Spoils

by Tammar Stein

  I slide back under the covers, suddenly cold. In the dark we lie back to back, two parentheses facing the wrong direction.

  “Natasha…” My anger is gone and only a weary sadness is left in its wake.

  “All I could think about was that Emmett was leaving. He was enlisting in the army and he was leaving St. Pete and he wasn’t coming back. I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t let him leave me like that. I was completely obsessed.”

  I don’t remember that time very well—I was only ten. But I remember how worried my parents were about her. How they felt she was crossing some line, passing from youthful intensity into something not-normal, into crazy. Maybe that’s what caught his attention in the first place. Maybe she secreted some pheromone, something that said she’d cross any lines, pay any price, and it’s what attracted him to her. To take her up on what she was so clearly eager to give away.

  “The first few times I saw him, he never asked anything about me,” she says, settling into the story. “When he saw me light up the first time, he offered to share some of his smokes. He said they were smoother than anything I’d ever had. What a pickup line, right?”

  “A lame one.”

  She falls silent and I kick myself for interrupting her flow.

  “I took one,” she says after a pause. “He flicked a gold lighter and as soon as I tasted it, I knew he was telling the truth, it was amazing. He finished before me and he crushed the butt under his heel and said, ‘See you later.’ And that was it. I watched him walk away as I kept smoking; he never looked back. A couple of days later I saw him outside a coffee shop where I was with some friends. But he only waved and kept going. He was wearing that wonderful leather jacket and looking like he could be a movie star. All my friends were dying to know who he was, asking me how I knew him. So I said we met at a concert, that he was a musician. When I saw him again the next week, I had some crazy thought of going out with him, making Emmett jealous.” She laughs hollowly. “God, can you believe that? Seventeen-year-olds are pathetic, aren’t they?”

  “I guess it depends on the seventeen-year-old.”

  “Sorry, Leni, I forget how young you are sometimes. You’re definitely smarter than I was at your age.” That’s supposed to make me feel better, but it’s not much of a compliment.

  “So what happened next? After you tried to date the evil hacker?”

  She winces at the bite in my tone.

  “I asked him where he got his cigarettes because I wanted to buy some. He reached in his pocket and took out a nearly full pack and handed it to me. He told me they were blended especially for him, and I could keep the pack, he’d get more later. It didn’t have a name on it, just a red carton with a gold flame embossed in the center. They had to be really expensive. When I shared them with my friends, everyone went crazy over them. They made us feel so good, mellow but focused, you know?”

  I don’t nod, I don’t move, we’re getting to the heart of the story.

  “I saw him again a week later by the Vinoy about to cross the street. I ran after him before he could turn the corner. He laughed when he saw me coming, like I made his day. I told him I wanted to buy him a Coke or something. I felt like I owed him for the cigarettes. We ended up hanging out on the veranda at the Vinoy, sitting in rocking chairs and talking. We were there for hours. Leni, it sounds so crazy now, but he totally got me. When he told me a little about himself, I could see that he was like me. Like, how if you really want something, you don’t give up. When you love someone, it’s with all your heart and soul, you don’t leave anything on the table. And the next thing I knew, I was nodding along because finally somebody got me. Totally and completely understood how I was put together. Everyone else thought I was crazy to keep chasing after Emmett. No one understood except him.”

  She sighs deeply.

  “I can see how every time we met was a setup. Everything I told him, he already knew. He was telling me the things I wanted to hear. Everything he gave me came with strings attached. By the time he finally revealed that he was more than what he seemed, I’d already known him for a couple of months, I already liked him. I—I trusted him.

  “He knew every evil thought I’d ever had, every wish I ever made. He knew it all and he made it sound normal, he made me feel normal. And he promised he could help.” She’s silent for a moment, remembering it all. “It made sense, everything he said. Someone had to win the lotto, why not us? And I’d be helping the whole family, really. We’d all be millionaires and Mom and Dad wouldn’t have to work so hard. I’d have all this money and Emmett would stay with me forever because he wouldn’t need a job, he wouldn’t need to enlist, I’d take care of him. All he asked in return was that I promise to help him one day if he needed my help. That’s all. He didn’t ask for my soul. He laughed when I asked him. Just a favor in return for a favor. I kept thinking of that old story of the mouse and the lion.”

  A prickling of unease flitters across my skin.

  “Your soul?” My voice has gone tight and high. “Why would you even ask him that?”

  But here’s the thing. I know.

  “Because he’s the devil, Leni. And that’s what everyone always says the devil wants.”

  For a moment, the magnitude of what she’s said hangs in the air.

  “Natasha,” I say, pity and horror and disgust in my voice. “Oh, Natasha.”

  “He ruined us,” Natasha whispered. “He ruined all of us. And then he had me ruin another family.”

  I’m suddenly furious. This is why Michael came to me. It’s because of her. I feel tainted, guilty, even though I’ve done nothing wrong. “They win the lottery too?” I ask sarcastically.

  “No.” She stays silent so long I think she isn’t going to answer. But after what seems like hours, Natasha speaks again and says the thing I’ve been waiting to hear, the thing I dread and know is coming.

  “I thought when the time came the favor wouldn’t be so bad. Years passed and he stayed away and didn’t ask for anything. I thought maybe he forgot about me. I thought that if he did come back one day and said he wanted me to do something really bad, I would refuse. I would take whatever punishment he handed out and suffer and not hurt anyone.”

  Her chin starts quivering and her voice cracks as she keeps talking. “I thought I was strong enough. I thought I was a good person. But he cut off all my options. I couldn’t say no.”

  I’m afraid to speak. Tears well up in my eyes at the enormity of what she’s telling me.

  “I made a deal with the devil, Leni. And in the end, he really did get my soul.”

  We both cry for a while.

  I’m not sure what to do. Her hands are raw like she’s scrubbed them with bleach. She sobs and says no one can forgive her.

  “Won’t you tell me?” I plead. “Maybe there’s something we can still do, maybe we can fix it.”

  “No, no.” She shakes her head. “No one can fix this. It’s unfixable. I can’t tell you, Leni, I can’t. I feel sick about it. I have nightmares, I can’t tell anyone.”

  “You can tell me, I can handle it,” I tell her, echoing my mom’s words in the afternoon. But this time, it doesn’t work.

  “No, Leni. You can’t.”

  Natasha falls asleep eventually, but I lie awake, listening to her wheezing breaths and thinking about tainted money, curses, miracles and angels. Especially one terrible, sword-swinging, sitting-in-judgment angel, who must think we’re all paltry, substandard beings.

  If I look at it from his point of view, it’s kind of hard to blame him.

  He would already know about this, of course. He knew when he first appeared to me, which perhaps explains the less-than-gentle appearance. He’s pissed off at the Kohn family and rightly so. From the way Natasha’s falling apart, it must be awful, it must be the worst thing I can imagine. Which means that no matter what happens with my money, no matter what good any of us achieve during our lives, this will never be okay. I can’t help stealing a glance at her, shrunken and pa
le as she lies near me, twitching and moaning even in her sleep.

  Do I phone in an anonymous tip? Do I call the police to come arrest my sister? And tell them what, exactly? That maybe she killed someone? I don’t know who or where. And I don’t know for sure that she killed someone, only that whatever she did is bad enough to undo the fabric of who she is.

  Natasha cries out and her eyes flutter as she’s gripped by some nightmare. I lean over to shake her awake, but she settles, so I let her be. I hug my knees and rock back and forth. We can’t undo what she did—whatever it is, it’s irrevocable, untenable. I don’t hesitate to call it the devil’s work. It’s all his, all the horrible ripples, all the lives ruined, it’s all for his benefit. So maybe the best I can do is minimize those effects. That’s what “fixing it” means. I can’t reject her at her lowest point, in her time of need.

  The only thing I can do is be her sister.

  Chapter Nine

  Whatever turmoil my private life is suffering, the first marine chemistry lab is today. I slip out of Natasha’s apartment building early in the morning. There’s enough time to go home, change and grab my backpack.

  The air is moist and warm, like a laundry room after the dryer runs. Still, it’s only in the low eighties and I appreciate the relative coolness compared with the scorcher coming. There are royal palm trees, and the smell of the salty bay is in the air. Crickets chirp and call. The hotter it is, the faster the crickets chirp, and their rate this morning is only a warm-up compared to the marathon jam sessions coming this afternoon.

  At home, everyone is still asleep. I quickly get ready for school and sneak out again, no one the wiser. As I bump along the driveway on my bike, small brown lizards skitter at the sound of my approach, diving into instant camouflage under the dried oak leaves that forever need to be swept and collected. One time I startled a pygmy rattlesnake sunning itself on the driveway in the early-morning light. Ever since then, I’ve paid attention to the scuttling sounds on leaves because while it’s usually only a lizard, sometimes it’s not.

  In the part of my mind that isn’t completely preoccupied with angels, Natasha, the impossible task of righting an unknown wrong, the slipping sand in my hourglass (seven days, but who’s counting?) and scanning for wildlife, I know this morning’s lab is important to me and know what happens when you let that slip away. You sleep until ten, you stay in your pajamas for days. You drink and watch television, get fat and grow bald. So even though I’m tempted, sorely tempted, to stay home, to bang my head against the wall, or more usefully, make like a hacker and track down possibilities, I’m on my bike, heading to my local campus of Safety Harbor Community College, hoping that my lab partner will know how to run this lab, because I don’t have a clue.

  My lab partner. I suppress a groan as I pedal around a car stopped at a red light. I almost forgot Gavin was my partner.

  I pass a small retention pond. An alligator, barely a four-footer, floats like a water-soaked log, legs splayed out underwater and only the top of its head with its protruding eyes breaking the surface. I’ve passed far larger alligators sunning themselves on the grassy banks of this pond. Alligators are capable of moving at speeds of up to thirty miles an hour, but they’d rather not. They get perkier around mating season but that isn’t until April and even then, it’s only a problem if a gator’s seven feet or bigger. Of course, it’s the ones you don’t see that will get you in trouble. The few unlucky people who have been attacked, or had their dog attacked, always swear they never saw the alligator until it had them in its jaws. But when the alligator is four feet long, it’s not scary, it’s cute.

  I cruise past the pond, dodging cars, swerving hard to avoid colliding with a wide white Cadillac that turns right from the left lane, nearly running me over. I shout a few choice words after it, knowing that even if the windows weren’t rolled up tight and the golden-oldies station (Tampa Bay’s most listened-to station) wasn’t rocking out a top-forty hit from forty years ago, the driver still wouldn’t hear me. I’ll take my chances with the alligators over the snowbirds any day.

  I pull up to the SHCC campus and the squat windowless building that holds the labs. The SHCC lab is well stocked and well equipped for a community college. They even have a mass spectrometer, an indispensable, expensive piece of equipment that can do everything from urinalysis to analyzing ocean water elements. The experiment we’re supposed to re-create today illustrates the basics of Marcet’s principle. In 1819, a Frenchman analyzed seawater from different places. He measured the six major chemical elements that make up the salt in saltwater and found that no matter how much salt there is, the ratio of the elements to each other is almost exactly the same, wherever you go in the open ocean.

  This phenomenon is also called the principle of constant proportions. I adore scientific anecdotes like this, finding out about the little links that bind us all together. Our professor obtained a sample of the Pacific Ocean for us to look at, pretty cool since it’s over three thousand miles away. We have samples from Tampa Bay, of course. And since a USF research vessel recently returned from a trip to Antarctica, we even have a small vial of Weddell Sea water. What I don’t know is how to operate a mass spectrometer, how to analyze the data or how long this will take. Small stuff, right?

  The twenty-minute bike ride in the muggy heat has left me sweaty, grimy and probably smelly. The lab is over– air-conditioned and immediately my damp shirt turns clammy and cold as goose bumps spread across my arms and legs. I clench my teeth as I shiver, bracing myself for the unpleasantness to come. I won’t give Gavin the satisfaction of knowing he rattles me.

  Even though I’m ten minutes early, Gavin is already at one of the two long metal tables, bent over an open laptop. I’d hoped to be able to read a bit about the experiment and review the instructions before he arrived so I wouldn’t look like a total moron. Not going to happen, I think morosely.

  He glances up when he hears the door open. He’s filled out in past years, his shoulders broader; he’s grown into his height. I hate to admit it, he’s intimidating in his faded gray shirt and cargo shorts. In a way that most science geeks don’t, he looks tough. Maybe it’s the C-shaped scar on his forearm that wasn’t there when I knew him two years ago. His hair is a lot shorter than it used to be, when he wore it long and loose like a slacker rock star. It looks better short. He hasn’t shaved this morning, giving him that scruffy outlaw look.

  My chin tilts up in automatic challenge as I wait for him to say something about this reunion. But he only nods hello and goes back to work. It throws me off balance but after a moment, I decide he’s right. This isn’t the time and frankly, there’s nothing to revisit. He was someone who went to my high school a few years ago. He’s my lab partner now, and that’s it. No need to make more of it. I put him out of my mind and set my bag at the other metal table.

  The overhead fluorescent lights make the whole room seem like it’s slightly glowing. The TA has already set up the instrument and stepped out, meaning we’re alone in the narrow room. There’s a sink and an eye-wash station, while several clear fiberglass hoods cover work spaces to protect ongoing experiments.

  The mass spectrometer is plugged in on one wide, cleared counter. It doesn’t look like much, a beige box, some cables—it could be a fancy printer.

  Though the TA hasn’t come back yet, I head over to the prep area and line up our samples, the glass slides, the pipettes. Gavin watches me for a moment before stepping next to me and helping finish the prep, his movements quick and precise.

  “Have you ever used one of these?” he asks, not looking at me.

  “No. I’ve read about them, though.” I can hear the defensiveness in my voice and I slide my gaze over to him, ready for a fight.

  “So you’ll be the PI today, cool?”

  Letting me be the principal investigator means we run the lab at my pace, on my terms.

  “Yeah.” I try not to sound surprised at this generous gesture. “Thanks.”

 
; He finally looks over at me and smiles a small, pleased smile at my reaction. “I figured you might want to get your hands wet.” His voice has a slight southern drawl to it that I’d almost forgotten. He doesn’t sound nervous like I do.

  “It’s too early for puns.”

  He grins. “It’s never too early.”

  I step up to the $100,000 beast and begin running through the steps the lab overview lists. Gavin is certainly in a better mood this morning than he was in class. I wonder at the change but figure it has nothing to do with me.

  Using pipettes, we place a drop of seawater on various small glass slides for the mass spectrometer to analyze.

  He jots down the numbers as the computer pulls them up. I came fully prepared that he would either hog the entire experiment and not let me do anything, nastily condescending the entire time, or the flip side, do nothing and have me do all the work (which I’d prefer, given a choice). But instead, he’s the perfect lab partner. Darn it.

  The TA comes in at some point. Bearded and pale, he tells us he’s a PhD candidate at USF. I fill in the rest: he’s here to make a few extra bucks. The only thing he really cares about is that we don’t cause any permanent damage to the lab equipment. He watches our progress for a bit. What he sees must reassure him that the machine is in safe hands because he’s soon scribbling in a journal and writing complex equations with a Sharpie on the clear plastic doors of the hoods that vent toxic chemicals.

  We complete the experiment, clean up, and then enter data in the Results section of our lab report. I lean back on my metal stool and smile.

  “You’re not a bad lab partner,” I say.

  “I like how you leave You’re not nearly as big a jerk as I thought you would be hanging in the air.”

  “It was a pleasant surprise,” I say blandly.

  He grins at my response, and my stomach foolishly flips. Stop! I command my thoughts. Do not go there.

  “I took some college classes when I was in high school, before, you know…” Before he was arrested and sent to juvie. Yeah, I know. “There was always some jerk who got a thrill from making me feel young and stupid.” He zips up his bag and then nails me with a look. “I always swore that when I had a high schooler in class with me, I’d be their lab partner and I wouldn’t be that way.”