The Unlikelies

by Carrie Firestone

  “She’s going to be okay now, Alice,” Val said. “They just need to get her into a rehab place. They’re gonna know how to help her.”

  Alice laughed.

  “Hector checked Izzy’s drug buddy out of rehab and escorted her right back to the trap house. He’s quite the gentleman, that Hector.”

  Val repositioned the cool washcloth on Alice’s forehead and covered her with a Princeton blanket, one of the many Ivy League fleece throws Gordie’s family had collected from the older Harris brothers.

  We settled into our designated chairs with the brownies, lattes from the latte machine, and a list of potential NeighborCare candidates.

  Gordie pulled up NeighborCare.com. We started with Ella. Her fund-raising had stalled permanently. Even with the local Alabama news story, they hadn’t reached $200.

  “She’s so cute I want to cry,” Val said. “Look at her two bottom teeth sticking out.” Alice lifted the washcloth to check out baby Ella.

  “I don’t get how people always say ‘pray for us,’ like prayers are going to help,” mumbled Alice.

  I leaned over and whispered, “Okay, voodoo priestess.” Alice glared.

  “What?” Val said, looking back and forth between Alice and me in confusion. We pretended not to notice.

  “Prayers help, I promise you that,” Jean said.

  “Okay, guys, can we figure this out? I feel like we’ve been dragging our asses so much we’re going to be ninety-seven when we decide what to do with the canaries,” I said.

  First on the list: Ella, baby, Alabama, child of lizard. Next was Jean’s suggestion, a Haitian mother of six from Boynton Beach, Florida, who found space in her heart and home for special-needs foster children. Then came Marigold, a five-year-old with a rare form of bone cancer. And Mrs. K, a teacher from Alaska who was trying to raise $20,000 to start a safe home for teen prostitutes.

  It was hard to explain how we landed on the pages and unanimously voted yes, over and over again. When I was home, searching through hundreds of NeighborCare.com profiles, trying to find the people Mr. Upton would have approved of, it was nearly impossible. But with Jean and Gordie and Val and Alice—as out of sorts as she was—it was swift and harmonious. It was as if Mr. Upton was there to guide us from beyond the grave.

  We decided four was enough for our pilot run.

  “Okay, we have our list. Gordie, work your magic,” I said, dusting crumbs off my cramped legs.

  We sat for hours, vetting each person by stalking them, their friends, their families on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other websites. Gordie did his computer genius investigating, dug out valid addresses, made sure all the candidates were airtight, or as airtight as anyone could be through the murky portals of cyberspace.

  We ate our weight in brownies, popcorn, and leftover three-bean salad from the main kitchen. We drank volumes of lattes.

  And then we were done, and I felt at peace with our plan.

  We sat for a minute, wondering what to do with ourselves now that the burden had been lifted.

  “I think we should dump the lizard’s suitcase,” Gordie said.

  “Why?” I said, surprised.

  “I don’t know. It’s sitting there in your closet for what? Why are we keeping the creepy silk bathrobe and shit?”

  I felt unsettled. I hadn’t thought about throwing away any of it. It seemed sacred in some strange, twisted way. But maybe Gordie was right. Maybe Mr. Upton should have dumped the suitcase a long time ago. Maybe it would have given him closure.

  “We should bury it somewhere. Or burn it. That would be fun,” Jean said.

  “Why are we wasting our time on this?” Gordie said, marching over to the basement kitchen. He rummaged around under the sink and pulled out a box of heavy-duty trash bags. “Come on. Let’s do this.”

  We caravanned to my house and parked out front. Val and I tiptoed up to my room, took out the contents of the suitcase, piece by piece, feeling the seams and the pockets to make sure we hadn’t missed any stray canaries. Then we dumped it all into trash bags. His expensive dapper suits. His robe. His collection of women’s hairpins.

  “Are you sure we shouldn’t smoke one of the cigarettes? Just to see what an antique cigarette tastes like?” Jean said as we loaded the garbage bags and the empty suitcase into the backseat of the Range Rover. Val made a face, grabbed the cigarettes out of his hand, and dumped them in the bag.

  I secured Andy and his canaries in the garment bag, then rode with Gordie to the dumpster behind the supermarket, where he hurled in the empty suitcase with the Nova Scotia stickers and the two heaping trash bags, and we drove away. I thought about my original plan, to donate the suitcase to the Smithsonian, but Gordie was right. That suitcase and all the memories it carried felt creepy. It belonged in a dumpster.

  That night I hid the letter to Mr. Upton’s lover in a Spanish folder under my window seat and lay in bed staring at the origami garlands hanging from the ceiling. The moon cast filtered light on the mismatched paper cranes.

  Let’s make Izzy an origami crane chain, I texted everybody.

  I don’t like birds, Jean texted back.

  It’s not about you, Jean, I wrote. The other Unlikelies must have already been asleep.

  NINETEEN

  ALICE FACETIMED IN the morning to tell me that the police called her mom out of the blue, and her mom collapsed into a howling heap, fearing Alice was dead from drugs. But it turned out they were just calling because they were in possession of some stolen property they believed belonged to Alice’s family: a ring forged out of rare white gold and embedded with rubies, a diamond tennis bracelet, and a strand of priceless pearls.

  Alice’s mom had fired their cleaning lady, Olga, a lovely Polish woman with five kids, when her jewelry went missing. That started a chain reaction, and Olga lost all of her East End clients.

  Alice recounted her parents’ conversation with the cops.

  “No, ma’am,” the cops had said. “Your jewelry was found at a drug dealer’s house.”

  “I had no idea Olga was a drug dealer,” Alice’s mom had said.

  “Mom, it wasn’t Olga. Izzy stole your jewelry,” Alice had said. “Now excuse me while I puke.”

  And she did. Alice puked her guts out.

  “Why did she need to steal? Izzy has tons of money,” I said.

  “Dealers don’t take AmEx Platinum, Sadie.”

  To get the canary packages delivered before Gordie’s upcoming camping trip with the Turtle Trail Recreation people, I had to call in sick to work.

  “How’d you get out of work?” Gordie set the bag of care packages on the backseat.

  “I told Farmer Brian I had a migraine. I feel really bad. Let’s hope my mother doesn’t need cucumbers or something.”

  It was just the two of us, headed west toward the wealthy towns of Long Island’s North Shore. I thought it made sense to play things safe by mailing the packages from Roslyn, Great Neck, and Manhasset, where we figured people probably had loose diamonds lying around.

  We had typed the message, printed it out on bright yellow cardstock, and stuck it on top of the tissue paper that covered the tiny sealed baggies, each containing two stones. These are real yellow diamonds worth many thousands of dollars. We are sending them on behalf of a wealthy benefactor who wanted to help others. We saw your NeighborCare page and were touched by your story. Best of luck to you.

  We didn’t get the Unlikelies involved in Mr. Upton’s promise. It wasn’t about the Unlikelies. It was about righting the lizard’s wrongs.

  Gordie confided in me that his parents contributed generously to the Turtle Trail Recreation Center and always had, and that his father had a form of autism.

  “What are you talking about? Your dad is a gazillionaire.” I glanced back at the packages on the seat behind Gordie.

  “Yes, and he’s also on the spectrum, as they say. He couldn’t talk until he was almost seven.”

  “Wow. And he built a software empire.”
r />   “He and my mom are about as mismatched as two people could be. And yet they work.”

  I laughed. “I get it. My mother fled the Iranian Revolution only to meet my father, an ex–New York City cop, after his stand-up comedy routine offended her and she hit him.”

  “No way.”

  “Yeah. He made a joke about Muslims having four wives, and she chased him down after the show, hit him, and told him he had no idea what he was talking about. It was love at first sight.”

  “Woody was a cop, huh?”

  “Yeah. He lost his thumb on the job and quit. My uncles kind of pressured him into the family ice cream business. But he loves it.”

  “Does he still do comedy?”

  “He thinks he’s doing comedy. Every night. On our porch.”

  We talked about colleges and our dysfunctional class and Alice’s terrible predicament.

  I turned up the music, and we car-danced until we got to the first post office. Before I handed Ella’s package to the guy, I kissed it three times for good luck. At each post office, when the person asked, “Is there anything fragile, liquid, perishable” or whatever, we said no. We tried not to look at each other, because even though there were no questions about cut or clarity, we felt like we were doing something very, very shady.

  When it was all done and we had stopped for Mexican food at a strip mall somewhere between the fancy towns of the North Shore and the fancy towns of the East End, I asked Gordie a question.

  “Are you glad you went to the homegrown hero luncheon? Like, are you glad you got involved in all this?”

  He crinkled his eyes and chewed his burrito and wiped his mouth and said, “It’s better than watching Reid feel up Claire all summer.”

  I nodded. “That must be how Mute Mike feels.”

  “And David. Keith and Zoe are getting hot and heavy.”

  So Gordie preferred the Unlikelies to being a third wheel.

  That was something.

  “Sadie? Uh. Can you come here, please?” Mom got that high-pitched tone only when there was an issue.

  I had been napping on the couch, waiting for Alice to pick me up. Mom took off her gardening gloves. “I just got a call from Farmer Brian asking me how your head is,” Mom said.

  I froze.

  “Sadie?”

  “Yeah, Mom?”

  “Have you been keeping your headaches from me so I don’t bug you?”

  She didn’t know I missed work. I had dodged a massive bullet.

  I resumed my nap position. “Not really. My head hurts sometimes, but it’s not a big deal. I think this one is menstrual.”

  Mom sat on the edge of the couch and rested her hand on my ankles. “Do you think maybe you should take it easy with all the late nights and running around?”

  I turned and stared at her. “The late nights and running around are exactly what I need right now, Mom.”

  She sighed heavily. “Suit yourself.”

  I did actually have a headache, and I was exhausted from getting up early to mail the packages. But I had promised Alice I’d do errands with her because she said she really needed moral support. Of course, the “errands,” like everything else we did, were not normal.

  Our first stop was Izzy’s house to pick up things for Izzy, who was still in the hospital. Izzy’s mom had refused to leave the hospital waiting room until a rehab bed opened up and the hospital agreed to transport Izzy directly to the rehab center. She was afraid Izzy would jump out of the car if her parents tried to drive her. She was finally realizing Izzy’s heroin problem was more than a passing phase.

  Alice sped up Izzy’s sloped driveway and slammed on the brakes.

  An elderly woman with a distressed expression let us in. “Thanks, Beverly,” Alice said. “We’re going to get some stuff for the hospital.”

  Izzy’s room felt haunted, like the specter of happy, horseback-riding Izzy was smudged on the walls, sobbing into the pink floral fabrics. It was stuffy and smelled slightly of sour vomit. Somebody had gone through the drawers and closet, probably in a desperate search for hidden heroin. Izzy had lined up her nail polish bottles from brights to pastels. I picked up a silver-framed picture of Izzy and Alice when they were all smiles and freckles and Alice didn’t have any of the hardware or paint obscuring her face. I noticed a quote Izzy had written in pencil and pinned to her headboard on pink lined paper. No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path. —Buddha. It made me want to cry.

  Alice went into the closet. Most of the contents had been piled on the bed, pockets picked through, shoe boxes vetted. She crawled to the back and used a ruler to pry out the tight corner of the carpet. Underneath, stuck into a groove in the plywood, was a green felt bag. Alice pulled it out.

  “And bingo,” Alice said. “She told me she threw this out, but I knew she was full of shit.” Alice pulled a phone out of the bag and handed it to me. “This is her secret drug phone, compliments of Hector.” She slid the phone into her bag and pushed down the carpet corner. I imagined Izzy sitting in her white desk chair using the ruler to make a school project or do a math assignment. I wanted to get out of her sad, sad room.

  Alice grabbed Izzy’s stuffed pig—her version of Flopper—and a notebook and some toiletries from the bathroom. We eased into the slow crawl toward the hospital.

  “You can’t bring those things in,” a snotty receptionist said, snatching the plastic bag full of toiletries.

  “Why not?” Alice said. “It’s just perfume and mouthwash and stuff.” She held up the list Izzy had dictated.

  The snotty receptionist made an Are you an idiot? face and said, “Because our patients drink perfume and mouthwash to get high.”

  Alice looked at me and shook her head.

  When we walked into the family waiting room, we found Izzy’s mom asleep on the grubby loveseat. She opened her eyes and smiled up at us.

  “Hi, girls.” She looked years older than the day she had greeted us at their house. She wasn’t wearing makeup on her pale, blotchy face, and deep silver roots sprouted from the top of her head.

  She stood and embraced Alice. “She’s so mean to me. She’s cursing and telling me I ruined her life.” Her whole body trembled and she bent down to rest her head on Alice’s shoulder. She sobbed and sobbed; her muffled cries rang out like strange bird sounds.

  Izzy’s mom apologized for “falling apart like that” and went on and on about how Izzy was a good kid and where did she go wrong as a mother?

  “You didn’t do anything wrong,” Alice said. After, as Alice and I walked through security toward Izzy’s room, Alice whispered, “She did a lot of things wrong. But nobody deserves this shit.”

  Izzy sat with her feet tucked under her on a scratchy-looking lounge chair facing a pretty, dark-haired, fair-skinned girl.

  “Pooch and Sadie, this is Lexie. She’s my new bud,” Izzy said.

  “Hi,” Lexie said meekly. “I’ll see you soon, Iz.” She walked down the hall toward the patient rooms.

  Izzy’s hair was pulled back. Her face was white as rice and her eyeballs were almost orange. “Lex has issues, but she’s really sweet. She got in trouble for stealing from the elderly to buy shoes, and people were so cruel to her. They have no idea what this girl has been through. Everybody sucks.”

  I glanced at Alice, who mouthed Holy shit as Izzy clutched her stuffed pig and stood up to move her chair over.

  She’s the Hamptons Hoodlum, I mouthed back.

  The conversation quickly shifted to Izzy’s mother.

  “She’s an overreacting bitch. I can’t look at her ugly face. I can honestly say I don’t even feel like using, but she’s forcing me to stay here.” Izzy shifted in her seat. “Do you know that woman is telling the doctors I’m suicidal?”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “They’ll let me out of here if I’m not a danger to myself or others, so my mother is telling them I’ve sworn I’ll kill myself. Which I will. Because I’m in thi
s hellhole.” She stopped. “Actually, you know what? I’d rather be here with these freaks than with her. I hate that bitch. She’s the biggest psycho of all.”

  I nodded and let her continue with her mom-hating diatribe while Alice sat there playing with her nose ring. She didn’t look at Izzy. Not once.

  “Where’s Hector?” Alice finally said.

  Izzy acted like she didn’t know what Alice was talking about. She made a face. “What? I don’t know. I thought we were talking about my mother.”

  “C’mon. You know where he is. You know they busted the shrink’s house. Where the hell is Hector?”

  “Why do you care where Hector is? You’re obsessed with him. I think you’re just pissed that I was hooking up with him and blowing you off.”

  Alice’s pasty complexion flushed pink. She balled her fists and glared at Izzy. “I fucking stood there and watched Hector stick that needle into your groin. Remember? When the blood sprayed all over me? He just keeps coming back to stick needles into you and you keep letting him do it, Izzy. He has ruined your life, your parents’ lives”—Alice pointed toward the waiting room—“and Tanner. That kid worships you.”

  Izzy stood up and padded away in her rubber-bottomed blue socks and mint-green bathrobe. She didn’t turn back.

  I linked my arm through Alice’s and we walked out to the waiting room. Izzy’s mom’s expression was hopeful, as if the homegrown heroes would somehow infuse her daughter with sunny, sober thoughts.

  “She looks good,” Alice said, leaning down to kiss her cheek.

  As we passed our bench yet again, Alice took Izzy’s drug phone out of her bag and held it up. “Well, I guess you’ll have to tell us where Hector is,” she said. Then she looked at me with a weird smile. “Are you ready for the next errand?”

  TWENTY

  ALICE TOOK ME to the animal shelter where she worked and introduced me to a kennel full of rowdy dogs, clamoring in their cages to give us kisses. She showed me the most recent batch of photos she’d taken of the big, broad, brindled pit bull wearing the pink bandanna around her neck. Alice had a gift for photographing unwanted dogs and making them wanted by forever families.