"Well, which is it, if you had to choose one?" Gina asked. "Wonderful or difficult?"
"That's the thing. She's both. The wonderful part would be her mother's incredible brains and drive and even a goodly portion of the Dryden natural beauty. When she chooses to, she can be very, very pretty, but… that leads us to the difficult part. In fact, everything leads to the difficult part." He walked on. "I don't know how to say this without it sounding pretty bad, but she's just never really been easy in any way. We called her the Original High Maintenance Kid. And that's when we were feeling good about her."
"Okay."
"Well, not really okay. You don't even want to hear about her eating habits, which ranged over the years from gorging herself early on to some pretty intense bulimia over the last couple of years. And let's not talk about mastering all the rudiments of hygiene-hair, fingernails, everything else. You know what she was wearing when she got in yesterday? Salvation Army camo." "That's the style, Stuart."
"All right, but why does she wear that baggy shit when she could be… attractive? I just don't get it."
"Maybe she doesn't want to be attractive. Maybe the attention threatens her. I've got a friend who's the same way. She puts on a dress or wears a tank top and guys driving by crash their cars into things. I've seen it happen. She hates it. I don't think that's so abnormal."
"No, we haven't gotten to the abnormal stuff yet."
"Which is what?"
"The true mental stuff, which is really what nearly broke up Caryn and me a long time ago." Stuart gave Gina the extended version- how during Kym's adolescence, she'd tried their collective patiences with every kind of acting out in the book, until finally Caryn had decided that she suffered from "classic" Attention Deficit Disorder and should be on a regular, heavy regimen of Ritalin. "Problem was," he continued, "that I don't really believe in a lot of the versions of ADD that Caryn's high-end medical crowd tends to embrace."
"Embrace as what?"
"A one-size-fits-all explanation for high energy and disruptive behavior in young people. I thought that if my daughter needed attention so badly, maybe it was because she wasn't getting enough from her parents, myself included. So I started to take her places with me, the wilderness, the woods, the usual." He shrugged. "For a while, it seemed to help. And at least I wasn't drugging her."
"So what happened?"
"So, in the end, it turned out that, as usual, Caryn was more right than I was." Now he came to a full stop and looked Gina in the face. "The truth is we found out that Kym's bipolar, which used to be called manic-depressive. She does need to be on a regular dose of lithium, or she doesn't function right in the real world. And unfortunately, the classic situation, which she fits, is she forgets or refuses to take her pills. When she's on them, she's okay but everything in life is kind of low-key and boring, and she hates that. She wants the high of being manic. So she stops the pills and crashes and burns. You know that time…" But suddenly he stopped, looked out over Gina's head to the cloudless sky. "No," he said all but to himself. "Never mind."
But Gina put a hand on his arm. "Never mind what? What time?"
Stuart sighed and pointed to a bench next to the walkway. "You want to sit a minute?" And he told her what had really happened when the neighbors had called the police five years before, when "plates had gotten thrown."
Pulling a trick out of his writer's bag, Stuart had purposely used the passive voice when he'd told Gina about this before. The plates had gotten thrown all right, he said, and Caryn had gotten cut, but he hadn't thrown them-Kymberly had.
And Stuart and Caryn at least agreed that they weren't going to let their daughter be charged in the attack. Her life was going to be difficult enough-even if she got everything together and religiously took her medication-without the added burden of a criminal record. She'd gone off her pills again last summer, and this had precipitated the many huge and highly vocal fights between Kym and both of her parents.
The screaming between male and female voices that the neighbors had heard? It had been Kym and Stuart, daughter and father; not Caryn and Stuart, husband and wife. And when the police had come, he and Caryn had put on the act together, going along as though it had been them fighting-again, to protect their daughter.
He was sitting on the bench, canted forward, staring out into nothing in front of him. A couple of seagulls had landed in the grass across the path and were raucously fighting over a french fry. Gina cleared her throat. "You could tell this to Juhle, you know. He doesn't think you're a wife-beater, a lot of this goes away."
But Stuart shook his head. "It'd get out. Kym's got enough to deal with."
"It might not get out. Juhle can keep a secret."
"I don't know. I just don't know. Anything." He let out a lungful of air. "You want to be moving again?"
After they'd covered some ground, Stuart continued. "There's just so much guilt about every part of this. I mean, the truth is that Kym's problems-Kym herself, even-got so she poisoned everything with Caryn and me. Caryn went into her world of position and money and I just withdrew so I didn't have to confront it the whole time. When I was around, I'd try to be a good husband and father, I suppose, but I knew that I couldn't do anything to help my daughter, or to make things better with Caryn. It was just what it was. And I was too weak or, I don't know, too… too goddamn impotent to do anything."
"You thought it was your fault."
"It was my fault. I'm the one who originally wanted a kid so bad. If it had been up to Caryn, it never would have happened, and everything would have been better."
"Maybe not better, Stuart. Maybe just different."
"Another different couldn't have been worse, believe me. No, Kym was my genes. Without that, Caryn and I… shit. I don't know."
"And this is where all the anger comes from, isn't it?"
"Some good percentage, I'd say, yeah. Why do you think I had to go away to get 'healed by water'? But then I'd come home and Kym wouldn't have taken her pills and she'd explode at me for something trivial or absolutely imaginary, and the frustration would knock me sideways again. And then Caryn, of course, would blame me if I lost my temper."
Gina had her arms crossed. A breeze had picked up and blew the hair off her forehead. When she spoke, she kept her eyes out on the water. "You said Kym and Caryn were on the outs when she went off to school?"
"Yeah, that happened this past summer." Stuart went on to say that suddenly the sides had shifted and-even on her medication- Kym had begun to fight much more with Caryn than she did with him. She began to use street drugs, self-medicating, the doctors called it. Kym was showing up at home with CDs and jewelry and other stuff they knew she hadn't bought; things around the house began to disappear; she was having more or less random sex, hanging out with difficult friends, constantly ignoring her curfew. Caryn would not have any "daughter of hers" acting that way, since it reflected on her. And in this way Caryn, more than Stuart, had become the hated, the enemy.
And that was how things stood until two weeks ago when, a blessing for both parents, Kymberly had finally gone off to school.
Twelve
Stuart and Gina had made it down nearly to the Golden Gate Bridge, for the last couple of hundred yards walking in silence. But it was a more comfortable silence than they'd shared up until then. And Gina finally broke it. "So. Your book," she said, "Healed by Water."
"Note the awkward silence," Stuart said, "while the author decides whether he should ask the reader for an opinion or not."
"I've already told you I liked it a lot. But it was more than that. When I finished it-it really touched me. I was just so… relieved, I guess is the word."
"About what?"
"About taking on a client who was intelligent and innocent. I can't tell you how good that felt. That I'd finally be able to put my legal talents to the service of someone who might actually deserve them." She kept walking, eyes forward, hands in her pockets. "I said something yesterday about losing my fiance a few years ago. Well, since then, not that it matters to you, but…"