The 'Ohana Tree

by Rebecca Addison

  By Rebecca Addison

  The ‘Ohana Tree (‘Ohana 1) Copyright © 2016

  Rebecca Addison (Kindle Edition)

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form (electronic, photocopying, or otherwise) without prior written permission from the author, except for short quotations for blogs and book reviews.

  License Notes:

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Disclaimer: The persons, places, things and otherwise inanimate objects in this novel are all figments of the author’s rather overactive imagination. Any resemblance to anything or anyone living (or dead) is unintentional.

  Cover designed by: J Addison

  Images: Shutterstock Copyright ©; author’s own.

  Interior Images: Courtesy of Historic Photos of Old Hawaii (1820s to 1940s) Public Domain

  For Jemima and Ben.

  Be brave, be loud, and always follow your dreams.

  ALSO BY REBECCA ADDISON

  “Intelligently written, soooo easy to read, Still Waters had me laughing in parts and tearing up in others. I wanted to know what was going to happen to these people, and I cared about the decisions they made. A great book.”

  Most people in the small town of Jefferson thought she had it all – beauty, brains, money, status. It seemed that everything came easily to Hartley Preston. And then there was her boyfriend David, good-looking, charming and on his way to the top just like she was.

  But no one knew better than Hartley that things aren’t always as they seem.

  After making a devastating discovery that tears her world apart, Hartley runs away to an isolated coastal town. She’s searching for freedom and independence but what she finds is Crew Sullivan, a man who is running from life even faster than she is.

  Hartley wants to escape her future. Crew needs to be released from his past.

  And with the way they feel about each other, it could have been more than perfect. Except for one, small thing.

  Hartley is keeping a secret.

  And Crew has more than a few of his own.

  Still Waters is available for download on Amazon for Kindle, or on other devices using the Kindle app.

  Contents

  Dedication

  ‘Ohana

  Preface

  Also by Rebecca Addison

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY FOUR

  Still Waters

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ACKNOWLEDGeMENTS

  Author’s Note

  CONNECT WITH ME

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ‘Ohana

  All those who are claimed,

  loved, and nourished

  by a family group.

  He po 'i na kai uli, kai ko 'o

  'a 'ohe hina pūko 'a

  Though the seas be deep and rough,

  the coral rock remains standing.

  Chapter One

  Even today, if you stand on the ridge and look down past the line of banana and papaya trees to the rocks that line the cliff, you’ll see it, still standing there inconspicuous in a sea of mottled green. It’s nothing special to look at, just another mango tree at the end of a long row, but out of the whole orchard that spans the width of the Onakea family property, that tree alone is mine.

  I was ten when Pa gave the tree to me. He gave me a look and opened the screen door, leading me out into the warm spring night. We stood side by side for a moment, gazing up at the stars and enjoying the cool, soft grass beneath our bare toes. As we moved away from the lit up windows to the dark purple and black of the fruit trees, he told me the story of the Nightmarchers in a quiet, hushed voice. I’d heard the story many times before by then but the thought of ghostly warriors and their pounding drums still made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. The papaya trees loomed in the darkness, their thin, straight trunks lit up by the moon. My eyes darted to the spaces between them, my shoulders slumping, my heart slowing to a normal rhythm as we grew closer. There was nothing there. The Nightmarchers were busy somewhere else that night.

  We made it to the mango trees and my Pa stopped at the end of the row, kneeling down. I had grown up hearing the story of that tree. Its place in our family history was committed to my memory. It was as if I had always known it, like I knew my name, or that the ridge behind the house marked the border of our land. My father asked me to tell him the story now.

  “My ancestor was working on the land when he saw a beautiful woman walking along the shoreline with her sisters. She was so beautiful that he dropped the mango he was eating, and pressed it into the ground with his foot as he ran to her. The tree grew from that seed, and that’s why if you eat one of our mangoes, your life will be as sweet as the flesh. Because it was made from love,” I recited, quietly pleased that I hadn’t stumbled over any of the words.

  “Kailano, i nā mālama ‘oe i ka ‘āina, na ka ‘āina malama iā ‘oe,” he said. If you take care of the land, the land will take care of you. Then he picked up my hand and pressed it to the trunk of the tree and told me that I was now in charge.

  For over a hundred years people from all over the island had counted the days until our fruit was ready, and up until my eleventh birthday, I was my dad’s right-hand man. I loved the office jobs, especially working out delivery schedules and filing invoices in the tall metal cabinet with the key. The office was my sanctuary, a place where I sorted and tidied without having to speak to anyone. There, I was away from the constant gaze of my father and protected from my uncles who never grew tired of teasing me about my soft voice and debilitating shyness. As I worked in that office, I imagined myself growing until I was as tall as my dad and just as broad across the shoulders, my voice deepening and hairs growing on my top lip and chin. I pictured myself telling a story in a strong, deep voice around a fire late at night with everyone listening intently. There were many uncertainties to ge
tting older - I didn't know how I would ever be able to speak to a girl, and the strange things my teenage cousins whispered about were still a mystery, but one thing was certain. I would devote my life to the land, just as my father had done, and his father before him. I saw that life played out for me daily by my father, uncles, and older cousins. It never occurred to me that I could become anything else.

  But then everything changed.

  Just a few short weeks later, the tree that was once the pride of the 'ohana stood empty and barren, never to fruit again. The rest of the fruit in our orchard fell to the ground where it rotted, filling the air with a sickly, sweet stink. And slowly, year by year, fewer people on the island remembered our mangoes.

  But the tree was still the first thing my eyes searched for every time I went back to the plantation. When I was sure I was alone, I went down to the mango grove and watched it from a distance before walking toward it and placing my hand on the trunk. I talked to it and asked the fruit to come back to me. I did this often. More often than I wanted to admit to myself. Because the year I turned twenty-eight my need to see the tree fruit again had become more desperate than it had in years. That was the year I felt sick in my soul every time I saw it. Its empty limbs were like a rebuke, reminding me of that terrible night and all the things I could have prevented. It was also the year a girl named Tessa arrived on the island, bursting into my carefully managed life and causing the ground to shift violently beneath my feet.

  Chapter Two

  I never slept well in the summer, but that year my insomnia had taken a cruel turn. My brain didn’t just whir and spin late into the night, it taunted me with images of the past and the sounds of voices I hadn’t heard since I was a boy. When exhaustion finally forced me into a restless, fitful sleep sometime near dawn, I dreamed that I was walking alone on an empty beach, the tide steadily rising until I was swallowed by warm, churning water. I tasted salt on my tongue and my lungs burned in my chest, but I never tried to save myself. I let the ocean take me to its depths where my body eroded until I was nothing but sand. When I woke, my mouth was dry and my brain pulsed inside my skull. The only weapon I had to fight the exhaustion was coffee, and I drank it by the bucketful. I was tired, in every possible way a human could be tired. Mind, body and soul. I couldn't say what the trigger was, no traumatic event had preceded it, and nothing out of the ordinary had tipped the scales in the wrong direction. Perhaps that was the problem. Nothing out of the ordinary ever happened to me. I was still young, my body strong and my head full of dreams and ideas. But I felt old, and my world grew smaller and smaller with each passing year.

  There were expectations.

  That I would stay on the island.

  That I would look after our land.

  That I would watch over my family.

  And I did all of these things and more because I loved my 'ohana and no matter what anyone said about my father, he taught me the importance of living pono - doing what was selfless and morally right. But as hard as I tried, the work and the responsibilities and even the knowledge that I was doing the right thing did nothing to quieten the small flicker of need in my belly. I needed to experience life on my own. I needed to be free from a future that was laid out like a carpet in front of me, stretching on and on and on to the horizon. And most of all, I needed to play music.

  I’ve written songs since I was a child, firstly to entertain my baby brother and then as a way to join the men, who were often singing and playing guitar out on the lanai after dinner. The stammer that plagued me disappeared when I sang, and with my guitar against my chest, I felt safe and almost hidden. I still felt that way. As a child, I played to be seen. And as a man, I played both professionally and for myself. But there was never enough time. Since leaving high school, I’d worked for my dad either out on landscaping jobs or up at the family plantation, beating back the forest that never stopped trying to swallow it whole. And when the sun finally went down, signaling the end of another long day, I picked up my guitar and walked along the beach to my cousin Pete’s Bar.

  The bar was intended to be a high-end restaurant that Pete and his parents hoped would attract wedding parties from the mainland. It only took seven months of working with brides and their mothers for Pete to build a stage and install a bar made from a long, marbled slab of Koa wood, closing the restaurant for good. Within six months, it was the most popular live music venue on the island. He had bands lining up to play in his bar; I knew I was lucky he’d given me a regular gig. But it didn’t stop the knot in my stomach from forming each night as I walked along the sand with my guitar on my back. The tourists who packed Pete’s to capacity weren’t there to hear my music. They were there to get drunk and get laid, all while having the quintessential Hawaiian holiday experience. Pete had the tiki carvings and the hula dolls with their plastic grass skirts lined up on the bar. And he had me, the Hawaiian looking Hawaiian. Singing Hawaiian songs.

  “Aloha,” I said into the microphone. My voice shot away from me, the loudness of it giving my heart a start. I wasn’t one of those performers who excelled at mid-song banter. There were no calls of ‘Is everybody having a good time tonight?!’ when I was on stage. Because Pete asked me to, I introduced each song before we played it, but other than that I tried to stick to the song list. Get in, get out. A few months ago, Pete brought in some hula dancers to do a tourist show on Saturday nights. They were the shows I dreaded the most. I couldn’t get away with hiding on Saturdays. I had to wear an aloha shirt with Pete’s written on the back and mingle with the audience, taking the microphone with me as I weaved between tables singing Aloha ‘Oe.

  “Show us ya tatts!” a girl screamed from the back as I stepped off the stage and started my walk around the floor. The table had been hassling me all night; a group of British girls on holiday and all of them blind drunk. I changed directions, making my way to a couple who looked like they were on their honeymoon and behind me, I heard the girls boo.

  “Come on!” one of them shouted. “Take ya shirt off! This is fucking boring!”

  The woman in front of me winced at her partner and took a long drink from her mai tai. I was so sick of this shit. I scanned the room for Pete but he was busy behind the bar, looking intently at the drink he was pouring. Pete and I were more like brothers than cousins. We could communicate just by looking at each other. I willed him to turn around and look at me now. I had a few words I wanted to say. He didn’t, of course, and soon the girls were yelling again.

  “I’d let you stick your umbrella in my pineapple!”

  I caught the eye of Julia, one of the hula dancers who performed on the small dancefloor to the right of the stage. She raised an eyebrow as she spun around to hide her laugh. Our tourist show didn’t attract the middle aged mainlanders and families in matching hibiscus print clothing. We were too far from the big resorts for that, and we didn’t offer a proper lu'au or fire dancing. We were considered second-rate by the travel agents who sold the tickets. So we got the spring breakers, the backpackers, the people on all inclusive budget vacations. In other words, the drunks and the lousy tippers.

  Pete looked up, his face transformed into cool indifference. I hid my smile. Pete could switch from joker to Manager in a nanosecond. His eyes scanned the crowd looking for potential problems; someone who had drunk too much and needed to be cut off, men, eyeing each other up, ready for a fight. His focus was on the back table and I knew he was working out how much money he’d already made from them, and if he could justify kicking them out. I made another pass around the room, finishing the last song just as I stepped back on stage.

  “This is a joke!” one of the friends shouted. “She broke up with her boyfriend, yeah, and we promised her a good time tonight to take her mind off it.” She stood up, holding the edge of the table for support. “We’re not fucking eighty years old, right, we want some real entertainment, don’t we girls!” She looked around the room, glassy-eyed, and got a few half-hearted cheers.

  I put
the microphone back into the stand and spoke into it. “What do you want?”

  “What we paid for!” the blonde one said.

  “What was that?”

  “Give us a good time! That’s what the flyer said. It said we’d have a good time, right, so take off ya clothes and dance for us!”

  This time, there were a few more cheers. The band laughed behind me, not even bothering to hide it. A few of the more sober members of the audience were giggling into their drinks, but feeling bad about it, and behind the bar Pete’s mouth had set in a hard line.

  “You don’t want to see me dance,” I said, my voice sounding strangled.

  “So just take ya shirt off then, and show us ya tatts!”

  The room went silent, waiting with bated breath to see what would happen next.

  “Listen,” I said, “I’m not here to-”

  “All right, you three,” said Pete, finally, “time to go.”

  All three stood up at once. The tall one took off her sparkly blue jacket and threw it on the seat behind her, getting ready to throw the first punch. They didn’t get far. Pete’s was run exclusively by our family. I knew that a couple of uncles would be standing by to act as security and that my cousin Mark would already be sitting in his cop car outside, ready if we needed him.

  I looked out over the dancefloor as I unplugged the lead from my guitar. The doors to the deck had been left open so that the clean, mineral scent of the sea mingled with the smell of alcohol and dancing bodies.

  I stepped off the stage but was stopped from going any further by a hand on my arm. "Come on baby, you know you want to."

  I looked down. I didn't want anything from her but she was too drunk to see that. She flashed a smile, all fake tan, and thick eye makeup and bit her lip. She thought she was sexy. And her friend was just as bad, standing there swaying from side to side as she curled her index finger and mouthed, “Come here.” I stood up straighter and peered over the crowd toward the bar. Pete caught my eye and raised his glass.