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In sessions with psychologist James Thompson, whose medical records were released by defense lawyers, Andrea said things she would never confess to her husband. Her attempt to commit suicide, she explained to Thompson, was her way of heading off what the visions and voices were leading to. "I had a fear I would hurt somebody. I thought it better to end my own life and prevent it," she said. What others saw as her silence and nervousness, she said, were her attempts to restrain herself from acting out and causing harm.
In the sessions with Thompson, her secret history began to unfold. She admitted the knife image followed Noah's birth but refused to say who was hurt in the vision. She tried to change the subject. She had been depressed twice in her life--after her dad's heart attack and the "failed relationship" before she met Rusty. How, asked Thompson, would she describe the old Andrea? "A little more outgoing. More cheerful. More helpful. More patient. Not so self-centered as I am now."
The Kennedys were running out of room in their small house as Andrea's brothers and their kids moved in briefly, but her parents were adamant that Rusty not take her back to the bus. It was not healthy for her--or the kids. So Rusty, now a project manager at NASA earning $80,000 a year, bought a house, the second one he looked at: 942 Beachcomber Lane, a Spanish-style home with three bedrooms, two baths, trees, a high wood fence around the backyard and a spot to park the bus. Rusty took Andrea to close the deal. She was now receiving Haldol monthly and looked like a zombie, says Rusty, but he remembers she could hold the pen, signing here and initialing there, agreeing to pay the mortgage along with him. "I wanted her name to be on the deed," Rusty says, hoping the serenity of the backyard would speed her recovery.
And as the months passed, Andrea improved. She started swimming again, doing a furious 70 laps at dawn in the neighborhood pool. She planted milkweed to attract the butterflies that she and Noah loved. In a rare confession, she told Rusty she felt she had "failed" at the simple life in the bus. But she turned the front den into a classroom to home school Noah and the other kids. When they studied horses, they read Black Beauty and went riding real ones. When they were learning about Indians, she crafted a cardboard diorama including pretend deerskin stretched across twigs. To show off musical instruments, they paraded as a marching band in front of the video camera so Daddy could see them. She insisted on buying extra workbooks to expand their home-schooling curriculum. "You make it difficult on yourself," Rusty says he told her. "You're making it more complicated than it needs to be."
Andrea baked elaborate birthday cakes from scratch and stayed up late sewing costumes for her friends' kids, not just her own. The boys bragged about her chicken pot pie, and Rusty loved her chocolate-covered cookies. She traveled with the best-stocked stroller and diaper bag in the neighborhood, complete with apples cut into kid-size bites. "She did love to nurture her children," says Traci Winkler, another mother who would hang out with Andrea at the park and at kids' birthday parties. "She never seemed like she was in a rush with them." On Wednesday nights Rusty would take one of the boys out for pizza. Mommy's Night Out was Thursday. Andrea usually took one of the younger kids with her.