Spoils

by Tammar Stein

  The nap he’s had clearly did him good, though his face still has lines of fatigue and there are heavy bags under his eyes. He reaches into his pocket and hands me a small gift-wrapped box, no bigger than a matchbox.

  A tiny pair of rose-petal tellin shells, smaller than my pinkie nail, nestle inside. They look like miniature butterfly wings, the exact color of the sky at twilight. There’s a small drop of silver soldering to strengthen the point where they connect and a small loop so that they can hang from the thin silver chain.

  “I found the shells during the beach cleanup. I picked them up and then I saw you fall. I don’t know why, but it seemed like it was something you should have.”

  As I cup them gently in my hand, I realize that they look like a pair of tiny angel wings.

  Wordlessly, I hand him the necklace and turn, lifting my hair so that he can fasten it around my neck.

  I touch the shells. They feel cool against my skin.

  “It’s perfect,” I say. “Just perfect.”

  I glance over my shoulder at the lit house, scanning the milling crowd through the windows until I find my dad. He’s holding my mom’s hand, talking earnestly and gesturing with his free hand as she listens, her head bent to catch his words. He’s animated, rising several times to his toes, perhaps painting some lovely picture of the future. Maybe it isn’t surprising that my dad recovered first. Perhaps all that money never sat right with him either.

  “The bioluminescent plankton are in,” Gavin tells me, drawing my attention away from the party. “The bay is glowing green and blue. It looks like there’re thousands of tiny LED lights underwater.”

  “Really?” I ask, pulled from my turbulent thoughts in a manner I didn’t think was possible on this night. “I missed seeing them last year.”

  “So come see them now,” Gavin says, with a grin at the look on my face. He reaches for my hand and I gladly take it.

  “You seemed kind of distracted and upset last week,” he says. “You good now?”

  “I will be,” I say. “How did your trip down south go?”

  “It was way more complicated than I expected. But I saw Isakson this afternoon,” he says. “Kohn, you’ll never believe it. He hired me on the spot!”

  Somebody on the sidewalk behind us starts to whistle a bright little tune.

  We walk along a streetlamp-lit path that is as straight and true as a compass line. Ahead of us lies a glowing ocean, teeming with the promise of endless possibilities.

  He watches them go with a sneer on his striking, charismatic face. Some of the writhing, wretched fury that he always carries with him leaks through, and he knows this. He has to be careful. He quickly schools his features back to their standard operating mask.

  You win some, you lose some. He’s been around long enough to know that, though he never plays to lose, damn it, and he really thought he had a winner this time. Gavin walking away was a year’s work lost. His eyes glint red as his rage flashes. It seemed foolproof when Gavin was expelled from school.

  He shrugs, shaking off the loss. You move on to bigger and better things. He has more than a couple of projects running that he has high hopes for. Delicious, really, all these plump little chickens running around.

  There’s a lot of potential with Jennifer and Drew, their musk of desperation so strong he wouldn’t have to dangle much to get them to jump on board.

  Joanie was dim and callow, but she was so eaten up with envy that he knew from experience there were great possibilities there.

  Captain Homeless had slipped his grasp. But there were more. Always more. Plenty who thought their lives were worthless and that they didn’t have anything to lose. Plenty who were barely hanging on. One more setback. One more plan gone wrong and they were his for the taking. Everyone has their vulnerabilities. And you never knew what was waiting around the corner.

  He chuckles to himself. Most of the time, he’s the nightmare waiting around the corner.

  The thought cheers him up considerably.

  Remembering that there’s no time like the present, he heads off to check on his latest pet—the lawyer who misses her parents—whistling a happy tune.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Three months later, the investigation into the tea-shop fire closes. The fire marshal rules it arson and charges are filed against my sister. Other than one eyewitness saying she thinks she saw three people in the shop, there’s no evidence that anyone was in the shop other than Natasha when the fire started. And everyone knows that eyewitness accounts are remarkably unreliable. Natasha’s been assigned a public defender.

  It turns out that John Parker had been skimming from the profits for months, but when my sister started falling apart, he saw an opportunity to increase his revenue stream. He falsified order forms, emptied the store’s accounts and fled the state. If I still had my million, I would bet every single cent of it that John Parker started the fire. But as far as anyone can tell, he’s fallen off the face of the map. The defense attorney is planning to blame the fire on the disgruntled, thieving ex-employee, but at the end of the day, the only person who would gain from the fire was my sister.

  Seven years after winning $22 million, the five of us Kohns are back in the old house, in the old neighborhood, in our old rooms, Natasha and I in bunk beds, Eddie barely fitting on the couch since his old room has been turned into an office for the company.

  The big mansion sold at auction for a fraction of what was owed on back taxes and the mortgage. But my parents were allowed to leave without being responsible for the difference and in the end, they were grateful for that. An anonymous benefactor paid off all the back taxes on the old house. My parents often wondered which of their wealthy friends was behind the kindness or whether it was one of the many unfortunate souls they’d helped along the way, paying back a moral debt. It eased them, thinking of all the possibilities, feeling that someone was looking out for them. Someone was.

  I sent off my application to Stanford and indicated I would need financial aid. I expect to hear back sometime next month. After that, who knows? I applied to a couple of state schools as well.

  My parents changed their voicemail message. It now says: You’ve reached Kohn’s Electrical. We’re out with another client right now, but we’ll call you back as soon as we’re able. Thanks for calling! My mom’s voice at her most chipper. They don’t have that many clients, actually, but the Tampa Bay Times recently wrote a story about the lottery winners who lost their house and returned to their old line of work. Business has picked up since they ran the piece.

  I can’t say that things are amazing. Money is tight. I didn’t realize it but we were living off food-bank donations for months at the big house and my mom still swings by once a month for several bags of groceries. We need the help. So we eat Golden Puffs cereal instead of granola, Great Value “red sauce” instead of marinara, canned green beans instead of fresh, and we’re grateful to have them.

  But in a lot of ways, life is better. Eddie enrolled at SHCC. He wants to learn AC work and add a cooling/heating division to Kohn’s Electrical.

  My sister is a mess. She wears baggy jeans and old T-shirts from the shop. She never laughs, hardly eats or sleeps. I miss my sister who was confident and sexy and ready to take on the world. It hurts me to look at this ghost that drifts through the house. She lost the shop and she lost Emmett, the two things she hoped to gain with the lottery win. She also lost a lot that she never bargained for, but I can’t stop thinking about what she’s done and wondering if she will ever forgive herself for whatever it was. She still refuses to speak of it. I don’t think she’s planning to fight the arson charges very hard. Part of her clearly wants to be punished, even if it isn’t for the crime she committed.

  Gavin is a partner with AlgaeGo. He’s completely broke, since he and Tovar are reinvesting every penny they’ve got into making the company grow. But the company is solvent and their future is bright. Scientific American is writing a piece about them and there is ma
jor interest in their research from a Japanese firm. It isn’t always easy working for Tovar, but Gavin says he’s learned more in three months with AlgaeGo than he possibly could have in four years at Tech. I keep telling them both they should change the name. So far, I’ve been overruled. EarthFuel is still nipping at their heels. But with the first batch of algae happily burbling away in South Florida, Tovar and Gavin feel confident as to who will finish first.

  I returned the beach cruiser my parents bought me for my birthday. My dad found a couple of rusted bikes on the curb on Big Trash Day and he began tinkering. The frame on one of them was solid, the pedals on the other were still okay. It inspired him to troll through town and soon he had five bent and broken bikes to pull parts from. He salvaged enough working parts to put together one working bike. It’s a Frankenstein sort of bike, but it works. I ride it to school, to SHCC and to our favorite ice cream shop. It’s no sweet beach cruiser, but Eddie spray-painted it sky blue and Gavin scored little green fish decals at a convention that I stuck all over it, and even Natasha pitched in, donating the wicker basket that connects on the front. Let’s just say it’ll be a hard bike to steal since it’s rather bizarre and highly recognizable.

  I wear the shell necklace every day and it reminds me that there’s beauty and mystery in this world, in the least of places, on the most ordinary of days.

  Michael has not returned. But I know he’s out there. They all are.

  I lift the shells and touch them to my lips. They’re warm from my skin. I step up onto my bike and start pedaling to school.

  It’s a gorgeous Florida winter morning. There’s a cool nip in the air that will mellow into a balmy seventy degrees by the afternoon. The citrus trees in the neighborhood are heavy with bright globes of sweet oranges and peach-colored grapefruits. A thin little black racer sunning itself on the driveway quickly slithers away at the sound of my approach, slipping over the ground like a shadow. A huge airplane full of tourists roars overhead as it comes in for a landing at the St. Pete/Clearwater airport. As I’m looking up at the plane, an osprey flaps its powerful wings, clutching a good-sized fish in its talons.

  Ospreys are terrific hunters, yet they were almost wiped out back when my parents were growing up. DDT, the popular agricultural insecticide that helped control mosquitoes, caused their eggshells to be too thin and they would crack before the chicks could hatch. After DDT was banned, ospreys slowly began their comeback and now they are almost as common as squirrels. Meaningful changes can happen. Big problems can be fixed.

  I drop my necklace and it settles back in place just below the dip of my collarbone. I stand on the pedals and pump harder, knowing I only have fifteen minutes to get to school and loving the whoosh of wind, the feeling of flying.

  An endangered wood stork, startled by my passing, awkwardly flaps its large black-tipped white wings and takes off.

  I am eighteen.

  It’s a lucky number in Judaism. It symbolizes life.

  Lenore sails past him on her bike, hope and happiness streaming behind her like the banners medieval knights used to fly. She doesn’t notice him. No one ever does unless he means for them to see.

  There are other people he needs to keep an eye on. Yet he cannot tear himself away from Lenore. It’s her joy, her optimism, that he finds so lovely. He closes his eyes and feels her happiness on his skin. He can taste it. And he knows he needs to savor it, to make it last.

  Not all his stories have happy endings. There’s a family in Nashville that will never be the same. He needs to work on that. There’s a troubled young man there who might be able to help them.

  It’s time to move on. Angels are forbidden to contact their charges without proper authorization. It’s only when Asmodeus begins the meddling that he’s allowed to come in, for balance. There will not be another visit to Lenore, he knows this.

  But he also knows that she’s carved a place for herself in his heart. All his charges do. Though she will never see him again, he will be with her always.

  Michael gathers himself to leave, steeling himself for his next task. There are two young children whose mother is about to make a very wrong choice. They will need him to help them through the coming crises.

  God speed you, Lenore, he whispers to the wind and then he becomes part of it, blowing by.

  An endangered wood stork, startled by the sudden gust, awkwardly flaps its large black-tipped white wings and takes off.

  Acknowledgments

  Writing this novel took a lot of help from a lot of talented, kind people before it became what you’re reading today. In no particular order, I deeply thank Jeremy L. Balsbaugh of Hunt Laboratory, at the University of Virginia Department of Chemistry; firefighter David M. Frost, of the Hillandale Volunteer Fire Department, Montgomery County Fire and Rescue Service; Battalion Chief Paul Atwater, Seattle Fire Department; Assistant State Attorney Tony Julian, Juvenile Division Chief Patti Pieri, and the Hillsborough County State Attorney’s Office, Juvenile Division; Rabbi Danielle Upbin; marine scientist and Antarctic explorer Paul Suprenand; Gabriel, Aharon, and Dan Laufer, a trio of savvy businessmen who made AlgaeGo possible; my fantastic agent, Stephen Barbara; Katie Hamblin of Foundry, a keen, subtle, and fast reader who came to my rescue; and my talented editor, Erin Clarke, and the rest of the wonderful staff at Knopf. A special thank-you to Professor Joan Kaywell, of the University of South Florida, who does more for YA writers in general—and Florida writers (and readers) in particular—than anyone I’ve ever met, and who did so much to welcome me to the Tampa Bay book-lovers community. Fred, my first reader, my biggest fan, none of this would work without you. Tovar and Delaney, who remind me what’s really important, and here’s a hint: it doesn’t have anything to do with winning Powerball.

  Galya Frost

  Tammar Stein is the author of the young adult novels Kindred, High Dive, and Light Years, which was an ALA-YALSA Best Book for Young Adults, a Virginia Readers’ Choice, and a Texas Tayshas High School Reading List Selection. She lives in Florida with her family and a bilingual dog. Visit her at tammarstein.com.