Banana Split (5 page)

“Come on in,” she said, standing to the side. He was only too eager to enter and looked around the room once she shut the door behind him. Was he scoping out the place to see if there was anything valuable? There wasn’t, really, but just having someone else in the house made her uncomfortable. It was her only sanctuary, and she’d allowed it to be breached. Only Konnie had ever been inside her condo, and that was because she wouldn’t take no for an answer.

“Have a seat if you’d like,” Sadie said, waving the boy toward the futon against the wall and across from the TV.

He sat on the very edge of the futon and tried to bounce, but the cushion was pretty solid. Sadie sat in the rattan chair to the side of the futon and looked at him expectantly, trying to summon the persona of a welcoming hostess. She couldn’t make it work, however, and so she simply spoke her mind. “You already know who I am. What’s your name?”

“Charlie,” he said.

“Well, nice to meet you, Charlie. What can I help you with?”

He twisted so he could get something out of the right front pocket of his shorts. His clothes were not new, and he smelled like a little boy who’d just come in from a humid afternoon. Sadie hadn’t smelled that in a long time and felt a flash of nostalgia for the days when she’d had to bribe Shawn to take a shower. This little boy, Charlie, wasn’t all that different from what Shawn had been a decade ago. Charlie was smaller and not as dark-skinned, but the similarities tugged at her heart, which made her even more uncomfortable.

Charlie removed a folded piece of paper from his pocket and opened it up, smoothing it out on his lap. It was the grayish newsprint paper her students had used back when she taught school—cheap, soft, and thin. He cleared his throat very official-like. “I read about you in the paper,” he said, glancing up at her quickly.

“I was in the paper?” Sadie asked, her heart instantly racing.

“Yes,” the boy said, looking at her eagerly. “Because you knew my mom.”

Sadie’s attention snapped back to him. “Your mom?” she said, having a hard time processing the idea.

“Noelani Pouhu,” the boy said.

“I’m sorry,” Sadie said, shaking her head. “I don’t know anyone by that name.” And yet something niggled that she’d heard the name before.

“The newspaper said you—you were with her,” he said, his voice quiet, almost reverent. “Up by Anahola.”

Sadie’s mouth went dry.

Noelani.

She
had
heard the name before, and the realization of who he was talking about brought back the stark memory of pushing away a water-bloated body. Instantly her sweat glands reacted, and she focused on taking deep breaths.

“She was a mother?” Sadie’s head tingled and her throat thickened. “I didn’t know that.” She’d purposely avoided learning about the woman for this very reason. It was easier to think of her as simply a body, although Sadie was ashamed to admit that even to herself. “How did you find me?”

“I read about you in the paper and then heard the police talking. They said you was staying at a condo in Puhi on Valley Street, and the guy in the other one”—he pointed his thumb over his shoulder, technically in the direction of the street but she knew he was trying to tell her which condo—“said you was probably in this one.”

He put all that together himself? If he could do it, anyone could. She wasn’t safe here anymore.

He looked back at the paper and smoothed it out again. “I just wanted to ask you some questions about her.”

Sadie held her shaking hands together in her lap and swallowed. “You don’t want to know anything about that, I promise,” she said.

“Everybody says she was high, but she wasn’t doing drugs no more so—”

Sadie stood up, cutting him off and wringing her hands as though the hair—Noelani’s hair—was still wrapped around them. “Look, I’m really,
really
sorry about your mom. I can’t even . . .” She paused for breath, trying to keep her anxiety at bay, but images of that day in the water flashed in her mind and she wasn’t sure how much longer she could focus. For the first time, she pictured some kind of tattoo on the woman’s forearm. She hadn’t remembered that before, and she wished she hadn’t remembered it now. She didn’t want to think about this anymore. “I’m so sorry,” she said again. “But I didn’t know her. I only . . . found her, and I don’t know anything else.”

“You weren’t her friend?”

“No.” Sadie shook her head, surprised by the question. “I’d never seen her before.”

He pulled his eyebrows together and looked back at the paper in his lap. “But I thought . . . I thought you must have been with her.”

Sadie’s confusion overrode her anxiety for a moment. Why would he think that? Had the newspaper insinuated something like that? “No,” she said. “I didn’t know her, and I don’t know anything about her now. I didn’t even know she had a son.” Her voice cracked.

Charlie pursed his lips together, and she noticed his face darken. Embarrassment? Disappointment? A moment later, his shoulders slumped forward, and he hung his head, staring into his lap.

Sadie sat back down in her chair, unsure what to do. Was he crying? Should she comfort him? She could
imagine
herself sitting next to him on the futon and pulling him into a hug, but she couldn’t move. She didn’t want to touch him. Just as she couldn’t have an in-depth conversation with her son about what had happened in Boston, she couldn’t bear the responsibility of trying to comfort this little boy.

“I’m sorry I can’t help,” Sadie said, feeling bad about how much she wanted him to leave. She wondered when her prescriptions would be delivered. She had a feeling she’d need the anxiety one very soon.

Charlie sniffed and wiped his eyes.

She felt horrible, but she really couldn’t help him. She didn’t have anything to give. “Can I call someone to come get you?”

He sniffed again and stood up, moving for the door. The paper from his pocket was crumpled in his hand.

She stood, too. “Wait,” she said, though she didn’t move. “Let me call someone, uh—Who . . . who do you live with?” What a horrible thing to ask him!

“I don’t live with nobody,” he said loudly as he grabbed the doorknob and pulled it open.

“No one?” Sadie asked, taking a nervous step toward him. “Now, that can’t—”

He ran outside without looking back. She hurried after him but stopped at the threshold as though it had a force field keeping her inside.

“Wait,” she called, but it was halfhearted. She couldn’t help this little boy? She was
that
messed up? “Wait,” she said again, but it was a whisper.

Charlie disappeared around the corner, and a moment later she couldn’t even hear the sound of his footsteps on the street. She raised a shaking hand to her mouth, then closed and locked the door. One, two, three.

She was a mother!

Sadie’s heart continued to shudder in the wake of what she’d just learned, and she rested her back against the door and brought her hands to her face.

Just a body.

Just a body.

Oh, please, can’t it just have been a body?

But she’d never been very good at fooling herself. A sob rose in her chest, though she tried to push it down. She pictured Charlie in her mind, a sad little boy trying to find out what had happened to his mother. Piecing together enough little details to track down Sadie in hopes of getting answers no one else would give him. Believing
Sadie
was the one person who could help him. But she wasn’t. She couldn’t help herself let alone anyone else. Another sob followed the first, and finally, she gave in, feeling her face contort behind her hands as she gave in to the tears she’d been holding back for what felt like years.

It wasn’t a body.

The woman was a real person who’d been living a real life.

Noelani Pouhu.

Sadie would never forget that again.

Chapter 5

Not long after Sadie’s meltdown, there was another knock at the door that instigated the same panic. It turned out to be Reg, the delivery boy from the market. She knew she looked a sight with her swollen eyes, but he was too polite to say anything. She gave him a generous tip and put the perishables in the fridge before turning on the TV in search of some distraction. The anxiety and emotion had passed, but she still felt jumpy, so she took one of the pills Dr. McKay had prescribed for the anxiety in hopes the medicine would chase the last of her undone-ness away.

Sometime during the first or second episode of
Wizards of Waverly
Place,
Sadie fell asleep. When she woke up, there was an infomercial on. She turned off the television, knowing she was not strong enough to resist. She felt heavy and thick as she sat up and blinked into the darkness. She hadn’t had any lights on when she’d collapsed on the futon, so the house was dark and silent.

Dr. McKay hadn’t said the anxiety medication would help her sleep, but she certainly wasn’t complaining about that particular side effect. She’d sleep twenty hours a day if she could. She continued to sit on the futon, hoping her brain would wake up more fully if she didn’t rush it. Eventually, Charlie came to mind. She could only hope he’d been lying about not having a home. Pre-teen boys were prone to exaggeration, and he’d been upset. Surely he wasn’t truly on his own. Then again, his mother
was
dead.

Dead.

The word made her shiver, and she saw another flash of the body—Noelani Pouhu—in the water, but only a flash this time. Thank goodness. Sadie entertained the idea of somehow checking up on Charlie, finding out who was taking care of him, but that was only a flash too. Trying to find information about Charlie would be a step into a world she felt ill prepared to enter.

She rubbed her arms and wrapped them around herself despite the thickness of the night’s humidity. Even with central air conditioning, she always felt slightly sticky, no matter the time of day, but she’d heard that humidity helped prevent wrinkles, so it was a trade-off she could live with. A glance at the VCR clock made it easier to decide against making any phone calls about Charlie. It was two o’clock in the morning. She’d slept for hours and still had hours and hours of night left to go. What time had she fallen asleep? Four o’clock in the afternoon? Had she really slept for ten hours? Maybe next time she’d take half a pill, assuming she wouldn’t want to sleep that long.

Sadie turned on the lamp beside the futon, then stood up to turn on the kitchen lights as well. Immediately, she noticed that the blinds over the sliding glass door were still open. Her heart began to race. She moved toward them, intent in closing herself in again, but then she wondered if this was an opportunity to prove herself stronger than she felt.

After a moment of contemplation, she turned her back on the open blinds and returned to the kitchen area—determined to be brave. Her stomach growled, so she put the shoyu chicken and rice Konnie had given her into a covered dish and put it in the oven, heating it to 200 degrees, just like Konnie had said. Then she spied the brownie mix she’d ordered on impulse and remembered the quote she had on her fridge at home: “Chocolate makes everything better.” She increased the oven temperature to 350 degrees and made a note to keep an eye on the chicken to make sure it didn’t dry out.

Mixing the eggs into the brownie batter and sliding the pan into the oven was both familiar and new, but as the smell of baking chocolate filled the air, Sadie felt lighter, a little bit more herself than she had before. She ignored the sliding glass door completely.

She’d come to enjoy watching old movies at night when she couldn’t sleep, and Tanya had an extensive collection. She chose
The Searchers
and put the tape into the VCR. It wasn’t that Tanya couldn’t afford to update the condo, there was just no reason to do so when it was all so very functional. Sadie’s condo was the smallest—only one bedroom—and was therefore the least rentable, which made it a perfect maid’s quarters, and it was where Tanya stayed when she and her husband came each summer. The outdated technology wasn’t a problem for them, so they didn’t bother changing anything.

Listening to the Duke and Jeffrey Hunter was like having old friends come for a visit, and Sadie felt herself relax even more. She removed the chicken and rice from the oven after twenty minutes and began straightening up while it cooled.