six was watching television when she heard a knock on the door. It was Mary Kay Letourneau standing on the front step looking agitated and flustered. Behind her was a young boy whom Danelle recognized a friend of her son's.

The teacher apologized for the intrusion at the late hour, but she had no choice. Her words were rapid-fire and aimed right at Mrs. Johnson.

“He was helping at the school. He got locked out of his house. His dad's not home. I can't wait around for him to come home. Is it okay if he stays here with you?”

Danelle Johnson was flabbergasted.

“What the hell is he doing down there this late at night anyway? My kids are in bed already. They went to bed at nine. I don't understand. Why would you want these kids down there that late at night?”

“Well, he was helping me with the bulletin board and then he just got locked out. I've got to get home. I don't know what to do,” she said.

“Yeah, he can stay here,” Danelle finally said, as she led the boy inside and shut the door as the teacher quickly turned and walked back to her van.

A few minutes later, the impromptu care provider had the kid's father on the phone.

“Are you sure he's there?” the man asked, as if he'd been that route before and wasn't exactly sure that the call was legitimate.

Why would I make that up? Danelle wondered.

“Yeah, I'm sure,” she said. “And he's scared to death that he's gonna get in trouble from you, but I don't think it was his fault.”

The father agreed that it would be all right for his boy to spend the night—as long as Danelle made sure he'd get to school the next day.

Years later, Danelle tried to put two and two together.

“Now that I think about it,” she said later, “I'll bet she had Vili out in the van also. She was trying to get rid of the boy so she could be alone with him.”

It was Mary Kay Letourneau's sweet and young-sounding voice on the line. It was mid-December 1996. It was a call out of the blue. Not for Christmas greetings or school fund-raising or anything that anyone might come up with to characterize a call just before the holidays.

“I'm concerned about Molly,” the teacher said.

Danelle Johnson repeated the statement as a question.

“Why are you concerned about Molly?”

“Molly comes down to the school all the time.”

“I know that. Her and Nicole, Vili, Drew—all those guys come down. What's the problem?”

“Well, Molly seems to think that I'm her best friend. That I'm the only friend she has... She tells me all kinds of things and stories about school and life up at the junior high and I don't think she should be hanging around here so much. I don't even know her!”

“She was in your class! And those guys have been helping you for three or four months. What do you mean you don't know her?”

Mary Letourneau sputtered to a finish.

“Well, I don't know her. We're not best friends. I'm kind of worried about her. She should have friends her own age.”

Danelle Johnson was furious. And she was hurt for her daughter, who had mixed up a relationship with an older woman. It was a friendship about which Molly spoke often. It was Ms. Letourneau this, Ms. Letourneau that. All day. Every day.

“All right,” she said softly. “I'll tell her to quit coming down there and bothering you or whatever she's doing to you. Seems to me like you've encouraged these kids to come around there and help you. I don't want to hurt her feelings.”

“I don't want to hurt her, either. I'm just worried about her. She shouldn't think she's my best friend.”

“She has a friend her own age,” Danelle said. “Her friend comes down there with her to help you. They think they're doing something great there.”

“I'm just real worried about her,” Mary repeated.

Danelle Johnson thanked the teacher for her concern and hung up. She was very troubled.

There's something wrong. Why would the kids think they should be going down there and helping her? And why would she call me to tell me she didn't even know Molly?

Later that day Danelle found a moment to talk to her daughter about the call.

“Ms. Letourneau doesn't want you to come around anymore,” she said.

The girl asked her mother for an explanation.

“She says you act like you're her best friend and she thinks you should have best friends your own age. She thinks you're getting way too involved. She asked you to stop—”

“Yeah, whatever, Mom.”

Danelle mulled it over that night and in the days and weeks after. She rationalized it. She worried about it. She figured the kids had become too rowdy and Mary Letourneau couldn't have them around as much. Maybe another teacher complained?

Teenyboppers aren't a lot of fun twenty-four hours a day. Maybe they got on her nerves.

Drew and Vili continued to go to Shorewood, while for the most part, Molly stayed away.

Not long after the phone call from the sixth-grade teacher, Danelle spoke to her new husband about it. It disturbed her that the kids were spending so much time with their former teacher.

“There's something weird going on,” she said. “Why is this woman hanging around with these kids from junior high school?”

Her husband didn't have an answer. No one did.

That Steve Letourneau had become violent and abusive toward Mary Kay to the point of hitting, kicking, and pushing her to the ground had been a shock to Michelle Jarvis. In all the years Michelle had known Mary Kay, she had never once heard of any abuse. Sure, Steve could be a jerk and punch some holes in the wall, but he didn't knock his wife around. But as Michelle learned, a few weeks after Steve found out that Mary Kay had become pregnant in the fall of 1996 things worsened in Normandy Park.

Mary Kay would reiterate some of the things that Steve had been saying and doing, and as the weeks went by, the information she shared with Michelle began to scare her. She not only worried for her friend, but she worried about the four Letourneau kids. In his embarrassment, hurt, rage, whatever, Steve never lost an opportunity to remind them what their mother had done.

“I know it for a fact, because I heard him when she was on the phone with me. She would write down all of the things he said to her. And he said things in front of the children. He would talk about where she had sexual relations with Vili. To little children!”

And always, Michelle Jarvis, more than anyone, would focus on the Letourneau children and how their parents had handled a terrible situation. It seemed that Mary Kay thought only of Vili and Steve was fixated on making Mary Kay pay for what she had done.

“The kids were an afterthought when she did what she did and they were an afterthought for him in that all he focused on was his own rage and his own need to get even or get back at her,” Michelle said later.

Michelle wrestled with the idea that maybe she could take in the children, and she discussed it with her husband. It was more thinking out loud than much else. How could it be otherwise? She had no claim to the kids. They were Mary Kay's and Steve's. She told Mary Kay that once the verbal and physical abuse started, she should take the children and leave. She should call the police and have Steve arrested. But Mary Kay kept insisting that Steve would come around and things would get better. They didn't. As the name-calling worsened, the children were left to absorb it all. Michelle worried that long-term damage had been done.

“The things Steve said about their mother... these kids are going to be in therapy forever. I doubt very much they are going to fully recover. They've been messed up for life. Damage control could have been had.”

The kids were oddly casual about the subject matter and it bothered Danelle Johnson when they told her that Mary Letourneau had been beaten by her husband, Steve—at least that's what she told Drew and Vili during one of the late-night bulletin board sessions at Shorewood Elementary.

The kids related how Mary had told them Steve had hit her and was “mean to her and all of that.”

Danelle wondered about it later.

Why in the hell would a grown woman be telling this twelve-year old-kid about her family life? About her husband beating her and things like that? Where would that come from? And, she wondered, where would it lead?

Chapter 30

ONE AFTERNOON A Shorewood teacher looked out of her window and saw Vili Fualaau driving Mary Letourneau's van in the courtyard. It was worth a double take. It was so outrageous and potentially disastrous. The van moved slowly toward the window and the teacher worried that the boy was going to drive it right though the glass. He wasn't even a teenager as far as she knew. He was a child. Just as she bolted from the window to avoid a disaster, Mary came running out of the annex to save the day.

The teacher was relieved. Why had Mary given a kid her keys? Why hadn't she supervised him, though it “was possible Vili had taken the keys without permission?

The teacher couldn't help but notice the expression on the boy's face.

“You could see this big smile on his face. 'I'm this evil little person doing something... ' ”

Later when she thought about it, the teacher dismissed it as just “weird interaction” stuff between Mary and Vili. It was not anything unusual for Mary Letourneau.

“Mary was always weird. She did strange stuff.”

Years later a teacher who worked for many years at Shorewood shook her head at the memory of an encounter she had with a student in the hallway near the school library. A girl came up to her and asked her if she knew where Mary was. The teacher thought the girl was looking for a student.

“Mary who?” she asked.

“Well, you know,
Mary.
”

“No, I'm afraid I don't. Whose class is she in?”

The girl got snotty. “Mary
Letourneau
” she said.

The teacher was miffed by the attitude and reminded the student that at Shorewood teachers were addressed by their last name.

“If you are looking for Mrs. Letourneau, I'm sorry,” she said, “but I haven't seen her.”

“Whatever!” the girl said before stomping off in a huff.

The teacher held that little scene in her mind as a perfect example of the boundaries that Mary seemed to ignore.

“She allowed the kids to call her by her first name. She gave them her phone number, address, call anytime,” she said later.

When she told another Shorewood teacher about it, she too thought it was inappropriate—and dangerous. Fostering that kind of closeness wasn't right in a professional setting. It could only invite trouble.

“I don't give out my name and address unless it is an absolute emergency. Parents can send a note to school, leave me a message at the office.” the other teacher said.

For some the noise coming from room 39 was more than they could take. It seemed that no matter what time of day, Mary Letourneau's classes seemed to buzz with a boisterous energy that sometimes seemed to border on pandemonium. Friends seemed to understand that was just the way Mary did things, but newer teachers—teachers who didn't have an emotional investment in a relationship with the woman—found they could tolerate it less.

“Mary had a comfort level that was probably different than some people, but when Mary wanted to have their attention, she had their attention,” said a veteran teacher and friend. “So if she allowed kids to behave in a way that was comfortable for her, but uncomfortable for other people, that was her style of teaching. But she also had very good control when she needed it or wanted it.”