Chapter 4: What the Letter Said
The paper was so thin I was afraid to hold it too firmly.
I read.
*December 10, 1941.
To whoever finds this — my name is Henry Callan, Private First Class, United States Army, stationed at Schofield Barracks, Oahu.
Three days ago I helped bring a child into the world in the middle of the worst morning of my life.
I do not know if I will survive this war.
I do not know if the woman or the baby survived either.
But if they did, I want them to know this: that child was the only good thing that happened on that island that day.
I held her for about ten minutes before I had to go back.
I have thought about those ten minutes every day since.
Her name is Hope.
I hope she grows up somewhere safe.
I hope she never knows what the sky looked like that morning.
If I make it home, I will come back.
I promise.
— Henry.*
The room was silent.
Leilani had both hands over her mouth.
Grandpa Henry was looking at the floor.
"You kept your promise," I said.
"You came back."
"Eighty years late," he said.
"Henry." Leilani lowered her hands.
Her voice was firm.
"My mother lived a full life.
She had four children.
She laughed easily.
She loved the ocean.
She was not a woman who waited in sadness." She paused.
"But she kept your letter.
She kept it in a box beside her bed until the day she d*ed.
She said it was the first thing anyone had ever written just for her."
Grandpa Henry made a sound I had never heard from him before.
Not a sob exactly.
Something older than that.
I folded the letter carefully and held it out to Leilani.
She shook her head.
"It belongs to your family now.
It always did."
"Then we'll keep it together," I said.
I wasn't sure where that came from, but it felt right.
The manager — whose name I still didn't know — stepped forward.
"There is something else," he said carefully.
"Something we have been holding for a very long time."
He opened a drawer in the small table beside the shelf and removed a flat wooden box, the kind used for keepsakes.
He set it on the table and lifted the lid.
Inside was a photograph I had not seen on the wall.
Larger than the others.
Clearer.
It showed my grandfather, young and exhausted and smiling, sitting on the floor of a small house.
He was holding the newborn against his chest.
Beside him, propped against the wall, was a woman I didn't recognize — Kaimana, I understood now — looking at him with an expression that was equal parts gratitude and wonder.
And standing in the doorway, half in shadow, was a little girl.
Maybe five or six years old.
Watching.
"Who is that?" I asked.
Leilani's voice was very quiet.
"That is me."
I looked at her.
Then at the photograph.
Then back at her.
"You were there," I said.
"You were there that night."
"I was too young to remember clearly," she said.
"But I remember his voice.
I remember he sang something.
Something low and soft, to keep my grandmother calm." She looked at Grandpa Henry.
"Do you remember what it was?"
He thought for a moment.
Then, in a voice rough with age, he sang four words.
*You are my sunshine.*
Leilani closed her eyes.
The manager turned away and looked at the wall.
I pressed the letter against my chest and did not trust myself to speak.
May you like
Then my grandfather said something that changed the shape of everything.
"Leilani," he said slowly, "your mother — Hope — did she ever know she had a brother?"
