LITMIR.BIZ

      © 2015 by C. E. Edmonson. All rights reserved.

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      ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-2526-9

      For Cheryl

      Chapter 1

      The day that changed our lives forever started like any other Sunday.

      It was December 7, 1941. Our family was up early, as usual, preparing for services at Makai Neighborhood Church. My mom, Akira Arrington, was in the kitchen mixing flour, sugar, buttermilk, and nuts into a batter that would eventually become macadamia pancakes. A bubbling saucepan on the stove held a mix of lychee, mango, guava, and lilikoi that would soon thicken into the compote we’d use to cover the pancakes. All of these fruits and a dozen more grew freely on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, but few of them originated here.

      According to my eighth-grade science teacher, Mrs. Koyama, most of the fruits growing wild on the islands had been brought here centuries earlier by explorers. Hawaii being paradise, the fruit trees naturally thrived. Lilikoi, for example, is usually called passion fruit. Native to Brazil, it supposedly got its name from the flower of the vine, which symbolizes the Passion of the Christ. The tendrils represent the whips used against Jesus, the ten petals and sepals represent the ten faithful disciples, the fringe represents the crown of thorns, the three stigmas are the nails, and the five anthers are the wounds.

      Okay, I’m doing it again. I’m running off at the pen, just like I’m always running off at the mouth, at least according to my eight-year-old brother, Charlie. I call Charlie “the Whizz.” That’s because the kid never stops moving. At that moment he was in the backyard, throwing baseballs at a mattress propped up against a tree. Behind him the mountains of Oahu soared four thousand feet into the sky.

      That early in the morning, the peaks were shrouded by a gray mist that rolled in gentle waves from ridge to ridge. It would burn off in an hour or so, but just at that moment it was pierced by a rainbow that rose from the mist to form a perfect arch before dropping into a narrow ravine. Even by Hawaii’s standards, the rainbow was vivid, its shimmering colors so bright—from the darkest of blues to the darkest of reds—that I had no problem imagining a pot of gold at its end.

      My dad, Lieutenant Commander Charles Arrington, US Navy, occupied his usual Sunday-morning place, at least when he wasn’t flying planes from the decks of aircraft carriers somewhere out in the Pacific Ocean. He was sitting on a wicker chair on our back porch—which we called the lanai—reading the Honolulu Advertiser. Dad liked the lanai because it overlooked the Pearl Harbor naval base. Forget the fact that he was on leave and his ship, the USS Lexington, was out at sea. Dad liked to keep an eye on the base at all times because he was in love with flying, and that was where he got to do it. Landing a fighter on the deck of a ship was a fairly new thing at the time, but Charles Arrington was already a veteran. Mostly he trained other pilots.

      I was still gazing at the rainbow when Mom put in an appearance. She might have called to me from the kitchen, but I didn’t hear her. When Charlie wanted your attention, he called out in a voice you could hear on the other side of the mountains, but Mom never raised her voice. Born in Japan, she’d been reared in the Japanese tradition, although she’d come to Hawaii with her parents when she was only six and spoke perfect English.

      “Emiko, did you put on your dress yet?” she asked.

      Obviously I hadn’t. I wore my usual getup: shorts and a cotton blouse. Hawaii is warm all year round—it was seventy degrees on that Sunday morning—and young girls back then were allowed to wear shorts. On the mainland girls mostly wore dresses from the time they were out of diapers. But I was thirteen and rapidly growing past the age when I could get away with shorts. We both knew that.

      “It needs to be ironed,” I replied.

      “Yes?”

      One thing about Mom: although she never directly criticized her children (or anyone else), she could ladle on the guilt. When she was annoyed, she lifted her right eyebrow by way of warning. Ignore this signal and you’d be subjected to a lecture on harmony. Mom was big on obligation to the family and to society in general. Apple carts were not to be upset. To do so would bring shame on the family, and it didn’t get any worse than that. We were encouraged to view everything we did in that light. Would this or that bring shame on the family? If the answer was yes, you didn’t do it. Case closed.

      I don’t quite understand how Mom produced two kids so unlike herself. The Whizz never stopped long enough to think about shame or anything else. He was moving through his life at top speed. As for me, girls weren’t supposed to have sharp tongues, not in 1941, and especially not when the mom of the girl in question had been raised in the Japanese tradition. But I had an answer for everything, and I wasn’t afraid to say what I thought. My best friend, Kealani, predicted I’d never find a husband because men don’t like their wives to be smarter than they are. At thirteen years old, I couldn’t make myself care.

      Mom’s eyebrow won the debate this time. I fetched the ironing board and iron, and carried both onto the lanai, past the rows of shoes and rubber slippers lined up like military soldiers waiting for inspection. It was like I’d stepped into an alternate universe.

      Our house was in the foothills of the Koolau Mountains, and the view from the lanai looked out across the central valley, over the naval base, and into the Pacific. The mountains behind me had checked the mists, leaving pure sunshine to bathe vast fields of sugar cane that swayed in a caressing breeze. The fields ran north from Honolulu and Pearl Harbor, through a central valley that separated us from another set of mountains on Oahu’s eastern edge.

      Mainland seasons—winter, spring, summer, fall—don’t mean a lot on Oahu. The temperature’s pretty much the same all year. Hawaii’s year is divided between wet and dry seasons. The wet season begins in November, and that’s when the sugar cane starts to grow. By early December, with the plants about a foot high, their leaves overlap to form a bright-green carpet that stretches as far north as the eye can see.

      The green of the sugar cane was offset by the trees on the slope beneath us. The red blossoms on a poinciana tree were crowded so close together that the tree, from above, resembled an open parasol. Just below the poinciana, a little grove of kukui trees clung to the edge of a steep cliff. Their blossoms were as clear and white as the few puffy clouds high above us. Other trees and flowers were even more conspicuous, as if the plant world had decided to run a fashion show. The sweet smell of plumeria and late-season white ginger filled the air, and the dangling, gold blossoms of the shower trees hung from the branches like lace from a bridal gown.

      “Are you waiting for the dress to iron itself?”

      Did I happen to mention that Mom never uttered a sarcastic word? Did I happen to mention that my dad more than made up for that deficiency? There were times when I wondered how they had ever gotten together. Dad was born and raised in Connecticut, which is six thousand miles from Hawaii, twelve thousand miles from Japan, and light years away from Japanese culture. Charles Arrington was an East Coast Yankee, a man who believed in the old saying “God helps those who help themselves.” By that December he’d flown everything from World War I biplanes to heavy bombers to the fastest fighter planes the country had yet produced. At a time when certain generals predicted that landing an airplane on the deck of moving ship would prove to be impossible, he was out there proving the opposite.

      Charles Arrington—Chuck to his friends—was a handsome

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