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It took 10 days for Andrea to begin feeding herself again. That was enough improvement for Saeed to discharge her, even though her medications were not yet stabilized. She wanted to go home, where Saeed said she might respond. Says Rusty: "He saw me. He thought I could take care of her. He calculated the risk."
Home, however, was a demanding place. Andrea had resisted the idea of a nanny or a housekeeper, says Rusty, who felt that keeping house "was a source of pride for her." The Kennedys thought he should have hired somebody long ago. "I had five children, but I had a very good husband who helped," Jutta says. Rusty's mom Dora, however, came from Tennessee to help, sleeping at a motel and watching Andrea and the kids by day.
On May 3, while he worked, Andrea and her mother-in-law took the kids for a walk. After they returned, Noah saw Andrea filling up the tub. He told his grandmother, who turned off the water. Asked why, all Andrea said was, "I might need it." Debbie Holmes stopped by the house to drop off food, but Andrea would not let her in. Holmes doubted whether Rusty realized the severity of Andrea's depression; she believed he was not "big" on pills. Holmes also believed her friend had been possessed by the devil, something the two discussed after her 1999 illness, say sources close to the case. About this time in 2001, the sources say, Holmes was worried that the demons had returned a hundredfold.
But even Rusty knew that Andrea needed treatment. When Dr. Saeed agreed to a rehospitalization, Rusty drove her back to Devereux. Lori, 32, her roommate there, remembers Andrea as eerily mute as she lay in the windowless room farthest down the hall from the nurses' station in Unit 3. "Her eyes were real wide. She looked like a scared person," says Lori. "It was like nothing I'd ever seen before." Despite the rules, Rusty would walk into their room, and Lori complained to nurses. "To me, he was sneaky," she says. One night Lori hallucinated and screamed so loudly that nurses ran to their room. Andrea, lying in bed, did not flinch. Lori's parents, David and Janna Fashenpour, came to daily group therapy for families. At first they liked Rusty. But he dominated the discussions when others tried to talk, and he answered questions the counselor asked his wife, who wouldn't nod her head. Says David Fashenpour, a retired Air Force officer and NASA contractor: "It was almost like her silence was a payback to the husband--like a control issue going on."
During this hospital stay--unlike the three previous ones--Rusty did not bring the kids to see her. For Mother's Day, though, the four boys and Mary brought her a heart-shaped helium balloon and Russell Stover chocolates with a rose on the box. On a concoction of Haldol and antidepressants, she had improved marginally. She remained on 15-minute suicide checks, and she mostly stayed in her room. But for the first time, when Saeed asked if she was having suicidal thoughts, she answered no.