by Dete Meserve
“The whole time she was talking to you was very comforting,” Alexia said. “Until we popped that tire.”
Logan stood. “That’s when I was sure we were totally dead. No cell service. None of us had any. And the only lights we could see were way in the distance. Miles.”
Joe shifted in his seat. “And the rain was like we’d driven into a waterfall or something. I got out to check in the trunk, and there wasn’t a spare. And no other cars on the road.”
Alexia’s voice shook. “Then the wind picked up, rocking the car. And I . . . started crying. I thought you guys might hate me for that, but Logan, you told me everything was going to be okay.”
Logan smiled and touched her arm gently. “I said that. But I was terrified too. I was kicking myself for making yet another stupid decision getting in that car.”
“Me too,” Alexia added. “And that’s when Marie said something that changed everything.”
Every journalist learns by trial and error that there are times when you press for answers and other times when your silence, your listening ear, is the best way to keep an interview subject talking. This was one of those times. Of course I wanted to know what Marie said, but I knew the only way to find out was to let them tell their story.
The three of them looked at each other, and then Joe continued. “She said: ‘We have to figure out where the light is.’ I had no idea what she meant by that. Light? I mean, the only light was coming from the dashboard and our phones. What light was she talking about?”
“I kinda knew. I thought she was going to give us some kind of religious lesson or something. Make us pray,” Logan said. “I figured then that was her whole reason for getting us in the car. I wasn’t having any of that.”
“You put your head back and closed your eyes,” Alexia said to him. “I knew what she was trying to tell us. But I couldn’t see any hope in where we were. We all sat there completely quiet in the dark for what, like, fifteen minutes?”
Logan nodded. “And that’s when he showed up.”
“He?” I asked.
“The tow truck driver,” Logan said. “He had his brights on—they blasted through the rear window, practically blinding us.”
“It’s like he came out of nowhere,” Joe said.
“We were literally looking at where the light was,” Alexia added.
“I was pretty nervous,” Logan admitted. “I mean, we’re disabled in the middle of nowhere. Times like that are when people get robbed.”
“Or worse,” Alexia said.
“I mean, the guy sat in his truck for a long time before he got out,” Joe said. “And the light in the car was so bright we really couldn’t see who or how many people were in that truck. Everyone voted for me to get out of the car so that they’d think not to mess with us.”
“He was wearing fatigues and all . . . ,” Alexia offered.
“Still, I was pretty tense when I got out,” Joe said, running his finger along the rim of his Coke can. “But then the driver came out and asked me if he could help. Changed the tire. Not with just some spare but with a new tire he said would get us where we needed to go.”
“What are the chances . . . ,” Alexia whispered. “Four months earlier a stranger had saved my life by giving me a kidney. And here was a stranger saving my life a second time.”
Joe pointed at her. “That’s when you said we should all pitch in to do something for him.”
Alexia nodded. “And that’s when Marie said we should take a bigger leap than that.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
A bigger leap.
I knew the question was off limits, but at this point, I had to ask it. Sometimes that’s the only way to get to the truth. To understand why they did it. None of them had any real reason to keep talking with me, so I worried they’d bolt. But I’d rather have failed by asking the right questions than failed by playing it too safe.
“What was the leap she asked you to take?” I heard the desperation in my voice.
Logan sighed. “We all promised not to talk to anyone about the leap.”
“And you promised not to ask,” Joe said, glaring at me.
“Okay, then let’s not talk about the leap. Just help me understand why—whatever it is—it’s a secret?”
None of them spoke. Then Alexia smoothed her hair back and broke the silence. “We never imagined that it would spread like it did.”
“That’s all we’re gonna say,” Joe said, standing. He nodded to the others. “Let’s go.”
“Wait,” I said. “I’ll stop asking about the leap. Promise. But there’s something else I don’t understand.”
Joe sat back down slowly, crossed his arms. “Go on.”
I leaned forward. “When Marie asked you to help all these strangers, each of you was struggling with your own problems. Logan, you had money trouble. Joe, you needed a job. Alexia, you wanted to find your donor. Why didn’t Marie help you?”
Joe’s eyes narrowed. “You mean, like, why didn’t she give us money?”
“She tried to, actually,” Alexia said quietly. “At the end, right before we all had to go back home.”
“But we all said no,” Logan added.
“We weren’t looking to be rewarded for what we’d done,” Joe said. “That didn’t even cross our minds, I don’t think.” Then he cracked a smile. “But, Marie. She doesn’t take orders from us. Or anyone. She ended up helping us anyway. I found out she paid my family’s funeral expenses.”
I nodded, remembering hearing from a man named Hector that the funeral home he worked for had received cash to pay burial expenses. “I guess that way you couldn’t say no to the gift.”
He rubbed his jaw. “Marie’s clever that way.”
I turned to Logan. “What about you, Logan? Did Marie help you?”
“After the construction company where I work was hired for the concert gig, Marie sent my boss a note. She told him she only chose them because I worked there. I mean, I have the lowest-level grunt job you can get there, but now the top boss knows my name. Talks to me all the time. I feel like I might get to keep this job for a while.”
“The thing you have to understand about Marie,” Alexia said, her fingers toying with her necklace. “She doesn’t wait for you to tell her what you need. She just acts. I never told her about my medical expenses for the kidney transplant. Ever. But she paid them off.”
“But the biggest thing she did for us was to make us realize we had the power to change things,” Joe said. “Not just for others. Ourselves too.”
I let his words float. Allowed the silence to envelop them and give them weight. Looking at them, I realized there wasn’t an altruism gene that some were born with and others weren’t. These three were proof that we all had it in us, waiting for the right experience to spark it into action.
“We should go,” Joe said.
I wanted them to keep talking with me, but I knew I’d worn out my welcome. “One more question?” I pleaded. “Do you even know Marie’s full name? Where she lives?”
“You promised not to ask about Marie,” Logan said. “But the truth is, we don’t know her last name or address. We don’t know how to find her.”
I shot them a skeptical look.
“Really, we don’t,” Alexia said.
I sat back in the chair. Crossed my arms. “I don’t get it. You’re all keeping some big secret for a complete stranger. Why?”
In contrast to my sharp tone, Alexia’s voice was gentle. “Because in the car that night, she also told us her story.”
Isabelle narrowed it down to two Marie Riveras. We went back to the short list of all the Marie Riveras, discarding the former pageant queen and the convicted felon, and searched for anything she could find—news stories, social media posts, YouTube videos—that might give us a glimpse of why Marie Rivera had started all this. She tacked photos of the top two contenders on the fabric walls of the war room.
The first Marie Rivera had a bottle-blonde mane and a stra
ight-up Ralph Lauren catalog look. She was wealthy, the fortysomething CEO of an on-demand booking service for all things beauty, which apparently made her a staple on the fashion week front rows and at every notable party, because the photos Isabelle posted all seemed to have been taken at some club or high-end event.
“Seriously?” I asked. “I get that she’s wealthy, but—”
“I know how it looks.” She turned her laptop toward Scott and me. “But get this. A few months ago, she was driving her car in Queens when she hit a pole and flipped onto the parkway, and the car caught fire. She was trapped inside until some sixty-four-year-old guy walking his dog rushed to the scene and pulled her out. She’s quoted in the New York Post as saying she was so grateful and would ‘go to the ends of the earth to do kindness for a lot of other people, the silent heroes of New York.’”
“You think she’s doing all this to repay a kindness?” Scott said.
Isabelle nodded. “One that saved her life.”
“But why start that ‘repayment’ at a car-rental counter in Dallas?” I folded my arms across my chest. “I’m not buying it. She may have the means and the motive, but—”
“And she’s known for having her company throw branded concerts like the one you both attended,” she said.
I gazed at Marie’s photo and rubbed my jaw. “If she were a killer, we’d have a list a mile long of all the reasons she might have done it,” I said. “Jealousy. Anger. Revenge. Looking for respect. But we think people only do good things if they’ve had something good happen to them first.”
Isabelle pointed to the second photo. “That, or maybe they’re only motivated to do good after bad things happen to them. Like this Marie Rivera.”
Dressed in a tweed blazer with thick brown hair pulled back into an elegant chignon, this Marie was a successful Manhattan realtor.
“Her father was killed by a stray bullet while sitting in a town car last month after attending a concert at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem. He got caught in the middle of a gunfight between two rival gangs. After that, she became a big activist, donating a lot of money to several social organizations, speaking out about how she wants to heal the city and ‘bring us together.’”
Scott and I looked at each other. Could this be the Marie we’d been searching for?
“Let’s track her down,” I said. “See if we can get an interview.”
But even as Isabelle set off to try to find Marie, something was gnawing at me. I flipped through the master list of all the Marie Riveras and glanced at the two- or three-word summaries Isabelle had written about each of them. Then I scrolled through their bright-smile photos on the laptop.
“I know that look,” Scott said, glancing up from his laptop.
“What look?”
He leaned back in his chair. “The look that says, I’m not convinced.”
I sat beside him. “You’re becoming an excellent face reader. These Maries feel too . . . easy. Obvious.”
“Yeah, but sometimes the correct answer is the simplest. Or so says Occam’s razor.”
“Or . . . my dad often says that we could be searching in the branches for what appears in the roots.”
“Botany lesson?”
“I think he means we’re looking in the most obvious places for what’s actually hidden from sight. Deep in the roots.”
“Smart, your dad is.”
My hands flew across the keyboard after that, searching for Marie Riveras in New York City who didn’t have big headlines or tragic stories or thought-provoking rhetoric. Who didn’t appear in well-known magazines or Getty Images. Deep into the Google search, I stumbled upon an online bulletin for a high school on 129th Street.
A retired special education teacher named Marie Rivera had donated $25,000 to a scholarship to help a special education student with the cost of going to college. The article didn’t show a photo of Marie or say anything about her wealth or where she got the money—only that she was known for helping former students find jobs in the community years after they left high school.
Could this be Marie?
Scott called Logan, Joe, and Alexia and asked them to stay one more day in Manhattan.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Retired teacher Marie was difficult to track down. A phone call to the high school where she had worked was a bust, because they wouldn’t give out personal information. But a much-loved teacher like her had lots of grateful students and parents, so it didn’t take me long to find a few of them who knew her. Johanna Olvera, whose daughter had been in Marie’s class the year she’d retired, had organized a retirement party for Marie and was eager to tell me story after story about her.
“She helped some of the high school science kids to build electric carts from scratch, then give them to the kids who use wheelchairs, for free. You should’ve seen the eyes of the first boy who got one. Like, total disbelief that he could move around like that. And those teens who made the carts? They were just as happy.”
“She sounds amazing.”
“She is. You know how you can sometimes tell if someone is faking that they care? Marie is not like that. Something about her is different. You can feel it, even if you don’t know exactly what it is.”
“I’d like to do a story about her on ANC. Do you have an address? Phone number? Anything you can share?”
She bit her lip, thinking, then scrolled through her phone. “I don’t have her number, or I’d call her first to see if it’s okay. But here’s her email address. It’s about time someone special like her was on the news instead of just all the people wreaking havoc out there.” She pulled a pad of blue Post-it notes from her purse and started to jot something down.
I knew that the Marie we were looking for wouldn’t respond to an email from me, so I pressed for more. “Any chance you’d also have a street address?”
She glanced at her phone, then back at me, as if gauging whether she could trust me. I had the feeling that she hadn’t made the connection between the Marie everyone was talking about on TV and social media and the teacher Marie who had helped her daughter who was on the autism spectrum.
“She just moved six months ago. Here’s her new address.” Then she started copying information from her phone. She handed me the note. “Give her a hug for me.”
The address looked familiar, but it was not until Scott, Chris, and I had pulled up in front of the house with faded yellow vinyl siding and a front yard fortressed by a white iron fence that I realized we’d been here before.
“Are you kidding me?” Chris groaned as the three of us peered through the windshield.
I wasn’t sure what to make of the discovery. It felt like we were back where we started, covering the same ground all over again. Hadn’t the woman offered us a ton of proof that she wasn’t the Marie we were looking for?
“I mean, she had that orthopedic boot on her foot,” I said.
“And told us she hadn’t ever been to Dallas,” Scott added.
I sighed. “Or city hall.”
Scott rubbed his forehead. “She’s going to try again to convince us we’ve got the wrong Marie.”
“True. But we have three people that might change her mind.”
Chris, Scott, and I jumped out of the van. But when we got to her door, we froze, all of us staring at the door, giddy and nervous and keyed up about what we’d find on the other side.
“Ready?” Scott whispered, straightening his jacket.
With a shaky hand, I knocked.
Even though I’d met her before, I’d been looking for Marie so long that I half expected her to have transformed into some kind of ethereal creature, gliding to the door on a cushion of air. The other half of me expected—no, was actually worried—that this was yet another dead end.
But the first thing I noticed when she opened the door this time was how ordinary she looked. Yes, she was beautiful, with a flame of red hair and deep-blue eyes, but if I’d passed her on the street, I would never have thought she’d be behind a
n event of this magnitude.
And another thing. Even though she hadn’t yet uttered a single word, I felt like I knew her. I’d heard so many stories about her from people whose lives she’d touched and changed, people she’d never know, that it seemed as though I’d always known her. Somehow, she’d reached into my heart and made me feel a sense of wonder, just standing there on the doorstep.
“How can I help you?” she asked.
Good question.
“I’ve found Logan, Joe, and Alexia,” I said quickly. “They’re here in Manhattan. They want to see you again.”
Her hand moved to the door as if to shut it.
“And I want to talk to you about 8:28,” I continued, which stopped her hand in midair. “‘All things work together for good.’”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I had her attention. Even if she was going to keep pretending. Now I just had to keep her from shutting the door. “I want to know why you were so upset when you found a note with those words on your airline seat.”
I thought she was going to deny everything and tell me, again, that I’d come to the wrong address. Instead, she spoke softly. “I wasn’t upset.”
I smiled. It was the closest thing to a confession that I’d gotten yet. “Then what were you?”
“I was relieved. Hopeful. I had just come from the doctor, where I’d learned some scary news about my health. Finding that note gave me hope that maybe, even in times of great sadness, good will prevail if given the chance. I had no idea how true those words would end up being. I cried because I realized I could have a hand in making them be true.”
I tipped my chin toward the camera. “Could we talk some more on camera?”