by Dete Meserve
“The whole restaurant?”
“There had to be forty, maybe fifty people there. No one could believe it. We all started talking to each other because of it. I ended up meeting a guy I’d seen in there lots of times but never talked to until today. Turns out he lives in my building.”
“Any idea who paid for all the meals?”
“Our waiter told us a girl came in when they first opened up, dropped two thousand dollars cash on the counter, and told them to use it for everyone’s breakfasts that morning.”
“Did he say what she looked like?”
She applied a quick coat of gloss to her lips. “All they remember is that she had blonde hair. Maybe a teenager.”
“A teenage girl paid for everyone’s breakfasts?”
“Crazy, right?”
I tried to focus on my report about the government shutdown, but my mind kept wandering, thinking about the events happening around Manhattan. Maybe because they gave me a glimmer of hope that the unbearable city I’d been trying to survive wasn’t as heartless as it seemed. Or maybe I just needed a distraction from the maneuvering and negotiating and posturing that was happening on Capitol Hill.
Politics was never supposed to be my beat. I’d made that clear when Andrew had recruited me. Andrew had assumed I avoided political coverage because my father was a senator, but I told him that I didn’t like sifting through a rising churn of spins and lies and closed-door meetings to get at the truth. But Andrew was still out of town, and until he got back, I had no doubt Mark was going to confine me to this miserable beat.
As I started a call with someone in the justice department about the furloughed employees, my cell phone chimed. Unknown number.
The text read: I started a Facebook group. NYCMiracles. Check it out.
My phone didn’t recognize the number, so I figured it was spam. Until:
This is Corinne. You interviewed me after I was trapped in the elevator last night. I started the group because I just found a car key dangling from a purple ribbon on the door handle to my apartment.
Blue dots flickered on the screen, indicating she was still typing.
With a note saying to take it to the Chevy Dealer in Hell’s Kitchen.
Did you?
Key is to a van. With wheelchair lift for my daughter. Free.
From who?
They don’t know. A woman paid cash. And told them to give the van to me.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Mark was saying. “But the answer’s still no.”
“You’re saying no before I ask the question?” I pressed, trying to keep pace with his fast clip through the newsroom. I’d heard Mark thought sit-down meetings were a waste of time, so if you wanted to talk to him, you had to do a “walk and talk,” pitching your ideas as he paced through the newsroom checking in with other reporters and producers.
He cracked his lower jaw like he was trying to clear his ears. “You’re thinking that since you had big success with the Good Sam and Robin Hood stories in LA, that maybe you should chase this story about a couple of good things happening after the blackout.”
“More like an avalanche of good things,” I said, feeling the heat rise in my cheeks. My tone must have been sharp because the producer whose desk we were standing by looked at us and quickly slipped on her headphones.
“It’s not a national news story when some people do a few kind things.”
“But it is a national news story when people are looting and stealing?”
A vein bulged in his forehead. “I’m not having this debate with you.”
I steadied my voice. “This isn’t all that different from the crime wave story Stephanie’s been covering. Instead of killings and assaults, we’ve just got a wave of people helping others.”
He heaved a disappointed sigh. “From where you sit, it may be hard for you to see it, but people are scared, the economy’s bad, and we’re more divided than ever. That’s what we cover here.”
“From where I sit?”
“We can’t pretend the world isn’t in chaos by chasing after a story about a woman who received keys to a new van—”
“From a stranger. While thousands and thousands of purple and white balloons and flowers mysteriously appear around Manhattan.”
“And what about the gift cards that someone’s leaving on windshields all over?” a man said from behind me.
I turned to face him. He was in his midthirties, dressed in a tailored dark-blue suit and holding up a gift card wrapped in purple ribbon. “Found one of these on my windshield this morning. They’re all over town. Hundreds of them.”
Mark looked intrigued. Or maybe his interest was just for appearances because the man speaking was Scott Jameson, star of the very popular ANC series Wonders of the World, where Scott explored the most wild and beautiful locations in the world. Mark took the gift card from him and turned it over in his hands.
“Something’s going on,” Scott said. “Worth looking into.”
Mark frowned. I could feel a no bubbling up. “All right,” he sighed. “Give it a shot, Kate. But make it brief.”
Before I could reply, he walked away.
I blew out a breath. “Thank you. He was putting the kibosh on that story before you got here.” I held out my hand. “I’m Kate Bradley.”
“Scott Jameson.” He shook my hand with a firm grip. “We’ve met.”
Scott was tall, over six feet, with the kind of piercing blue eyes that look great on camera. But although I had seen practically every episode of his show, I knew I’d never met him. I would’ve remembered.
“I don’t think—”
“Fifth Avenue. Your collision with a bike,” he added.
“That was you?”
“Not the one on the bike. The one who helped you up.”
“Sorry, I didn’t recognize you—”
“You had a lot going on that morning. Besides, I was in disguise. I was wearing a Yankees ball cap. And I’m a Cubs fan.”
I laughed. “The disguise worked. Thanks for your help. It wasn’t one of my better mornings in Manhattan.”
“Some days here are actually tests of your survival skills.”
“And thank you for helping convince Mark to give me this story.”
He flashed me a smile. “That’s three thank-yous in less than thirty seconds. Obviously, you’re not a real New Yorker.”
“Guess my Los Angeles stripes are showing.”
“They are,” he said in a conspiratorial tone. “But if you don’t want everyone else to know that you’re not from here, you’ll drop all the thank-yous.”
“Manhattan rule number seventy-two.” I pretended to write in my notebook. “No thank-yous.”
“Besides, you don’t need to thank me. You had already convinced Mark before I got here. He just likes for his reporters to claw and fight for the stories they want to do.”
“I heard that can get you fired around here.”
“Sometimes it does,” he agreed. “Mostly it makes for stronger reporting. But glad you’re taking on this story. The city has a kind of weird and wonderful feel to it right now.” His eyes met mine as he handed me the gift card. “Welcome to ANC, Kate. Let me know what you find out.”
CHAPTER SIX
By the time I had returned to my desk, NYCMiracles already had dozens of posts on it. A twenty-seven-year-old woman named Cathy had gone into Duane Reade in the West Village and discovered that the pain medication she needed after a recent surgery had already been paid for by an anonymous donor. She left there with $500 worth of medicine. Free. When I reached out to her through Facebook, she called me back fifteen minutes later.
She sounded like she’d been crying. “Our medical bills are more than we can manage, so I usually go without when it comes to pain medicine. But knowing that someone did this for me?” Her voice broke. “They’ll never fully understand what that means.”
“Any idea who did it?”
“The pharmacist said the guy paid in ca
sh and wouldn’t leave his name.”
“What’d he look like?”
“Told me the guy was young, like maybe just out of high school.” She blew her nose. “And that he paid for ten other people who had open pharmacy orders.”
After I hung up with Cathy, more stories rolled in. The most bizarre example was a man named Hector who reported that the funeral home where he worked just received $25,000 cash by courier to pay off the funeral expenses for three families who were having services there that day.
Thankfully what happened at the Kmart in NoHo offered a solid clue. The manager’s post said that right after the store opened, a woman handed him $15,000 in cash and instructed him to pay the layaway balances of as many people as he could.
“I told her no,” the manager said when I tracked him down by phone later that morning. “I mean, we really aren’t set up for that. But she insisted. So I got a couple of clerks, and we dug in. Took hours.”
“What did she look like?”
“Hard to say. She was wearing these big sunglasses. White frames.”
“Indoors?”
“Yeah. And a red scarf, tied kind of fancy around her neck. Reddish hair, I think. One of the layaway customers found out what she was doing, dropped to her knees, and started crying. That’s when the woman took off.”
After we hung up, I wondered if this was all a momentary blip. A brief wave of kindness in the wake of the power outage. In the days that followed 9/11, people across the globe reached out with overwhelming help and support. Maybe this was the same thing.
I’d had a lot of experience with “good” stories like this in LA. I’d broken the story about the anonymous Good Samaritan leaving $100,000 in cash on LA doorsteps. A few months later, I was able to uncover the Robin Hood–like group who was stealing from the überwealthy and staging large-scale giving events for the poor. But what made this story different was how widespread it was—it wasn’t a handful of people receiving money, like the recipients of Good Sam. It was hundreds. Maybe thousands. And it wasn’t just the needy who were benefiting. Almost anyone seemed to be a possible recipient. But the scope of it meant there must be—there had to be—a group of people involved.
Were they all working together? Or was this kind of like “the wave” at a baseball game, started by a group and later imitated by copycats?
I wanted to be the one to get the answers, so I doubled down. I posted on the NYCMiracles page:
I’m Kate Bradley, a correspondent at ANC. If you have experiences with the good stuff that’s spreading through NYC or tips on who might be behind it, I want to hear from you. Text me at (323) 555-9999.
“Trade you,” Stephanie said, slipping a mug of coffee on the desk in front of me.
“For what?”
“Your story for mine. While I’m slogging through a report about the man who was found dead at the home of a prominent political donor in Chicago, I heard Mark is actually letting you work on a story about the good stuff happening.”
“How’d you know?”
“Word gets around quickly when Mark does a rare ‘nice boss’ move. Especially in a reporter’s first week at the network.” She leaned back in her chair and crossed her legs at the ankles. “You ever think this might be the work of someone you know?”
I laughed. “I know something like five people in Manhattan. What makes you say that?”
She shrugged. “Seems odd that one of the people you profiled the night of the power outage got a brand-new van the next day. Maybe our news bosses are behind this ‘good stuff’ thing to get ratings or something.”
I raised an eyebrow. “I’m hoping they all have too much integrity to manufacture a story like this.”
Her smile faded. “Worth looking into. At least tell me you’re considering the possibility that all of this is a setup for a scam.”
“A scam?”
“Remember a few weeks ago some guys were all over the media for helping a woman after they saw she was paying for gas with pennies? They started a GoFundMe for her and raised like a hundred thousand dollars from people all around the world. But they didn’t give it to her. They ran off with it.”
“You think someone’s started all this so they can ask people to pay to join in?”
She took a sip of her coffee. “Why else would they be doing it?”
I let her question hang there. I wondered why we often leaped to assume nefarious motives when faced with things we didn’t understand. Maybe it was because we were all afraid we’d look naive or uninformed if we leaned toward the positive. But if I learned anything from covering the Good Sam and Robin Hood stories, it was that we couldn’t jump to conclusions before we got the facts. Before we looked at the story from all sides. “It’s also possible that they have good intentions.”
She pounded back her coffee. “Clearly, you haven’t lived in Manhattan for very long.”
An hour later I was heading down East Twenty-First Street to find a woman named Kristen who’d posted that her $12,000 bill at First Presbyterian Hospital had been paid in full by an anonymous donor. The cameraman assigned to me was a fifteen-year veteran of ANC named Chris Yamashita.
“Great to have your skills as a cameraman on this story,” I said.
“Photojournalist, not cameraman,” he replied, using the fancier title for the same job.
Then he started scrolling through the photos on his phone, showing me a quick slideshow of the memorabilia he’d collected from some of the stories he’d covered over the last fifteen years: a Cohiba cigar he’d received from Fidel Castro while on assignment in Cuba, a signal flag from an assignment in a nuclear-powered submarine, and a chunk of cement from the levee that broke in Hurricane Katrina.
“I like to collect something physical from every story,” he said.
Otherwise, Chris was not much of a talker—a big change from Josh, my LA cameraman, who had a joke or an insight about everything we encountered on our news runs. And from the way his eyes took me in, I had the definite feeling Chris felt like he was slumming working on this “good news” story with me, a newbie at ANC.
I was wrong about that. About a mile into the ride in the ANC news van, he said, “Your dad. He’s Senator Hale Bradley?”
“Yep.”
“What’s he doing about the shutdown? I’ve got friends who’ve been furloughed. And it’s bad. They live paycheck to paycheck as it is. They’re just a few hundred dollars away from having nothing. How’s he helping end this mess?”
“I haven’t talked to him about it. He’s been too busy to return my calls.”
“I hope you’ll tell him—”
“I’m not here because I’m Hale Bradley’s daughter,” I interrupted. “I’m a reporter, not a conduit to my father or a mouthpiece for his ideas.”
He nodded. “Well, there you have it.”
“There you have . . . what?”
Before he could answer, my eye fell on a homeless man in front of an H&M store who was holding a large box wrapped in white paper and purple ribbon. “Stop the van, please.”
Chris slammed on the brakes. “Yeah, sorry about what I said. I didn’t mean—”
“Get your camera and follow me.”
I jumped out of the van and ran to the man, who was sitting on the ground looking at the wrapped present, a discarded cardboard shipping box to his side. He was shoeless, dressed in tired gray work pants, frayed at the bottoms, and a faded blue T-shirt.
“Excuse me, I’m Kate Bradley. From Channel Eleven. I mean, ANC.”
He looked up at me with questioning brown eyes on a face that was leathered and wrinkled. He looked to be in his seventies, although he was probably much younger.
“I’m wondering about that gift you have there. Where’d you get it?”
He smiled, exposing several missing teeth. “They delivered it to me.”
“Who did?”
“Amazon.”
“Amazon delivered a package to you. Here?”
He nodded. “De
livery guy comes over. Asks if I’m Reggie Booth, and I say yeah. Hands me the package and takes off.”
I glanced at the shipping label, which read: “Reggie Booth, Man on Sidewalk,” and the address of the H&M store. “Did you order it?”
“Got no way to do that.”
“What’s inside?”
He shook his head. “Fraid to find out. What if it’s a trick or something?”
“Want me to help?” Our eyes locked, and I was caught in a moment of raw humanity. I wasn’t looking into the eyes of a junkie or a man who had made terrible mistakes. I was looking at a man who was suffering, and this box, whatever it was, contained a glimmer of hope.
I crouched down and helped him untie the ribbon and pull the wrapping paper off the box.
When Reggie opened the box, we were both surprised to see a brand-new pair of sneakers, a half dozen pairs of socks, and some jeans.
He lifted the shoes out of the box. “They’re my size,” he whispered.
I hoped Chris’s camera was capturing the expression on Reggie’s face, which quickly morphed from bewilderment to surprise to shock and then to joy in the span of four seconds. Even if it didn’t, I was sure I would never forget it.
“Guy I know. Joey. Said the same thing happened to him earlier today,” he said. “I thought he was making it up. Guess he wasn’t.”
“How would someone know your shoe size?” I asked.
“And what size pants I wear.” A glassy tear formed in the corner of his eye. “I dunno.”
I spotted a packing slip in the box and snapped a photo with my phone. Underneath the Amazon logo it read: A gift note from A Stranger. The note read: We’re all connected.
“What’s it feel like getting something like this?” I asked.
He didn’t answer. Instead, his long, bony fingers caressed each item in the box as though he were double-checking they were really there.
“Someone thinks I matter.”
The story went viral, with viewers everywhere trying to figure out if Amazon was “in on the kindness thing” or if some Good Samaritan was actually going around Manhattan asking homeless people’s names, then finding out or guessing their clothing sizes and having Amazon deliver to them. I’d called Amazon, trying to see if they’d reveal who purchased the gift for Reggie. A polite customer-service representative told me, “We never share the sender information with anyone.”