Then she gathered Paul, who was 3, and drowned him, and laid the corpse on the bed beside the still body of his brother. Then she drowned John, who was 5. All three were covered with a sheet. Then she carried 6-month-old Mary into the bathroom and plunged her into the water.

Her son Noah arrived at the bathroom door. At 7, he was the oldest.

"What's wrong with Mary?" Noah said.

And then he must have understood.

The boy began running through the house, surely in terror, with his mother after him. She caught him and carried him, as he struggled and wailed, to the water. She held him under until he was dead, too.

That's all we know for certain about what Andrea Pia Yates did last week at 942 Beachcomber Lane in a middle-class section of Houston.

Horrific Call

She gave these details to the cops. When the five children were dead, Andrea Yates called her husband, Russell Yates, at his job at the Johnson Space Center and told him he should come home right away. Russell Yates asked her if anyone was hurt.

"Yes," she said. "The children. All of them."

Then she called the police and told them what she had done. After that, it was all about clerking the horror.

And then, from Bensonhurst to Bakersfield, the horror spread like a stain. Five children dead, drowned by their mother.

Out there, in safe, middle-class, white America, the body count is almost always in multiples now. Usually, it's some addled kid with a gun, shooting down children and teachers in a schoolyard. Or some unhappy former employee taking out a boss and six workers.

Multiple killings fit the structures of bad movies, providing an operatic bloodbath for the killer's last act.

This was different. There were no guns. There were no survivors, except for Andrea Yates and her husband, Russell. It was his fate to stand alone before the cameras, to tell about his wife's bouts with depression, to insist on a distinction between the woman he loved and the woman who had murdered their children.

Many viewers were baffled at his self-control. Television has taught us to look for performance values in all human activities, and as a bereft father he was supposed to be weeping and thrashing in agony.

But as he spoke, Russell Yates looked like a man stricken with simple human numbness. All of his life had been turned over.

There was his life before last Wednesday morning and there is his life afterward, the two lives forever separate now. All comfortable expectations about the future ended in that murderous hour.

He would never toss a ball on a green field with any of those boys. He would not arrive with a first birthday cake for the girl. They were gone, all of them, and so, in a different way, was his wife. The artifacts of that lost life can be boxed and stored, and the house sold. Memory will never fade.

"My wife, y'know, she's really suffering," he said, after visiting her Friday in jail. "And I just ask that you say a prayer for her because she needs it, y'know. She's suffering right now, y'know, y'know ..."

But nobody knew. Nobody had lived with her the way he had, nursing her through earlier depressions. But even Russell Yates, in the midst of his own suffering, probably could not find a way to fully understand.

There was much talk later about postpartum depression, which is very real, and can be ferocious among some women. The family also talked about how the passing of Andrea's father might have brought the chilly specter of death into the Yates house.

But nobody truly knew, certainly not the reporters or the cops or the neighbors or those who swiftly began to cast judgments, for and against Andrea Yates. Euripides supplied a motive for Medea when she killed her children. There was no simple motive here.

Questions Linger

We do know that it was probably coming for several months. That's what Andrea Yates told the police. One anonymous official who heard her audiotape told the Houston Chronicle: "She essentially said she had realized that she was a bad mother and she felt the children were disabled, that they were not developing normally."

But even as a confession, we don't know what this means. We do know a little about the blind, obliterating force of depression. William Styron, one of our finest novelists ("Sophie's Choice," "Lie Down in Darkness"), came out of his own fierce 1980s struggle with depression to write about it with humility and power:

"If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul. So the decision-making of daily life involves not, as in normal affairs, shifting from one annoying situation to another less annoying — or from discomfort to relative comfort, or from boredom to activity — but moving from pain to pain. One does not abandon, even briefly, one's bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes."

In such obliterating pain, it's absurd to talk about the deterring power of the death penalty. If anything, in a death-pervaded state like Texas, murder could become a way of committing suicide. Andrea Yates had failed at suicide a few years ago; in the tangled logic of depression, she might have been begging the state to remove her from her bed of nails by killing her. Nobody truly knows.

In the days to come, answers to the remaining mysteries might be eased out of poor Andrea Yates. For the rest of us, there are only a few abiding lessons.

Hug your children or your grandchildren. Protect them. Feed them. Give them warmth and laughter.

And that person of any age, staring blankly into the void: Hug that human being, too.