When we were teenagers, our parents would take us to Maui every four or five months for an extended holiday. In charter school we could get away with bending the attendance requirements more easily than in public school.

     My father, Edward Crowley, was flush with riches from selling his software company, ‘ExQuizit,’ when he was fifty years old to some billionaire in Silicon Valley; my dad transitioning to high-end consulting for another few years. He was a superstar game maker with amazing brain power which was only overshadowed by my mom who worked as an aerospace Engineering Program Director at NASA; both of them retiring before they hit fifty-five. As soon as they retired, they purchased two luxury beachfront condos in West Maui.

       Sally and I were the luckiest two teenagers in Northern California. As twins, although fraternal we looked much alike except she had wavy strawberry red hair and I had bark brown hair, a dullish color. Sally got the blue eyes from my mother and I inherited eyes like my father, so dark brown that they resembled some exotic animal eyes, with light amber flecks dotted around the centers; eyes noticeable to everyone who met me. So much so that I often wore sunglasses so people wouldn’t start up every conversation with “Are you wearing special contact lenses to get that look or is that your natural eye color?” I felt self-conscious and wanted to deflect the focus on me. My sister was the obvious beauty but I got the attention because of my eyes.

          With the two Hawaii condos, Mom and Dad would stay in the spacious 2,000 sq foot one, while my sister and I would enjoy the cozier one next door. The condos were set so close to the sand that we could step out on our lanai and pitch ourselves over the short stone wall and be on the sand. It was a heavenly setting and allowed Sally and I to sneak out at night without my parents even suspecting. We’d be in Lahaina just down the road eager to catch a blues band or dance party in one of the local clubs, our favorite one just opposite the famous Banyan tree by the harbor. Our frequent trips to Maui as teens were during Lahaina’s heyday, years before the tragic fire which destroyed most of the town in August 2023.

               I sit in my parents’ San Francisco home looking at my sister as she stands on the other side of the granite kitchen island and prepares to bake cookies. Bowls filled with sugar, flour and butter all around her as she kneads the dough with a rolling pin on a grand rectangular block of wood. A half dozen plastic cookie cutters are set near the cutting board. A star, a pineapple, a plumeria flower and a few others make up the assortment. I pick up one of the three largest lemons I’ve ever seen thanks to her garden which sit in a bowl close to me.

                I pick up the biggest one and hold it up in the air. As if making an announcement at a competitive event, I say,
 “This one gets first prize. A State Fair record-breaker. The lemon to top all lemons.”

                Sally looks up at me with her baby blues, the last of her red hair peeking out from under a stylish multicolored black, beautiful custom-designed head scarf. She seems to force a grin. She’s not prissy now with her appearance like she used to be when dating some of the best-looking guys I’d ever seen. She wears tan or black loose-fitting clothes now but she still likes to wear color on her head. Her skin has turned a grayish tone.

                The circles under her eyes are darker than they were a month ago when I took her to see ‘The Lion King’ musical in San Francisco. It was three days after her sixth dose of chemo this time around. She wanted to see ‘The Lion King’ specifically to get ideas for creative and colorful head scarf fabrics. I surprised her with front row seats during breakfast the same day as the performance. The experience paid off as now she has at least ten African-inspired scarves to cover her almost bald head.

 “So, Dizzy,” she says, “what shape of cookie would you prefer today? Star fish? Plumeria flower? Pineapple? Wait, how about this Dolphin?”  She holds up the powder blue cookie mold.

              Sally was the only human on Earth that I permitted to address me as ‘Dizzy.’ To everyone else, I was Desiree, whether I was at work or socializing. But since I grew up as ‘Dizzy’ in our family household, Sally still had the a-ok to use the nickname except as we agreed, never in front of other people. She respected my wishes most of the time. But Sally was a sassy girl and woman, and on occasion would slip up and shout out “Hey Dizzy” in a crowded department store or movie theatre, and then make fun of my soured reaction.

“Oops,” she’d claim.  “I totally forgot that you don’t like that,” then flash me her apologetic protruding top lip.
                I look at my sister as she dances around the kitchen, Blondie playing on Alexa in the background. Sally is twirling holding up the dolphin cookie mold in one hand and the starfish in the other.

“Which one strikes your fancy, Dizzy girl?” Both of us are thirty-six years old now, and both of us, unwed. Sally was engaged two years ago until the uterine cancer entered the scene. And then our parents were killed shortly thereafter in a small plane crash off their treasured island of Maui.  Dad’s Cessna 172 Skyhawk, which he called ‘Kitty,’ went down in the Pacific Ocean close to a beach in Hana which was situated at the far Eastern end of Maui. He flew his plane at least two or three times a week, and on that fateful day had taken Mom with him, something he rarely did since she frequently got migraines when flying.

                  The shocking tragedy occurred on one of their trips to the island where they’d typically spend more than half the year. Dad possessed a pilot’s license which he had for over fifteen years when the fatal accident occurred.

                  We never really found out the exact cause of the crash. Operator error or mechanical failure? The results of the NTSB investigation were fuzzy at best.

                   A part of me thought maybe Dad, who was almost 77 years old and my mom who was a year older, had actually pre-planned their demise. Why would they have done such a thing? I struggled thinking about it.

                   But I was good at puzzles and this one I felt I had figured out. For one thing, they had done everything there was to do in life; toured the world several times over, owned a beautiful spacious house in San Francisco and two luxury condos in Maui, donated and led charity events for endangered animals throughout their retirement and were committed to their marriage until their dying day; including renewing their vows in a formal ceremony.

                   They knew that Sally had uterine cancer which was diagnosed a year before Sally’s planned wedding. It crushed them to see their daughter in constant pain and going through half a dozen surgeries as the cancer spread from her uterus to her stomach. But Sally went into remission for a few months until the cancer came back with a vengeance. As soon as she found out she broke it off with Doug, her fiancée, a successful high-tech venture capitalist, a few weeks before Mom and Dad were killed. She said she had fallen out of love with Doug but I knew the resurgence of the cancer played a key role in her decision.  

                    As her twin, I felt what she felt. I knew she was secretly broken-hearted and didn’t want Doug to be tied to her long-term health issues. He didn’t seem shattered enough to beg her to re-consider. The wedding was cancelled and she gave back the two-carat engagement ring.

                     Mom and Dad were worried sick about Sally; both of them, eyes red with grief every time I saw them, fighting tears in front of their sick daughter. Away from my sister, I sat in their living room one afternoon and tried to comfort them which proved useless.

“You guys doing okay?” I asked. “What can I do to help you through this? It’s tough on you, I know.”

“She’ll be fine,” Mom said. “We just know it.”

“Sally’s strong as an ox,” Dad added. “You don’t need to worry about us.”

They didn’t want to admit the degree of their concern but it was written on their faces. I suspected that they thought that if they talked about it too much, it might be a jinx to Sally getting healthy again. And I knew that Mom in particular, although brilliant, was superstitious.

So, in family gatherings they both smiled, and talked about everything under the sun, avoiding Sally’s cancer. Yet Mom accompanied Sally routinely to her doctor’s appointments and Dad to all of her chemo sessions. He’d hold her hand as he sat for hours in a side chair while she received the chemo. He’d talked to her about trips he’d like Sally to go on with them to places like China, Africa, Rio de Janeiro and maybe even Lithuania. Sally told me about their chemo conversations and how his bad jokes made her smile while the infusion pump did its job.

                And then my mom leaked it to me privately that Dad was in an early stage of Alzheimer’s and had wanted to keep it from us until after Sally’s wedding.  

                 When my parents booked a trip to Maui halfway through Sally’s run of chemotherapy sessions, I felt ambivalent. But Sally encouraged them to go, not to worry about her. I promised to sit in for Mom and Dad, and take time off from work which was part of my company’s benefit plan. So, off they went. Mom hadn’t told my sister about Dad’s Alzheimer’s since she felt Sally had enough to contend with in the coming weeks. Eventually, she’d share that with my sister and requested that I be quiet about it in the meantime.

                  With Dad’s Alzheimer’s and Sally’s cancer, it felt unnatural for them to leave California, and frankly, it wasn’t like them to disappear during such an intense time in our family. And so, the whole picture led me to consider that perhaps my parents were done with living and wanted Sally to inherit their fortune including their spacious home in San Francisco, so she’d be set for hopefully a longer life. I didn’t think either of them could bear to see their daughter die or go through Dad’s descent into his illness. Sally didn’t have solid medical insurance because of her self-employment, thinking she’d be healthy forever.

                   Sally and I never discussed my hypothesis about our parents’ deaths but I knew this possibility had also crossed her mind, especially after I told her about Dad’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis. My parents left almost all their savings and one of their Maui condos to Sally who moved back into our birth house within a couple of weeks after they were killed. I received $150K, and the smaller condo. I understood what had motivated their decision-making process. And, my career as an employment law attorney was flourishing. I was up for full partner in a high-profile firm in Silicon Valley. My townhouse in Palo Alto was more than two-thirds paid in full. At 37, I felt more than financially secure.  

                   When Sally and I locked eyes at the funeral there was that unspoken understanding between us. The crash may have been intentional, pre-planned. She was my twin and we often communicated without spoken words. 

In Sally’s San Francisco kitchen where my mom had prepared all of our holiday meals and baked us lavish birthday cakes over the years, I watch my sister rolling out the dough for the cookies she’ll bake, while her body is filled with cancer.

“Dizzy girl, which cookie shape do you prefer? She asks.  You listening to me, Sis? We’ve got all these choices, so…”
“Wait, I have something for you,” I blurt out. Rushing to my purse sitting on the sofa, I pull out a small flowered paper bag, and hand it to Sally.

“Chocolates for me?”

“No, something better,” I say.

She wipes her hands on a kitchen towel and opens the small bag.
“A cookie cutter. Oh!” She places it on the counter-top. “It’s a Banyan tree. Wow.”

“Just like the one in Lahaina,” I say.
“Yeah, now destroyed.”
“No, I heard it’s growing back little by little. It’s still fragile but it even has some long branches now.”

“Well, thank you. I love this.”

“Me too. I saw it in a shop in Santa Cruz last weekend, a shop full of Hawaiian products called The Banyan Tree. I had to get that cookie cutter for you. It’s a sign, Sally.”

“A sign, she says. “I think it’s a Banyan tree Dizzy girl, not a sign.” She looks down at the dough, sprinkles more flour and pushes the rolling pin back and forth.

“It’s a sign of hope for your recovery. Your wellness,” I say.  

             She looks up at me, her moist blue eyes glistening.

“You want this one, then?” She holds up my gifted blue metal cookie cutter.

“Yes Sis,” I say. “Bake me a Banyan tree.”

Linda S. Gunther is the author of six suspense novels: Ten Steps from the Hotel Inglaterra, Endangered Witness, Lost in the Wake, Finding Sandy Stonemeyer, Dream Beach and Death is a Great Disguiser. Most recently, Ms. Gunther’s memoir titled A Bronx Girl was released and is available on Amazon. Her essays and short stories have also been featured in a variety of literary publications across the globe. In April 2025, her play titled Listen While You Work was produced and performed by Inclusive Theater in Buffalo, New York. www.lindasgunther.com