Banana Split (2 page)

After twenty seconds, she had to lift her face out of the water. Deep relaxing breaths didn’t help when they were inhaled through a snorkel. Konnie was nowhere in sight, and Sadie couldn’t subdue her growing terror. With her head lifted, she was more aware of her feet dangling deeper in the water and closer to those unseen, bottom-dwelling creatures. She tried to pull her feet up, but would that really deter the monsters lurking beneath her? She’d also seen that movie about the surfer who had had her arm bitten off by a shark. What did Sadie look like from the bottom of the sea?

Sadie spat out the mouthpiece and tried to inhale, but it was as though her mouth were no longer connected to her lungs. She couldn’t get the air in. Why not? What was wrong with her?

She headed for the boat, knowing she had to get out of the water. Now. Once she reached the side, however, she couldn’t figure out how to get in. The rim was too high for her to grab onto. Her gasps were ragged and noisy, making it sound like she was drowning even though her head was out of the water. She couldn’t see any of the Blue Muumuus.

What if she passed out in the ocean? Would the fish eat her before anyone discovered she was gone?

You are being ridiculous,
she told herself, ripping off her mask in hopes it would help her breathe. She clutched at her life jacket and closed her eyes, trying to pretend she was simply resting on a punctured water bed. After a full minute, her lungs opened up again. She took long, deep breaths and tried to clear her head. She felt oxygen returning to her brain as her body relaxed.

Then something touched her foot, and her eyes flew open in panic. She began thrashing toward the shore.

She had to get out of the water!

That the boat was
right
there
or that Konnie or the other women would certainly have helped her get in it didn’t cross her mind until she was crawling onto the sand, coughing and spitting up water, her lungs and arms burning from her desperate swim to shore.

The sand turned from wet to dry as she crawled out of the ocean; the shore was littered with sticks, rocks, and broken shells left behind by the tide. This wasn’t one of the groomed beaches like they had in Florida, where machines cleaned up the shoreline before the tourists woke up. This beach was natural and messy, and the sand stuck to her wet skin. Something cut her knee, reminding her that she should stand up. But she didn’t want to do anything that would slow down her escape.

Finally, she collapsed, the bulky life jacket keeping her face out of the sand while she once again focused on breathing like a normal human being. It felt like forever before she felt safe. Her thoughts turned to how she would apologize to her new friends, who probably thought she was absolutely bonkers. She wasn’t so sure they weren’t right.

The nightmares that had plagued Sadie after her trip to Boston had led to insomnia and too many late-night infomercials that had provided her with more kitchen gadgets and exercise equipment than she could ever use. When her friend Gayle, her son, Shawn, her daughter, Breanna, and her boyfriend, Pete, had sat her down for an intervention, they told her she needed to get away for a little while. Unwind. Relax. At the time, she’d been optimistic about the change of environment—who wouldn’t want to go to Hawai’i?

But, though she was no longer ordering useless items off QVC, she still stayed inside most of the time, and the only people she interacted with were the Blue Muumuus every few weeks. She slept through the afternoons and was awake most of the night, double-checking the locks at regular intervals.

The only other time she left the condo was to do her job cleaning the additional seven condos in the complex that were rented out by the week. Housekeeping in Hawai’i was very different from housekeeping at home—sand got everywhere, and mildew was a constant battle. It was good to have something to do, though, and the cleaning job was her way of paying rent to her friend Tanya, who owned the complex but preferred her husband’s ranch in Arizona this time of year.

It was because of Tanya that Konnie even knew Sadie had moved in. Konnie had said any friend of Tanya’s was a friend of hers, but Sadie couldn’t help feeling like she was a burden all the same. The women, all of them grandmothers—
tutus
in Hawaiian—were very nice, but Sadie had yet to really feel like she was a part of their group.

“I need help,” she admitted out loud as water dripped off her long hair. She had grown it out past her shoulders, longer than it had been in decades. Before leaving Garrison, she’d had her stylist lighten it, in hopes that she’d have more fun as a blonde, but she hadn’t kept up the color, and it had faded to a brassy grayish-yellow. Two inches of gray roots had grown out since her arrival. The climate seemed to accelerate how fast her hair grew, and she lacked the courage to go to a salon full of strangers. Most days, she tied her hair back with a bandana and avoided mirrors, blaming her lack of style on the humidity.

Her senses refocused, and she could hear the incessantly pounding waves. The admission that whatever she was dealing with was more than she could handle on her own washed over her and filled her with both fear and relief.

“I need help,” she said again, wondering if it would be more powerful a second time she said it. It was. She
did
need help, and she needed it soon. Things had happened to her, scary things that had obviously taken their toll on her mental health. She needed to get back to who she was; she needed to feel whole again. Though she talked to her family and friends on a regular basis, she’d kept how bad things were to herself. She didn’t want them to worry. What would they say if they knew the truth?

She flipped onto her back, staring up at the blue, blue sky and wondering how her life had become so dark. Optimism had always been Sadie’s foundation. It had gotten her through her husband’s death more than twenty years ago. It had helped her raise her two children by herself. But in the wake of what had happened in Boston, she’d lost her confidence, and her world had been spinning out of control ever since.

Getting to her feet, she yanked off her flippers and looked out at the water that appeared so innocent now that she wasn’t in it. The Blue Muumuus were back in the boat, heading toward the shore, and she felt overwhelmed by embarrassment and shame, while grateful she wouldn’t have to consider swimming back to them. They had been so kind to her, and she had so little to give back. Now she’d ruined their adventure.

Konnie waved her arms, and Sadie waved back to indicate she was all right. The saltwater was beginning to dry the sand to her skin, making her feel like a big worn-out piece of sandpaper. The cut on her knee stung; she’d need to wash it out with freshwater.

A small boat dock had been built into the rocks along the beach, and Sadie headed toward it with a flipper in each hand. The floating dock moved gently beneath her feet when she stepped on it, and she froze for a moment, afraid she might fall in.

Konnie pointed the boat toward the dock, and Sadie walked slowly down the weathered boards, dreading the explanation of her bolt to the shore. What could she tell them other than the truth?
Hi, my name is Sadie, and I’m losing my mind. Congratulations on winning front-row tickets to the show!

When she reached the end of the dock, Sadie waited for the boat like a penitent child. Watching the water lap against the sides of the wood that was green with moss and other sea life gave Sadie the chills. Long strands of dark seaweed flowed alongside, like the hair of a mermaid from some long-ago fairy tale. Sadie watched it move, fluid and graceful, and tried to draw calmness from its easy motion.

After a few seconds, however, she realized the seaweed was black, not green. Despite her misgivings, she bent down to get a closer look into the water and was soon on her knees, peering at the underside of the dock where what she thought was seaweed was actually hair connected to a human head.

Scrambling to her feet as fresh panic descended like a hammer, she screamed for help at the same moment that she lost her balance, dropped the flippers, and plunged headlong into the sea that had already claimed one victim.

Chapter 2

It sounds like you’ve had quite a trauma.”

Sadie shredded Kleenex in her lap and nodded at Dr. McKay, her new psychiatrist. Trauma sounded like too mild a word to describe what it had been like to discover the body and then fall on top of it in the water. She hadn’t cried about it yet. The tissues were simply for her nerves, and they were not helping as much as she’d hoped.

Dr. McKay consulted the file in front of him. “What happened after you fell in?”

The question transported her back to that moment last week—six days to be exact—when the water had closed over her head. Wild with panic, Sadie had accidently kicked the body, dislodging it from the dock. The body had then floated upward with her. During Sadie’s frantic attempt to get away, her fingers had become entangled in the dark hair, catching her like a net and causing her to pull the body with her as she retreated from the dock toward open water.

She looked at her hands in her lap; she could still feel the hair wound around her fingers. The same deadening panic she’d felt while trying to get away from the corpse pressed in upon her in the small office and rendered her frozen and overwhelmed as she tried to stay in
this
moment, not that one. The cut on her knee and the bumps and scrapes she’d suffered from falling into the ocean and then being pulled over the side of the boat were healing, but the things in her head had only gotten worse.

Dr. McKay said something about post-traumatic stress disorder and how it could mentally transport a person back to the moment of the incident, igniting the fight-or-flight feelings that had occurred at the time of the trauma.

“I thought that was something soldiers got at war,” Sadie said. She certainly wasn’t a soldier—she wasn’t any kind of hero. When had she ever
saved
anyone? No, she always entered the story after the horrible things had already happened.

“That’s where PTSD gets most of its attention, but it certainly isn’t reserved only for war-time trauma—it can happen anytime someone encounters something psychologically overwhelming.”

Sadie tried to listen to his words but she could still feel the soft impact of her feet against the bloated body as she’d finally untangled herself from the hair and kicked frantically toward the boat heading toward her. By the time the Blue Muumuus got her calm enough to talk coherently, Sadie had lost all perspective on where she was and what had happened. When her first words were about someone by the dock trying to kill her, they had shared a look that communicated their wonder of why they had invited this unstable haole on their snorkeling trip in the first place. But then Konnie had leaned out of the boat, peering toward the dock.

A moment later, she was screaming too.

What happened next was anyone’s guess—Sadie certainly didn’t remember it, other than she’d been taken to the hospital for an assessment; the Blue Muumuus thought she’d been hurt in the fall. The doctors had kept her overnight and then gave her some pills to help her sleep and arranged for her to meet with someone to “work things out in her head.” Enter Dr. McKay.

“So don’t expect an instantaneous recovery,” Dr. McKay said, bringing her back to the present. “It can take time to repair the psychological injury from such an event, which is what we will work on.” He flipped through the papers in her file and paused to read something else. “It says here you’ll be in Kaua’i until the end of April, is that right? Three more weeks?”

“I fly home on the twenty-second.”

“So you’ll be back home in time for Easter—that’s nice.”

Sadie nodded.

“Do you have plans for the holiday? Time with family, perhaps?”

“My children are spending Easter with me and my boyfriend, Pete, plus his children and their families.” It would be the first time their children would meet one another. She felt more capable of building a replica of the Eiffel Tower out of cheese doodles than successfully pulling off the holiday gathering. It had seemed like such a worthy goal three months ago—the perfect reentry into a life that felt like someone else’s, now that she’d been gone so long.

“That sounds like something to look forward to,” he said, smiling in a way that made him look a little like Mr. Rogers but with glasses and a Hawaiian shirt.