Banana Split

by Josi S. Kilpack

  “So,” Sadie said after he’d taken a few bites. Though he was hungry now, she could tell by his overall physique that he wasn’t malnourished. “How old are you, Charlie?”

  “Just made eleven,” he said with his mouth full.

  “Fifth or sixth grade?” Sadie asked.

  “Fifth.”

  “I used to teach school. Second grade though.”

  He said nothing and kept eating.

  Sadie wanted to ask where he went to school and who he lived with but since those types of questions had not met with success in their earlier conversation, she tried a different approach. “I’m sure sorry about your mom. I wish I did know her, so I could help you.”

  “You’re sure you aren’t her friend?” Charlie asked, looking at her with a doubtful expression.

  Sadie shook her head. “Why do you think I was her friend?”

  He smashed a piece of rice with his thumb. “You was the only person in the paper and then the police was talking about you when they talked to CeeCee.”

  “Who’s CeeCee?”

  He took another bite instead of answering. He was almost finished eating so Sadie hurried to get him a brownie and a glass of milk. She’d dealt with kids from hard family situations before—such as a mother addicted to drugs—and knew they were often quite wary of questions. The food seemed to help keep him open.

  “What was your mom like?” Sadie asked as she set two plates of brownies on the table. He immediately abandoned the last few bites of his dinner in favor of the dessert. Big surprise.

  “She’s real pretty,” he said quickly. Sadie noted his use of the present tense and the way a light jumped into his eyes. He loved his mother. Sadie wondered what their relationship had been like. All she knew about Noelani was that she was a drug addict. Had Charlie been living with her? Who was CeeCee?

  “Was she nice too?”

  Charlie nodded, but his smile faded and he looked back at the plate as he lifted the brownie. There was so much in his head, Sadie could almost feel his thoughts wanting to burst out. But life had taught him to be careful—she could sense that too—and she didn’t dare betray the little bit of trust he’d given her by pushing too much. He reminded her of the feral cats on the island that would eat your food, but never really let you get close.

  “Have you always lived on Kaua’i?” Sadie asked.

  “No,” he said, shaking his head and taking a bite, a big one. “We lived in Honolulu when I was little,” he said after he swallowed.

  Sadie had to smile. He was only eleven; being little wasn’t that long ago. She lifted her own brownie and took a bite out of one corner. It wasn’t bad—for a mix. “Do you like it here?”

  He shrugged. “I guess.” He took another bite.

  “Why did you come to Kaua’i?”

  “’Cause my mom did,” he said, though he eyed her carefully. She was asking too many personal questions.

  “How’s that brownie?” Sadie asked.

  “Ono.”

  Sadie smiled; she knew ono meant good, or delicious in this context. “Would you like another one?”

  He nodded quickly, and Sadie served him another brownie, hoping she could get more information from him before his stomach realized how full he was. She waited almost a minute, finishing her own brownie, and then pushed forward again.

  “When you and I first met, you said that your mom wasn’t doing drugs.”

  Charlie looked up quickly, instantly defensive. “She wasn’t. She’s been clean ’cause the judge told her she has to if she’s gonna get me back.”

  Ah. So he was in foster care of some sort but expected to go back with his mom. For an instant, Sadie wondered what it would feel like to have things change so sharply, so quickly. It wasn’t that hard to imagine. She remembered the feeling of coming home to two young children after Neil had been pronounced dead at the hospital from a massive heart attack. And then, a decade later, her brother had called to tell her their mother had been killed in a car accident. A year and a half ago, Sadie’s neighbor had been found murdered in the field behind her home. Sadie had experienced her share of those turns of fate that gave you whiplash and shook up your future like a snow globe. But she’d been an adult when all of those things happened, not a child.

  “You think the police are wrong about how she died?”

  He nodded. “She don’t take drugs no more, and sometimes people lie.” He looked up at Sadie with a guarded, yet eager, expression. Like he wanted to make sure she was listening. “Even cops lie sometimes. You can’t trust nobody.”

  Sadie winced inside and leaned back in her chair, feeling overwhelmed by the hurt inside this little boy and remembering why she had been so hesitant to involve herself earlier. It was hard to feel what other people were feeling.

  “Who do you live with now, Charlie? CeeCee?”

  “I already told you I don’t live nowhere.”

  “So you’re homeless?” Sadie asked. “You live on the streets?”

  He nodded, but Sadie could see that, for all his toughness, he wasn’t that hard or neglected. His fingernails were trimmed, and the slippahs were still shiny, they were so new. She glanced at the wall clock near the phone. It was nearly four o’clock in the morning, and while she knew she would have to call the police at some point, she wished she could have more time with Charlie first.

  Calling the police would drag Sadie even further into this “situation,” and the anticipation of giving another statement landed like a block of ice in her chest. She gripped the edges of the table, trying to come up with another solution, but there wasn’t one. She would have to explain everything to the police, and they’d probably be suspicious as to why Charlie had come to her. She’d done so well with Charlie here—she’d barely felt any fear or anxiety—but now she closed her eyes and swallowed, trying to get hold of herself. When she opened her eyes a few moments later, Charlie was looking at her, a little fear mixed in with the confused look on his face.

  “I’ll be right back,” Sadie said, forcing a smile as she quickly stood up from the table and headed for her bedroom. She closed the door and sat on her bed, bracing her elbows on her knees and holding her head in her hands as she fought for control over her emotions and fears that ran like wild animals these days. After almost a minute, she was able to draw a deep breath and accept that she hadn’t done anything wrong and therefore didn’t need to be afraid of getting in trouble. Maybe she should call Pete to talk her through this—but wouldn’t he be proud of her if she handled it on her own? Wouldn’t she be proud of herself? Finally she stood up and went to the bedroom door. It had been a few minutes, but she tried to take pride in the fact that she had faced her fear and made a rational decision. It was an accomplishment.

  She didn’t want to risk upsetting Charlie by telling him she was calling the police. Maybe she could try again to get him to talk about where he was staying. Maybe she could get his okay to talk to this CeeCee person, or get him to agree that calling the police was the best choice for both of them. Creating a safe environment was the first step in having an important conversation, so she forced a smile and lifted her chin, hoping she could approach this in a way that wouldn’t make Charlie feel threatened.

  She took another deep breath as she rounded the corner into the kitchen. “So, I’m wondering if . . .”

  Charlie’s chair was empty.

  Her wallet was lying open on the table.

  Charlie had left the sliding glass door open when he’d made a run for it.

  Chapter 7

  What had seemed like a break in the cloud cover was instantly overcast again. Sadie locked the sliding glass door—one, two, three—and closed all the blinds. Then she spent an hour sitting in the living room, trying to decide what to do, battling wave after wave of self-recrimination.

  The clouds in her head made it hard to come up with a new plan. It wasn’t until the night was turning into early morning gray that Sadie called Pete on her freshly charged cell phone. No
rth Carolina was five hours ahead, but Pete didn’t answer. She was leaving a message when he called back on the other line.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked in a panic when she clicked over to answer his call. Sadie couldn’t even think about trying to calm him down, instead she rushed to tell him what had happened.

  “What are you going do?” Pete asked when she finished. She knew the calm in his voice was forced.

  “I don’t know,” Sadie said, glad that Pete hadn’t automatically given her marching orders. “The police will think I’m a nutcase for having waited so long to call them.” She glanced at the clock. It had been more than two hours since she’d first invited Charlie inside. Not to mention his first visit had been a full fourteen hours ago.

  Pete didn’t argue, and she deflated a little bit. She’d hoped he’d reassure her that she’d done the reasonable thing, but she knew she hadn’t been thinking straight.

  “I don’t want to call the police,” she finally admitted rather than dancing around it with other excuses. “This poor kid has already faced so much, and I don’t want to get him in trouble. He took less than a hundred dollars.”

  “The amount doesn’t really matter, and to not make him accountable doesn’t help him in the long run,” Pete said. “I understand you’re sympathetic toward his situation, but are your sympathies in his best interest? Calling the police will help them find him and get him back to his caregivers.”

  Caregivers. Not family. Sadie leaned forward, holding the phone to her ear while covering her eyes with her hand. “Why didn’t I take my wallet into the bedroom with me?” she groaned, remembering how she’d put it on the counter after paying Reg for the groceries yesterday afternoon. “I feel like I set him up.”

  “You didn’t,” Pete assured her. “He’s the one who ultimately made the choice. What does an eleven year old need with that much money?”

  “I don’t know,” Sadie said. “I feel so awful for him. He’s just a little boy, and he’s hurting so much, Pete.”

  They were both silent for several seconds. “Do you want to help him, Sadie?”

  “Yes,” she said, knowing where this was going. “I just don’t know that the police will be the help he needs, and I don’t want to get myself involved. It will look so strange to them that he came to me.”

  “Not that strange,” Pete said. “He’s looking for connections, and you’re connected to the last bit of information everyone knows about his mother. He’s obviously streetwise, and he did find you, so it mustn’t have been that hard.”

  That made her feel a little better, but it didn’t silence her fears. “There was a family who lived a few blocks north of me in Garrison,” Sadie said, sitting up straight and pausing for a breath that she hoped would even out her emotions. “The Hadfields. They did foster care for years. When a kid ran away, which happened from time to time, the kids were automatically sent to detention. Wherever Charlie’s living right now, it’s all he has. If I turn him in to the police, he could lose that, and he already has so many disadvantages.”

  Pete let out a heavy sigh. “He’s young enough that they might not react so harshly; they’ll consider his age and circumstances. Look, I explained to Officer Wington that you might want more information—that was before all this happened with Charlie—but I thought, in time, you might need to know more about the woman you found. Maybe now’s a good time.”

  “You can’t guarantee that the police will go easy on him,” Sadie said, choosing to ignore the part about Officer Wington being willing to give her details of a case she didn’t want.

  “I want to leave this up to you, Sadie, but I don’t know that I can’t not inform the Kaua’i police. I have certain obligations, and we both know that if something happens to that boy, neither you nor I would be able to live with ourselves.”

  Anger and frustration battled inside Sadie; she knew Pete was right. Hot tears rose in her eyes. “I don’t want to make things harder for anyone,” she said, her voice wobbling. “This is exactly why I stayed away from the case, why I didn’t want any part of it.” Tears rolled down her cheeks, and she wiped at them quickly. After having given in to the emotion after Charlie’s first visit, she couldn’t seem to go back to holding it in anymore. The more involved she became, the more overwhelmed she felt—as though her head might explode at any moment due to too much information, too much stress, too much inability to cope.

  “I’m sorry, Sadie,” Pete said. “I’m so sorry.”

  Sadie took a shuddering breath, berating herself for being so fragile and glad she hadn’t mentioned her exploding-head fear out loud. She really was losing her mind. “I don’t know what to do,” she whispered.

  “Do you want me to call the police for you?”

  “It won’t change anything,” Sadie said. “Except make them wonder why I didn’t call them myself.” She’d look weak and scared. Wait, she was weak and scared. Still, she dreaded having to talk to the police. Wasn’t there another option? “If he is in foster care, he’d have a caseworker assigned to him, right?”

  “Yes,” Pete said, obviously trying to figure out where she was going with this.

  “What if I talked to them instead of to the police? Maybe Charlie wouldn’t get in trouble that way.”

  “It’s not a bad idea,” Pete said. “They’d still likely have to report it, but they might be able to help you with the process. I think I can have someone back in Garrison find out who’s working Charlie’s case. I just . . . need to tread carefully.”

  “I’m sorry,” Sadie said quietly, knowing it was a risk every time he used his official position to help her find information. “I didn’t want any of this to happen.”

  “I know,” Pete said sweetly. “And you haven’t done anything wrong. We just need to deal with the situation as best we can, okay?”

  Sadie agreed, and Pete said he’d call her as soon as he had the information. Sadie hung up the phone and sat down heavily on the futon. Why was this happening to her? Again?

  Though she hadn’t immersed herself in the Hawaiian culture, she knew that the local people tended to be superstitious. They believed in ghosts and curses. Sadie was finding it harder and harder to believe she wasn’t cursed. These awful situations kept finding her, haunting her. Were they slowly imprisoning her, too?

  She waited by the phone for half an hour before she forced herself to get off the futon. She had hoped Pete would be able to find the information quickly, but she knew he was in the middle of his conference. He’d probably run out of a class to talk to her in the first place; she felt so high-maintenance.

  Charlie’s empty plate stood as proof that she hadn’t dreamed up the events of last night, but it was a small comfort. It would be much easier if it had been a figment of her imagination.

  She put the plate in the sink and wrung out a washcloth to wipe down the table. When she turned to the table, though, she noticed something on the floor next to the chair where Charlie had been sitting. At first she thought it was a sock, but within a couple steps, she realized it was a crumpled piece of paper. A beat later she realized what it was—the paper from Charlie’s pocket that afternoon.

  She hurried over, pulling out the chair so she could reach down and pick up the paper. Taking a deep breath, she sat down at the table and unfolded the soft paper carefully, as though it might turn to dust if she handled it roughly. There were six questions, written in sloppy, little-boy handwriting.

  1. How did you no Mom?

  2. Did you tell any lie to the polise?

  3. Does Mom have a new boyfrend?

  4. Was Mom taking drugs when you was with her?

  5. Did Mom say anything abowt me?

  6. When is Mom coming back?

  Sadie closed her eyes to regain her composure, but the words were still blurry when she opened her eyes and read the list again. She imagined Charlie sitting somewhere, a pencil in hand as he planned out his interview with Sadie, someone he thought had the answers to these questions. The f
ifth question put her interaction with Charlie into a different focus, and Sadie stared at it for several seconds.

  She reviewed everything she knew about this little boy: independent, determined, smart, reserved, hurting, and . . . loyal to his mother. Why had he come here, really? Why would he come to talk to someone he thought was a friend of his mother? At eleven years old, he didn’t know what closure meant. At fifty-seven, she wasn’t sure she did either. He wouldn’t know that finding answers could make him feel better. She thought over the few things he’d said about his mother: “She’s real pretty” and “She doesn’t use drugs anymore.” Not she was pretty; she didn’t use drugs.

  Sadie touched the words of the fifth question: “Did Mom say anything about me?” She let out a breath. Poor Charlie.