Word: andreas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...week in the living room because Rusty had not found a church he liked. He had learned the faults of organized religion from Michael Woroniecki, the traveling preacher who had sold him the bus. Rusty did not agree completely with the extreme views of his old spiritual mentor. But Andrea, moved by the repent-or-burn zeal, wound up exchanging letters with the preacher and his wife for years after they bought the bus. Woroniecki wrote that "the role of woman is derived...from the sin of Eve" and that bad children come from bad mothers. Sometimes her family life...
...Andrea was continuing her Haldol injections and driving twice a month to see a social worker for counseling. At that time, neither Rusty nor Andrea chose to find out more about the complexities of depression that had threatened their family. He once asked what her illness had been like. "Very dark," she told him. She would not discuss it further, and Rusty admits that he asked nothing else. "I didn't want to pry," he says. He still knew nothing of the knives she saw or the bloody visions, he says, and believed she was fully recovered...