He was tall, like his boy, and wore a look of deep concern. His eyes fluttered from his weeping son back to his granddaughter's coffin. "Little Kennidi tried," her grandfather said softly. "She fought with all her soul. But some things, as Father Macmillan has said, are just in God's hands from the start. Some things can't be changed. We will never forget her or her courage." Then he reached forward and took a white carnation off the casket, moved over, and handed it to his son's wife, Laura, who, like her husband, had not looked up. Her eyes, like his, were fixed on the hole that was about to receive their only child.

Both knew they would never have another.

The funeral reception was at Richard Cunningham's Pasadena mansion. It was a Spanish-style house on three beautiful landscaped acres near the arroyo that ran south from the foothills.

The guests pulled up to the house and got out of their cars, wearing dark clothes and grim expressions. In the entry, the family had put the best picture they had of Kennidi up on an easel. She had been only eighteen months old when it was taken, but already you could see the misshapen swelling. The later photographs were all unacceptable.

The picture of Kennidi showed that she'd had her father Cris's intense blue eyes and blond hair, but that was where the resemblance stopped. The hemangioma tumors that had started growing in her almost from birth were already redesigning her smile and bulging her forehead, eventually numbering in the hundreds. Noncancerous growths made of tangled blood vessels, they grew in her eyelids and mouth and in clusters down her throat and spine. They distorted her speech, and in the end made it impossible for her to walk.

It was then, when she could no longer move, that Cris Cunningham, the Gulf War hero, the courageous Marine, had disappointed everyone.

He started drinking.

The doctors at Bethesda Naval Hospital had tried to explain Kennidi's horrible condition, but they could not be absolutely truthful, so they finally said that sometimes this sort of thing just happens.