by Gregg Olsen
Sharon's older sister, Sandra, was on hand to help. In order to keep a clear path for the caterer's comings and goings, Sandra put a plant on a table and placed it in front of one of the doorways to block people from using it.
Mary Kay moved the table and Nadine watched as Sandra told her off.
“I've had it with you, Mary Kay,” she recalled her daughter saying. “I've taken all the shit I'm going to take off of you. You are dealing with the wrong person.”
During one of the Letourneau family visits to Anchorage, Sharon Hume took her granddaughter Mary Claire shopping to pick out an outfit for her birthday. She found a little denim shirt and vest at Lamonts, a mid-priced retailer, and fell in love with it. The little girl couldn't wait for her mother and father to see her wearing it. Steve praised his daughter for her good taste and told her how lovely she looked.
“She was so proud of that outfit that she wore it for three days,” recalled Nadine, who was up in Anchorage visiting at the time.
When Mary Kay arrived from Seattle later, Mary Claire put on the outfit as a surprise. The next thing the adults knew, Mary Claire burst into the living room in tears. Steve and his grandmother asked her what was the matter. Mary Claire said her mother hated her new outfit. “ 'That just makes you look fat,' ” she quoted her mother as saying.
Sharon was very upset. So was Nadine. With Mary Kay, nothing was ever good enough.
Steve told his mom to let go of it and he'd clear it up with his wife later.
“Clear it up later?” Sharon repeated. “You know you are not ever going to bring the subject up! You're not ever going to ask her why! Is it because Grandma Sharon bought it for her? Or is it not good enough?”
“Mom,” Steve said, “just let it ride.”
Nadine jumped right into the fray.
“Who in the hell wears the pants in the family?” she asked her grandson. “You or Mary Kay? Yet I've never seen Mary Kay in a pair of pants.”
Steve didn't say anything back to his grandmother and the old woman just shook her head. Mary Kay was a piece of work.
You never win with her. She is that manipulative. And where did she learn it? she thought.
Steve's grandmother was a forthright woman who never let a chance go by to speak her mind. Her family loved her for it, though there were times when they probably wished Grandma would just shut up. One of those times took place in Alaska in Sharon Hume's kitchen when the family was enjoying a salmon dinner.
The “boys”—Steve, his childhood buddy Mike Mason, and his cousin, Mike Gardner—talked about heading up north to stay in Mason's father's cabin. It would be a couple of days of hanging out, just like they used to do before wives and children.
Everyone was up for it, but Steve was reluctant. He hemmed and hawed and just couldn't commit.
“Well,” he said, “I don't know. I'll have to check with Mary Kay—”
Nadine blew up. “God,” she said, “are you so damned pussy-whipped?”
Everyone laughed and Steve turned red. Later, his grandmother told him she was sorry.
“But I think you are. She's got the upper hand and she knows how to use it,” the old woman said.
Steve just shook his head.
Chapter 22
TURNING NORTH ON Thirty-fifth Avenue SW from Roxbury is a straight shot from White Center and the problems that come with that territory. With each block toward the central business district, “the Junction,” of West Seattle, come better homes, nicer yards, and that elusive pride of ownership. Thirty-fifth Avenue is lined with trees; rows of green-dipped paintbrushes in spring, yellow flames in fall. The houses are older, some approaching a century old. Little Northwest bungalows sit up high off the street in yards with lawns that drop perpendicular to the sidewalk. So steep are the yards that some homeowners hitch a rope to their mowers to drop them down and reel them up. No person could walk the edge.
The Hogden house was a pretty lemony shade of yellow that brought cheer in the winter and complemented the turning leaves that marched up the avenue in the fall. The home of Lee and Judy Hogden and their twelve-year-old daughter, Katie, sat like the others high up off the street. It was a house full of love with no shortage of pets.
The heart of their home was the kitchen, a wonderful room of clutter and computers. A kitchen island inset with a slab of marble dominated the center of the room; above the island was a canopy of pots and pans. A row of family photos mingled with eight-by-ten glossies of film and television stars—a gift from a movie director friend of Judy's. The prize of the gallery was the signed photo of Bette Davis; the River Phoenix image had never been taken from the envelope.
Someday, Judy, an accountant, would get around to it. But in September of 1995 she was focused on her daughter and her education, as she had been since kindergarten. She didn't know it then, but Katie's sixth-grade teacher, Mary Letourneau, would have a profound impact on her daughter—in ways she couldn't have imagined, or wanted.
Up a narrow staircase was Katie's bedroom, a small space made larger by the high ceilings of a vintage home. Hers was the room of a young girl with deep emotions. Framed photos of her friends, classmates, Mary Letourneau, and Vili Fualaau were pinned above the dresser. CDs filled a shelf. Candles topped a nightstand.
Classroom 39 was never neat. It held the clutter of a woman too busy to be bothered with housekeeping when there were projects to be created and lessons to be learned. An ancient map of Washington State flanked by green chalkboards and bulletin boards that never went unadorned hung in the front of the room. A sink and soap dispenser got plenty of use in that classroom. Tempera paint splattered the wall and sponges were stained the color of the rainbows. Beams were painted with the hues of the Seattle football team, the Seahawks. The gridiron theme was the legacy of a previous teacher from days when teachers were able to give rooms a personal touch.
The annex was isolated from the rest of the school and Mary Kay's room was on the western-most end of the building. Two fifty-year-old cedars blocked the view to the courtyard area and the classrooms across the way. The setting suited the teacher's style. She was a hands-on educator who believed that experiences count as much, if not more, than what can be found on the pages of a book. If that meant noise, that was just part of the deal.
In the 1995–96 school year, as in other years, Mary Kay had a table set up where a group of kids could sit and work together. The kids at the “Round Table” were an exclusive lot. They were the chosen. Mary Letourneau had a warm word for all of the children in the class, but Vili Fualaau, Katie Hogden, and one of Vili's cousins, Tony, were a little bit more special. As Katie saw it, Mary did her best to make the other kids “feel like they were close to her.” But there was a slight distance in those relationships. Those kids wanted to be close with their teacher, but she didn't allow it. Not in the same way that she did with Katie and the two boys. Katie didn't see the relationship between Mary Letourneau and the kids outside of the Round Table as “friendships.”
“She called me to talk, she wouldn't call them to talk. They'd call her. She would always be there for them, always have time for them. Besides me and Tony and Vili, I don't think she called them [the other kids in the class].”
Years later, Judy Hogden smiled with the memory of Mary Letourneau and the attention she paid her “special” students.
“One thing that I noticed was that there was a handful of kids in that class that Mary saw something special in. After Katie graduated from sixth grade, Mary put her arm around me and said, 'Katie is truly a gift from God, a very special young lady.' She taught to those kids and the other kids came along for the ride. Mary had her special kids and she focused in on them. I think a lot of the other kids were just there.”
Of course, not every child in the classroom made it to the Round Table, but whenever Mary saw a child with talent—art was always the most precious gift—she did what she could to foster emerging abilities. Mary thought nothing of reaching into her own purse to pay for art s
upplies for a child who came from a financially strapped family. Other teachers did it, too. But in some of the schools in the Highline School District, such supplementation would have proved costly.
One child, a quiet and sensitive girl, was adept at creating sculpted forms and Mary Kay went out of her way to see that she had supplies. It wasn't only Vili Fualaau who seemed to benefit from the extra attention.
“She was an excellent teacher,” Katie remembered, “but our school couldn't really provide everything she needed to teach every student the way she could have. She kind of like nurtured the ones that had like gifts that could be helped, because she knew that if she didn't do it they'd go on to Evergreen or whatever school and probably wouldn't have thought of taking care of those gifts themselves.”
For the most part, students loved her for it. Said one: “She went out of her way to help kids when she saw something that interested them when it seemed like they didn't have a lot of joy in other parts of their lives. There were a lot of troubled kids in my class. It was an interesting year.”
If Vili was the artist, Katie was the writer. It was her love of writing that she thought first bonded her to Mrs. Letourneau. Be it poetry, short stories, even more typical reports, Katie infused her work with originality and a sense of fun that her teacher enjoyed, and to some degree, identified with.
“I always showed mine [work] to her and she was amazed, because it was so much like how she writes. It was the same perspective. We used to make jokes about being left-handed and being divergent. That was the thing of the year,” she said.
As the weeks of the school year flew by, Katie found herself redefining the relationship with Mary Letourneau. Mary Kay told her how inspiring she found her student's writing, the control she had of the language, the freshness of her perspective. They'd talk for hours about their thoughts and feelings and how to capture it all on the blank page of a tablet.
“There was a lot of trust,” Katie said later. “She was somebody that I could look up to as an adult and she was also somebody I was equal with at the same time.”
Chapter 23
THE LEAVES DROPPED into a heavy pile along Thirty-fifth Avenue SW when parent/teacher conferences rolled around in early November 1995. Judy and Lee Hogden had looked forward to the meeting with Katie's teacher. By then, Mary Letourneau's phone calls had become frequent and the Hogdens knew that the teacher viewed their daughter as “special.” They arrived at Shorewood Elementary a few minutes early for their five-thirty appointment—the last one of the day. They had been told the conference would last about fifteen minutes, maybe half an hour.
More than two hours passed. Two hours of hearing a teacher praise their daughter's brilliance, talent, and friendship.
“She just sat there and talked and talked about Katie. Her writing. Her future. How much they had in common. Time just went by. Lee and I looked at the clock,” Judy remembered.
“We left Katie home alone and I'm sure she's wondering where we are,” Lee said. “Mary, I'm sure you need to get home.”
Mary Kay was in no hurry. It was clear that despite four children and a husband at home, she'd rather be sitting there with the Hogdens than anywhere else. “Oh, no, that's okay,” the teacher said. “If I wasn't here, I'd have to be at a sixth-grade teachers' meeting. I'd much rather talk to you than the other sixth-grade teachers.”
The teacher went on for a while longer and the Hogdens thanked her for all they had done for Katie.
Their daughter was waiting at home.
So were Mary Kay's children.
Judy Hogden was a sensible, well-read woman who along with her husband, Lee, had long known that their daughter was “born an adult.” She was a girl who had no trouble talking eye to eye with older people. Katie once teasingly told her mother that she felt like she had to read Seventeen to learn how to act like the typical teen. She just didn't relate as easily to kids her own age, though no one would have said she was a nerd or a recluse. The phone always rang in their house, and Katie was usually the one to get on the line.
As Mary Letourneau's phone calls increased over the school year, the thought did cross Judy's mind that it was a little out of the ordinary. It didn't alarm her in any way; it just made an impression that the teacher had found something special in her daughter and both were benefiting from the mentoring.
“I knew she was a lot older, but she always struck me as the big sister Katie never had. I never felt the age thing was odd. I did wonder how a mother of four had so much time to spend on the phone with her students. Mary always struck me as young and fun-loving. It was great that she was young and loved the sixth-graders,” Judy said.
The lights in room 39 were almost always the last ones to dim at Shorewood Elementary. For a time, some wondered if Mary Letourneau was so disorganized that she couldn't get her work done in the manner of most other elementary school teachers. It was true that there was never enough planning and correcting time, but ten P.M.? Others who knew her better thought disorganization could be a factor, but also weighed the idea that Mary just didn't want to go home. Maybe she didn't have much reason to go? Her marriage was in deep trouble and she frequently hinted at that. At one point, three teachers cornered Mary Kay to tell her that she shouldn't be so vocal about her problems with Steve. They understood she wasn't happy and didn't want to go home, but why didn't she want to get home to her children? What was so terrible about home that kept her from her own babies?
She called on Katie Hogden a number of times to bail her out of her mental disarray.
“Katie, please! Let me go photocopy this… fax that. Please!”
Katie was happy to help. She'd sit at Mrs. Letourneau's desk for hours using the answer key and marking paper after paper while Mary ran off to take care of an errand.
“She always had a gazillion things to do,” Katie said later.
At the end of the day when darkness fell, Katie would help her teacher load up her bags with projects and papers that would never get finished. She'd carry them back and forth each day, unloading and reloading. Blanketing her desk in an avalanche of paperwork, she always said she was going get it done, that night. But there was always more to do. The distractions of daily life piled up and, in time, would bury her.
Danelle Johnson was a magna cum laude graduate of the school of hard knocks. She'd had it rougher than most, but pulled herself up from the abyss of living on welfare to cleaning toilets to a job with her own office at a community college. Her laugh was always ready, masking the realities of a life that sometimes seemed too hard, or just plain unfair. Her voice was deep, the result of cigarettes and the decibel level sometimes required of a mother of six. At forty-six, Danelle Johnson was doing the best that a single mother could. She had a good job, a nice house. Food stamps and welfare were a distant, but never fully forgotten, memory.
Her youngest were boy-girl twins, Drew and Molly, two sandy-haired kids with the push-me, pull-me relationship typical of brothers or sisters of similar age. They hated each other. They loved each other. They were close. They couldn't stand the sight of the other. They were Shorewood Elementary students from kindergarten to sixth grade. And they struggled every step of the way, forcing their mother to make herself known at the school office whenever the twins were having difficulty.
“I was famous at Shorewood,” Danelle said later. “All I had to do was call down there and say 'This is Danelle' and they knew exactly who I was and why I was calling.”
Danelle's job of nearly two decades had provided stability for her children, allowing them to start and finish in the same school—a not-so-common feat in a district that draws from the apartments and projects of the poor.
And even though Danelle and her own grown children formed an extended family, the focus on the school remained paramount. School, she hoped, would be their chance to do something better, as it had been for her when she hit rock bottom.
Their lives revolved around Shorewood.
“That's why what happ
ened is so sad. Sad and disgusting,” Danelle would say later.
When sixth grade came in the 1995–96 school year, daughter Molly was enrolled in Mrs. Letourneau's class and her twin brother, Drew, was assigned to a teacher across the hall. Drew's best friend was Vili Fualaau. For a time, everything looked all right. Danelle Johnson hoped against hope that her children would get through sixth grade with enough knowledge to make the transition to junior high.
When Danelle showed up for her son's and daughter's parent-teacher conferences in November, she was looking forward to talking with Mrs. Letourneau. Molly thought so highly of her teacher, but her grades were still below average and Danelle considered school more than a popularity contest.
Mrs. Letourneau was rushed. She barely had five minutes to discuss her troubled student. She told Danelle that she needed to get more involved with her daughter's homework. She wasn't encouraging and she didn't seem particularly interested in talking about Molly at all. Danelle was mystified. The woman she had seen around school in the past was outgoing, friendly, and perky, and above all, interested in connecting with parents and students. This lady wasn't interested in that at all. At least not on that day.
“She seemed a little strange,” she said later.
Chapter 24
AT THIRTY-EIGHT, SOONA Fualaau had plenty of problems. With an ex-husband in prison, and bills and eviction notices in the mail, the heavyset woman with long black hair streaked in gray lived stoically in a burdensome world. She'd worked dead-end jobs at everything from taking orders at a Taco Bell to cashiering at the Roxbury Texaco. But she wasn't alone. The school was a valued link in her life on the level of the church where her father was a founding member and she, naturally, was a devoted part of the Samoan congregation. When the Fualaau house caught on fire it was Shorewood teachers and students who collected clothing to get the family of five going again. Soona was poor, but her sons and daughter could transcend all of that because they were stellar in different ways. The teachers at Shorewood saw their potential very clearly.
