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Andrea was still depressed, but Flack discharged her "for insurance reasons," as he wrote on her medical chart. He also thought she might respond better to a female psychiatrist, whom she might find more "nurturing," he told Rusty. Flack had given Andrea a prescription for Zoloft, an antidepressant not unlike her mother's, and Rusty took her back to her parents to recuperate. But she never liked taking pills and faked swallowing them, say Jutta and Rusty. They took turns checking her mouth for hidden meds.
Andrea only got worse. Staying in bed all day, she scratched four bald spots into her scalp and picked sores in her nose. She used her nails to score marks on her legs and arms in her silent obsessions. Her mother and other relatives say Andrea was slipping away, and they could not reach her. At this time, she would later tell psychiatrists--but not her husband, he says--she experienced visions and voices. She would hear commands: "Get a knife! Get a knife!" Then the image she first saw after Noah's birth returned: a knife and a person being stabbed. But now in the image she saw the bloody results. The visions returned as many as 10 times over several days.
Andrea told Rusty and her mother that the children were "eating too much." When 4-month-old Luke cried, Andrea would try to rock him to sleep and give him a pacifier, but she would not feed him. The task of weaning the infant to a bottle fell to her elderly mother, who struggled to care for her grandchildren and her own sick husband.
Not until Andrea became ill did her relatives fully realize that mental illness ran in the family. They began to confide in one another, says Jutta. Andrea's brother Andrew and sister Michelle are being treated for depression. Her other brother Brian found out he is bipolar. The more they talked, the more they all suspected that their father had been battling depression. Andrea, as far as anyone knew, had never been treated for her pre-Rusty bout of depression.
The day before she was to meet her new psychiatrist, Andrea disappeared. Rusty tracked her to the bathroom, where she stared at the mirror, pressing a kitchen knife against her throat, deliberating. "Give me the knife," Rusty demanded. She told him to get out. "Let me do it," she said. He moved toward her, grabbing her arm and prying the knife away. Upon hearing the details from Rusty, psychiatrist Eileen Starbranch wanted Andrea hospitalized again. This time she would be sent to Memorial Spring Shadows Glen, a private center in northwest Houston.
After 10 days, Andrea was nearly catatonic. Electroshock therapy was considered. But Starbranch decided to try an "emergency injection" formulated from a cocktail of drugs, including the antipsychotic Haldol, which she used only in dire cases. The effects were immediate, recalls Rusty. His wife exhaled like a wounded animal and moved erratically around the room before she slept.
When she awoke, Rusty saw renewed longing in her eyes as she looked at the swimming pool outside, back at him and then at the pool again. He saw the woman she could be. The conversation they had that night, he thought, was one of their best. Andrea was unguarded. Later she told him that the Haldol injection was a "truth serum"--and that she hated how it caused her to lose control of herself.