Under the Giant Mimosa with the Mango Tree Lover

By R. Cameron Bryce

Hannah Lindsey Brown's father was killed by his doctors . . . and they knew that she knew why.  Hannah Lindsay Brown, the once adventure icon, would face a new, impenetrable challenge.  Traumatized, stonewalled, locked out of a system that pretends to be accessible, she had to find a way to pick up the pieces and move on. The adventure icon would become the indigent traveler trying to make sense of the new desensitized version of American culture. Looking for closure, she crisscrossed America in her "Lucie", sailed to Alaska on a perilous voyage onboard a derelict commercial fishing boat with an all male crew that never wanted her there, and then found herself in a secret spot, "hidden in plain sight" in the Hawaiian archipelago. There would be no peace, no reckoning . . . until she found herself under the giant Mimosa with the mango tree lover.

 

This second revision brings back the Hannah Lindsay Brown character, in alignment with the original memoir. You can get a multimedia version of this exact same story in my "When Pigs and Horses Fly."

 

(Note to reader: If you've visited Hawaii, you likely never saw the magical secret places that are hidden there in plain sight . . . just a heartbeat away. And if you've never been to Hawaii, "Under the Giant Mimosa" will give you a glimpse of what lies just beyond the sideshow on the other side of paradise.)

 

Now a 5-star Readers' Favorite book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: RCB
• Release date: Nov 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201657420

R. Cameron Bryce

Thank you for visiting! I am originally from New York, but have spent the majority of my life living among the islands of Polynesia. I have been a published author for more than twelve years, with books published in three different genres and written under two different pen names, depending on genre. My latest brainchild, Under the Giant Mimosa with the Mango Tree Lover, is now available through all good bookstores worldwide. Sometimes we go on journeys that we never signed up for . . . I am constantly on one of those journeys!

Book preview

Introduction

Ihave been fortunate to be able to visit some of the locations through which Hannah Lyndsey Brown passed during her much-unexpected journey to the other side of paradise.  I can tell you from first-hand experience that a stormy Cross Sound, Alaska, is not the place for any sailing vessel, and that there are, in fact, hidden places, in plain sight, in the Hawaiian archipelago where Hawaiian legends are still very much alive and you'd best pay attention to what goes on around you. 

And that horse and that pig that played endlessly around the ponds of Kahena, best of friends, soul mates? They were as real as you or I.

Adventure icon, Hannah Lyndsey Brown was a throwback. She'd spent years crossing oceans, solo, on her own sailboat, away from urban society and her home country. Because of this, she had become a kind of human time capsule that embodied the morality and values of a different era.

In this book, she shares a memoir of a period in her life during which she would go on another kind of journey — another kind of adventure — one that she'd never really signed up for.

Hannah's experiences, worldwide, had led her to believe that people are inherently good. When she was sick with dengue fever on a tiny island in the Fijian archipelago, the local people there rallied to save her life. When her boat was hopelessly aground in a remote region among the thousands of islands in Indonesia, it was the local fishermen there who found an ingenious way of freeing her vessel — just before the arrival of a major storm that would surely have dashed any hope of survival. There were so many examples, over the years, of beautiful, selfless acts of kindness by the humanity that surrounded her voyages.

When she returns to America, it seems the rules had changed.  In this new version of civilized, those we'd come to trust most with our lives could no longer be trusted at all, disadvantaged people in our communities could now be considered throwaways, and the law had been re-crafted to protect the whim of the moneyed.  

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HANNAH LYNDSEY BROWN'S memoir is based on a true story.  For numerous reasons, including my own need to take considerable artistic license in the retelling of this story, I have turned it into a work of fiction.  Character names, locations, and any other identifying markers in this book are a product of my imagination, and any similarities between these and real-life characters, locations, or other real-life identifiers are strictly coincidental and nothing more.

PART 1

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Legal Murders

CHAPTER 1

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Awakening

Isat bolt upright in bed and glanced around startled, I couldn’t be sure.  It sounded like someone was screaming at the top of their lungs.  Rubbing the sleep out of my eyes, I must have been dreaming; I half expected to hear it again. 

I reached over and turned on the lamp by the clock on the end table.  It was 3:38 a.m.  I could just make out the dim glow of a light on somewhere in the house, maybe from the hallway bathroom.  I rubbed my eyes again and tried to calm myself, shaking my head, trying to shed the sense of panic. 

I gradually became aware of the silence and smell of another Florida early morning.  A light tinge of swamp-gas smell hung in the air as a lone car passed by, radio loud, someone laughing, country music.  A dog barked, somewhere down the block. 

I didn’t hear a toilet flush, maybe someone was in the kitchen.

Our aging and slightly overweight black Lab, Bonny-Parker, pushed open my door and stood in the entranceway.  She just stood there, looking at me as if she wished she could talk — short, quiet, desperate sounds coming from somewhere inside of her.

"Do you want to go out, girl?’

She didn’t budge.  It was too early for her walk.

Something was wrong, I wanted to give her a rub, . . . c’mon girl,  lightly slapping my thigh, trying to encourage her to come over . . . and then, there it was again — I did hear a scream.  It sounded like it was coming from my father’s bedroom. 

I was wide awake.

I vaulted out of bed, hurried down the hallway, the dog suddenly leading the way.  When I got there, I found my mother leaning over my dad.  He was shaking and his face was soaked with sweat.  I could just hear Bonny-Parker’s quiet cries, her gaze riveted on my father.

Another nightmare . . . he’s been having these every night since the new drug . . .  the look on my mother’s face frightened me. 

New drug?  Which one now?  I can’t keep up with them . . . I can’t even pronounce most of them.  I moved closer, Dad, wake up, it’s Hannah, it’s going to be okay, I said, trying to sound like I wasn’t shaken myself.  I was. 

My father’s condition seemed to be worsening when, by all accounts, he should have been recovering.  He was in excellent physical condition when this whole thing started.  I thought that, by now, everything would be back to normal again.  His handball buddies had been coming around lately wanting to know how he was doing.  They’d ask me if I wanted to play a set to fill in for my father and I’d tell them that I just didn’t want to get back on the court until dad got better and they’d say things like, Hannah, you’ve got to chill out a little.  He’ll get better . . . you’ll see.  Michael’s made out of stainless steel.

. . . Michael, it was just a dream, my mother gently squeezing my father's arm, my father still not having fully emerged from whatever scared the crap out of him in that dream.  He started to cry.  I'd never seen my father cry.  As a little girl growing up, he was my super hero and not even Kryptonite could harm him. 

It was all supposed to be a routine medical treatment for an early-stage, early diagnosed, small cancerous tumor, plenty of precedent for success, no one doubted complete remission.  There had to be something else.

His doctors suddenly fell silent.  It was getting harder to reach them for updates.

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I WAS STAYING AT MY parents' house in Pastel Lakes, Florida, helping out where I could during my father's ordeal. 

When my mother and father first came here, decades ago, a lightly traveled two-lane road, called Milner Trail, ambled through this part of the county.  The Trail’s thin, fractured asphalt blended at the road’s borders with the sandy-dirt footpath that was the sidewalk.  On one side of the road, a collection of single-lot residential ranch-style homes, modest lots, hugged the road for about five miles north and south.  My parents' home was one of them. Milner Trail and these homes were, at the time, the western-most boundary of the town.  Similar tiers of cookie-cutter neighborhoods behind these homes spread east for about two miles. 

West, across the road, there was a horse and cattle ranch with acres of grazing land.  It was quiet and had a rural feel.  Every once in a while a bull would get loose and cross the road, roaming around the neighborhoods terrorizing grannies and small school children until a ranch hand would come with his pickup truck and herd the animal back across the street and onto the farm.  He was always polite, apologizing profusely and promising there would be no repetition of the event. There always was.  It was the best live entertainment this community had. 

This was where Average America lived; working class people who just wanted to be comfortable, raise their kids in a reasonably safe neighborhood.

This was when Florida was beautiful.

I'd been away for years.  After graduating university, I went to work as a boat-building apprentice — the first female apprentice ever at Y & B Boatworks — and shortly after completing the apprenticeship, I moved to Hawaii.  A stint with a corporation there taught me that career tracks that involved cubicles were a no-go zone and I eventually bought Leilani Kai, a nine-meter sailboat, fixed her up and prepared her for a voyage across the Pacific Ocean that would take me away from the States for years.  My parents thought I’d lost my mind when I told them I was taking a small sailboat to places like Samoa and Tonga.  My mother was so stressed out about my sailing off that she secretly hatched a plan to distance herself from me, bit by bit, so that when the inevitable bad news came — that Id been lost at sea — there would be a certain emotional insulation.  Mom was like that, she was disappointed that I wasn’t married with children already — where are the grandkids?— and then this crazy sailing idea.

I’d never been lost at sea, but the voyage consumed all of my energy and time and I hadn’t connected with my family much.  I was feeling guilty about that, so when I returned, I made a decision to rekindle ties and live nearby for a while. For some reason, I felt like I owed it to them. Soon after coming back to the United States, I moved into a neighborhood close by and eventually started a small online business.  When my father became ill, I moved into a spare bedroom at their house, helping out as I could.  

I'd spent most of my life living in Hawaii and I've always considered Hawaii home.  Florida wasn't working for me, the climate, the strange demographic mix, racism so thick you could taste it, the in-your-face corporate/political corruption, and the complete disregard for the region’s delicate ecosystem, seemed to be everywhere at once.

In the time that I'd been away, the little community of Pastel Lakes had been transformed, as if by some dark magic, into an overcrowded, hot, humid jumble of duplexes, strip malls and great-walled gated communities, or pastel gulags, as my friend Pietra used to call them. 

The quiet two-lane road that I'd known had swelled to six-lanes, a monster highway that saw thousands of cars every day.  Through backroom deals and pressure from NIMBY-minded wealthy interests not wanting traffic in their backyards, the county widened Milner Trail almost to the front doors of the bordering homes, a six-lane flatulent dragon that pummeled residents with its inevitable noise and pollution.  Asphalt and concrete everywhere replaced the acres of rural open space, reflecting and re-radiating Florida's hot, monsoon-like humid air.  The horse and cattle ranch across the street had long disappeared, overrun for miles by a helter-skelter smattering of zero-lot-line duplexes whose driveways drained into the blistering hot main thoroughfare.  Florida had become a victim of shady developer interests and a corrupt, complicit government — the object of the game was profit — quality of life for the rest of the community was not on the table.  No one ever complained; apathy was rampant.

This was when Florida turned ugly.

When developers filled every possible nook and cranny with residential housing, they, and their government allies, like sugar-saturated hyperactive children on Christmas morning, began unwrapping an aggressive campaign to attract something called clean, light industry to the region, a veiled reference to the medical industry.  With the stampede of aging retirees migrating to the area, corporate conveyor-belt medicine overtook Pastel Lakes and its surrounds like kudzu on steroids.  Medical malls sprung up right next to shopping malls — a strange phenomenon hoping to convince the sick and incapacitated of the convenience of shopping for medical services in one location, like shopping for dishtowels or brick-a-bracts.  Sprawling clinic campuses took over landscapes that once nurtured delicate ecosystems — deliberate, academic-looking architecture designed to engender a sense of awe and reverence.  Hospitals and doctors’ offices became as ubiquitous as convenience stores. The community of Pastel Lakes was drowning in clean light industry.

I was an uncomfortable alien here and was quietly desperate to leave.   Returning home to Hawaii wouldn't be an option now.  I wanted to see my father through this.

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I'M TRYING TO CONTAIN a low-grade panic that was beginning to overtake me as I headed for the office of Dr. Emery Shapro, oncologist.  Something went wrong.  This was supposed to be routine. For some reason, my father's condition was deteriorating long after he should have recovered. 

I kept reassuring myself that, hey, these guys are doctors — all those years of training — and they must be smart just to be able to get into medical school.  I'm going over, in my head, what I will say to the doctor when I see him.  My father was fine when he came to you, no symptoms, full of energy and enthusiasm for life, his family and friends.  Then bam, six months later he's deathly ill and not from the original disease, but . . . something else.  What am I missing here?  Help me out?  I don't wear a lab coat nor do I have a stethoscope slung around my neck . . .  heck, I don't even have a certificate in first aid.

The automatic door leading into the medical center opened with a slight whoosh-like sound.  One could immediately feel the avalanche of cold air cascading out of the building, pushing through the thick, sticky, Florida humidity.  A friendly information desk receptionist, sandy blond hair, bob and bangs, clinic-logoed blouse and clinic-pleasant smile gave me directions to Shapro's office, on the second floor of the building.

So let me understand you correctly . . .  I'm sitting across from Dr. Emery Shapro, my father's oncologist, trying to make sense of what was going on.  . . . a patient comes to you with a small, very early stage cancer, diagnosed quickly, well contained, historically and statistically very treatable — plenty of precedent — and now that same patient, initially asymptomatic, in great health, diagnosed during a routine annual physical, is suddenly deathly ill?

Dr. Shapro shifted in his seat slightly, unconsciously twirling a pen around with the fingers on his right hand. He appeared distracted, almost bored,  The chemo and radiation treatments can do that to a patient.  He'll recover.  He just needs time . . .   the pen spun off his fingers and onto his lap.

Time?  When he came to you seven months ago, he was running a business, competing in sports, and renovating his house.  There was no discernable illness — no symptoms that would point to failing health.  Now he's bedridden, immobilized and seriously ill . . .  and quite frankly his condition appears to be worsening daily and none of the symptoms are related to cancer . . . what the hell is going on?  Last night he had another terrible nightmare . . . frightening . . .  something that started happening with his latest drug prescription.

Shapro, finger-spinning his pen again, Look, Hannah, we're doing the best we can . . . I don't know what else to tell you . . . I'll have his prescription changed and we'll see what happens.  I could sense Shapro's temperament shifting, more uncomfortable.  The pen flicked out of control and onto the floor.

Do you mean that you don't know what will happen when you change his prescription?  Where is the science in all of this?  I didn't know whether I came off as begging or accusing at this point, I just wanted an answer that made sense.

The doctor leaned over and picked up the pen, I mean that we are doing the best we can,  he set the pen down in front of him and then, putting both palms on his desk and pushing himself standing, Frankly, Hannah, that's all I can say about this.  Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm due at the hospital in ten minutes. 

Shapro’s body language was troubling.  I decided to start keeping a journal

CHAPTER 2

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Night Spirits

Sometimes people die in their sleep and no one ever really knows why.  He or she died of natural causes is usually an acceptable explanation, despite the fact that the actual cause may be unknown to observers. 

I’ve always wondered if I could have died like that in my little white van, under the giant mimosa tree at the farm in Kahena.  Above and around me, the towering mimosa tree grew entwined with a mango tree lover whose trunk seemed to spring from among the mimosa’s roots.  It was that time of year, when the tree was flowering — a fan of loosely spaced, bright-red spike-like pedals shouted against a thick backdrop of deep green oval-shaped leaves.

I dreamed a lot when I slept under this tree. There was something about the energy at Kahena.

The region around Kahena is ground zero for some of Hawaii’s best-known legends.  Ancestors are unambiguous when they tell of the night spirits, for example, who endlessly roam parts of Hawaii looking for a portal to the other side.  They warn that these spirits must never be disturbed — nor even gazed upon by the living — the penalty for which, instant death.

I’d read about this legend and others, and, like most, never took them to be anything more than that.  Legends came from another time, another mindset.

Lying in my bedroll in my van under the giant mimosa, I’d come to welcome the sounds of night here. There was a peculiar kind of edginess about the nighttime quiet in Kahena.  Nothing seemed out of place, except when it was. 

In my deep sleep, I dreamed that I was walking around outside of my van.  I could see my little home on the path where I always parked, under the giant mimosa tree with the mango tree lover, in the middle of a moonless pitch black Kahena.  I was gazing at the stars, mesmerized.  You could see so many stars in the total darkness that was the Kahena night, stars strewn across the sky like endless blinking, glowing grains of sand. 

Wainani, the horse that lived on the Kahena farm, made her home just a short distance from where I parked my van.  As always, she was in her usual spot under the hau branches beside Kahena stream, head down when she slept, motionless.  The night’s sounds were all around: the toads' and frogs' loud, staccato calls for mates on the banks of the ponds, the buzz, clicks and whirs of nighttime insects, the wind in the trees and the occasional squawk of an 'auku'u bird, somewhere up above or over in the hau branches, were all familiar.  The sound of an aerator motor hummed in the background.

As I sat trying to pick out the constellations, I gradually became aware of the faint, distant sound of some dogs barking. You could always hear dogs barking around here, but something was different.

I focused, listening.

Looking in that direction, I could barely make out a slight glow that seemed to be moving in my direction. Headlights from the main road, I speculated.  As the glow brightened, I realized that it was too late at night for much traffic and the light might be from someone’s headlamp up at the pig farm on the hill.  

The glow gradually widened and got closer, and as it came into clear view, I shot straight up to my feet, standing and straining to see more.

"Are those people in this light? 

The glow was hypnotic, broadening, getting brighter; I strained to see more clearly.

It was drawing closer.

Now I was sure.  I should have run; my legs wouldn't respond.

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Wainani's head suddenly jerk up, shaking her whole body, snorting, as if suddenly awakened from a bad dream.  She looked straight at me, as if she knew something.  At that precise moment, an urgent voice from somewhere deep inside told me that I should get down on the ground, quickly, and lay flat on my stomach with my face pressed against the earth. 

Do not look, do not move!  If they see your eyes, they will steal your soul! 

I fell to my stomach and lay prostrate, face in the dirt, ridged, quiet, trying to control my shaking.  As I lay there I heard no footsteps, but I could sense the ground brighten with the reflection of a dull glow.  I remained motionless for a long time. 

Bugs were crawling on me.  I lay bolt still. 

There was a sudden, sharp crackling noise, like the sound of an arcing electric spark, and I felt an excruciating sting in my right side.  I came bolt awake.  A giant stinging blood-red centipede, a Scolopendra, had gotten into my van, into my bedding.  I must have rolled onto it.  I balled up some paper towels and captured the monster, my rib cage now throbbing; I could feel its protests transmitted through the wad of paper, as I opened the side door and tossed the whole mess out.  The pain was excruciating.

In the morning light, Wainani was in her spot under the hau branches by the stream.  Awake, head up, quiet, she looked over in my direction — almost like she knew something.  I was still nursing the welt left by the angry centipede.

There were things, unexplained, that went on at the Kahena farm; things just out of sight, in the dark of night.  I would spend the next years of my life living here, under the giant mimosa with the mango tree lover.  My friendship with Wainani would grow over time — two lonely souls trying to make sense of their destinies.  Boundaries here were sometimes fuzzy, something between dream and surreal.

CHAPTER 3

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Investigation

Journal entry: October 10:   something went wrong and I am hopelessly dumb about this subject.

I began poring over my father's medical records looking for anything that would help me to understand what was happening.  I had no idea even where to begin but I felt certain that doctors knew something about this turn of events that I didn’t, something that had nothing to do with his original diagnosis.

I had to figure this out.  I assembled prescription drug lists, dosages, chemotherapy records, radiotherapy exposure records, x-ray and CAT-Scan images, and doctors' narratives. I started doing research on the Internet; how could anyone possibly make sense of all of this information?

I slept little, spending whole days and nights online, in libraries and on the telephone trying to decipher a code not meant to be completely understood by the uninitiated. 

I educated myself about the drugs that doctors were prescribing — opioids and opioid analgesics, corticosteroids, benzodiazepines, and the powerful propoxyphenes — how doctors were using them, what their side effects were, interaction warnings, and safe dosages.  I read articles about chemotherapy, powerful drugs, drip-administered directly into the bloodstream over long periods and then re-administered over multiple days.  I tried to unravel the logic behind the application of huge doses of radiation repeatedly aimed at human organs, daily, over a period of weeks or more.

My Web searches were frustrating.  I didn’t really know what I was looking for.  Searches led to wildly different results.  Occasionally I’d run across search results with links to doctors who were warning about the possibility of severe injury or death due to medical mistakes — medical fumbling that wasn't part of the plan. 

Journal entry: . . . great . . . now I’ve got to wade through Internet conspiracy theories!

I clicked on an article by a Dr. Beatrice Starbyne, MD, a physician who specialized in Public Health and was a professor of medicine at a well-known American medical school.  Starbyne estimated that medical mistakes were killing more than a quarter-million people every year.

She called them medical atrocities.  The article, published in a well-respected medical journal, piqued my interest.  

Out of curiosity, I did a Web search for medical error.  The search engine returned, About 1,560,000,000 results (0.55 seconds),  as if screaming, alerting me to a potential avalanche of articles, papers and technical reports all talking about how patients were being injured, or killed, by mistakes in hospitals and in doctors' offices. 

I clicked on an article by a healthcare financial magazine intended for hospital administrators. The headline read 769 Hospitals Nationwide Cited for Medical Error.  The article was about how the Center for Medicare Services, a federal agency, had fingered seven hundred and sixty-nine American hospitals for injuries and death caused by medical bungling in their facilities.  Each of the hospitals had to pay a hefty fine and become the subject of future scrutiny by CMS.  The seven hundred and sixty nine offenders were only those that they’d caught; no one knows how many more might be out there.

Journal entry:  I read an article today by a famous surgeon who practices at a university clinic in the northeast.  He was blowing the whistle on his colleagues for all of the unnecessary harm brought on by bungled treatments. The doctor wrote in methodical detail. This scared me.

I pored through social media sites searching for actual case histories.  One popular site had at least a dozen groups dedicated to medical atrocities — some with thousands of members — with hundreds of patient histories of those harmed or killed.  Some of the stories were chilling: careless surgeries, patients with non-life threatening illnesses suddenly dying because of super-bug infections in hospitals, or wrongly administered drugs and therapies.

As I carefully sifted through the many case histories and then began comparing these against the volumes of jargon in my father's records, things started showing up.

Journal entry:  I’m starting to notice awkward notations in my father’s medical records:  lack of agreement in different transcripts documenting the exact same procedures; obvious miscommunication between doctors; a curious case of pre-dated records filled out in advance, in detail, containing erroneous information about procedures that doctors could never have known about until after they had completed the procedure.

Doctors appeared to be crafting some of their narratives, attempting to convince readers that their treatments met legal Standard of Care — perhaps early immunization against any threat of litigation. 

I was exhausted.  I'd slept and eaten little in the previous days.  The research took me off into another direction, an unexpected turn, this medical error thing.  I grabbed some leftover chicken and some wilting salad from the refrigerator and brought the plate back to my desk.  I ate as if in a trance and then fell asleep, head resting on my crossed arms, for I don't know how long. 

I started dreaming about when my father helped me fix up my very first boat, a father-daughter project that began with the discovery of a small runabout that someone abandoned in a nearby vacant lot.  The bottom rotted, someone had painted a message on its tattered side: Free, take it away.  And, so we did.

We spent months fixing it up together.  In the dream, he was showing me how to hook up the motor, how to hook up the cables for controlling the gears and throttle.  I cherished my father's attention.

The project completed, we were out on the boat, sailing around off a beach somewhere; my father congratulated me on how well the boat turned out.  I was so proud.  As we sailed out to sea, my little speedboat, somewhere along the way, morphed into my old nine-meter sailboat, Leilani Kai, and together my father and I sailed towards some islands in the South Pacific. 

Out of nowhere, storm clouds began to roll in; thick, black, roiling storm clouds that warned of dangerous weather ahead.  The wind began to blow and