35. Elyse #2
I set my cell down. “She was very helpful. She said it’s legit.
She said all our debt has been paid in full as part of a donation that was made to ‘forgive’ Hudson County medical debt—that’s the term, apparently—and that it’s completely random and anonymous.
But she said we should call the hospital’s billing team and check with them. ”
She clamps a hand over her mouth. “Holy fucking shit,” she mumbles.
“I know.” We stare at each other for a moment. Her eyes are huge. “Want me to call the hospital?”
“Like, yesterday.”
I laugh, and she giggles too. I feel a little unhinged. Drunk, almost. “Okay. Let’s do it.”
This time, I come around to her side of the table and pull up a chair as close to hers as possible.
Sensing an increase in the energy level, Jambon rouses himself from his usual place on Dad’s armchair and puts his big, cute head in my lap.
While we’re waiting for someone to pick up, I set the phone to speaker and put it on the table so I can pull up Sylvie’s account details from my Notes app.
Only then do I take her hand and grip it tight.
We’re both practically hyperventilating by the time someone picks up.
Trying to keep my voice as steady as possible, I relay our patient number to Tyrone, our operator. “Could I check the balance of this account, please?”
“Hold for a moment,” Tyrone says. We make faces at each other while we wait, like What in the ever-loving fuck is happening right now? faces.
“I have your account here,” he says after the longest moment ever, and my stomach bottoms out.
I feel like someone on death row who’s just been told they might have gotten a stay of execution.
Then he says, “The balance on the account is zero. It was settled in full by the Unburdened charity on November sixteenth.”
November sixteenth was four days ago.
“Oh my God,” I whisper, as right next to me, Sylvie lets out a kind of wail and bows her head almost to the table, fisting her hands over her eyes. “Oh my God, oh my God. Shit. I can’t believe it.”
There’s a pause, and then Tyrone says, “Congratulations, ma’am. That’s really somethin’.”
“Yeah,” I manage to say. “This is unbelievable. We got the letter but we thought it was a scam, you know? So we called the charity and they told us to confirm. This is so insane.” I’m gabbling, but I don’t care.
I release Sylvie’s hand and get her in a side hug. Her entire body is shaking like crazy.
“We’ve had a few of them come through this week,” Tyrone says. “You guys have had a Thanksgiving miracle, I guess.”
“Yeah. For sure.” I can barely speak. Tears are coursing down my cheeks. Thanksgiving miracle is the understatement of the century.
“Jeez. That is one big-ass bill they paid for you,” he says, and I explode with unhinged laughter.
“Right?”
“Sorry, it’s just… I spend a lot of my day talking to folks who are worried sick, you know? It’s nice to have a conversation like this.”
He’s so nice, and it makes me feel even more emotional. Who are all these people out there in the world, donating blindly to change strangers’ lives? And then being happy for strangers at the other end of the phone when they have a change in their luck?
“Well, thank you, Tyrone,” I say. “I appreciate you so much. I think we can trust this now, right? I’m not hallucinating?”
“I’m very real,” he tells me, “and I’m staring at a big line of zeroes.
So you’re not hallucinating. But I should remind you that any further outpatient or inpatient therapies will still be payable should your insurance fail to cover it.
We still have you attending physical therapy at one of our outpatient centers, is that correct? ”
He thinks I’m Sylvie, I realize. No matter. Her debt is my debt. “Correct,” I say with a big, wet sniff. “And I understand. That’s not a problem.” Future PT sessions we can handle. It was the hospital debt that was the albatross around our family’s necks.
“Well, congratulations again,” he tells me.
After I’ve hung up on my second new buddy of the day—third, if you include our fairy godmother or godfather, obviously—I turn the side hug into a proper hug, and we just sit together, shaking and crying and screaming a little while Jambon gets in on the action, pawing at us in excitement.
“It’s over,” Sylvie says. “It’s all over. I can’t believe it.”
I know exactly what she means. She may still be sitting here with her crutches propped up next to her and her wheelchair in the corner of the living room and God knows how many more months of pain and struggle and tough, tough rehabilitation ahead of her, but that’s not the shadow that’s been hanging over us these past six months.
Because every day, Sylvie makes progress on the physical front, but every day, that debt has hung over us, looming larger and larger as it became more overdue.
We were all psyching ourselves up for what the hell would happen when it got passed over to a debt collection agency.
And now it’s just… gone. Poof! Evaporated.
“We have to call Dad!” Sylvie exclaims. “We have to get him home!”
So we call him, and we break our incredible, not-remotely-believable news to the poor guy with yelling and tears. I don’t think he can actually understand what we’re saying, because we’re making no sense at all.
“The debt is gone, Dad!” Sylvie yells finally. “There was a donation, and it’s just—paid. Boom. We don’t owe anything.”
There’s a silence at the other end of the line, and then he says, in such a small voice that it breaks my heart in two, “Gone?”
“We’re debt-free,” I tell him. “Some donor paid off a whole chunk of medical debt in Hudson County, and we were among the lucky ones.”
“Oh my sweet Jesus,” Dad says. “Oh my sweet, sweet Jesus.”
“Dad?” I say. “Go sit down, okay? This is a lot.”
There’s some shuffling. Then: “We’re debt-free?”
“We sure are!” Sylvie singsongs. “We’re solvent, suckers!
” Dad and I both laugh at that, probably because we haven’t seen her this light in six months.
The stress of this accident and its financial burden have taken such a toll on my sister, but the woman sitting next to me looks twenty-seven for the first time in half a year.
“Come home!” I tell Dad. “Shut up the shop! Give everyone the afternoon off! We gotta celebrate.”
“Damn straight we do,” Dad says. “Americano Italian all the way!”
That makes me laugh. Americano Italian is a Jersey institution—a steakhouse-slash-cocktail bar on Broadway where the waiters wear white tux jackets and the meat is just as legendary as the live music.
We haven’t been for years—not since Sylvie graduated college, in fact. “We’ll never get a reservation.”
“I’ll call ’em,” Dad insists. “I’ll call ’em up right now, and I’ll tell ’em we got a lot to celebrate. My little girl had a miracle happen to her today, and we are damn well eating filet. I swear your mom pulled these strings from heaven. I swear it. I knew she’d come through for us.”
At his words, I hug Sylvie harder. I’m so freaking happy, but there’s pressure across the front of my face from all the tears that still want to escape. “Okay, Dad,” I say. “While you’re thanking her, ask her if she can pull one more string and get us a table for four.”
I wish I could have faith like Dad does. I wish I could believe that it’s Mom who’s showered us with these enormous blessings six days before Thanksgiving.
But there’s something about what Tracy said that’s niggling at me. Something about how crazy it was that our debt balance was exactly one percent of the overall that was paid down. I pick up the letter from Unburdened and check the final number that they’ve forgiven. $366,143.50
Three hundred and sixty-six thousand, one hundred and forty-three dollars and fifty cents. That is not a round number. I type it into my phone calculator and multiply it by one hundred.
Shit.
The total donation size for whatever bundle we fell in came to just over thirty-six-point-six million dollars.
That is what is technically known as a fuck-ton of money.
I’m absolutely not about to share my hunch with my sister or my dad. After all, Tracy confirmed that Sylvie was chosen totally at random. But my spider senses are telling me that the timing of what is undoubtedly a Hail Mary for our family, and an insanely generous one at that, is a little suspect.
I can’t help thinking that Mom didn’t pull these strings from Heaven.
I think our anonymous fairy godperson may be someone who recent events would suggest hangs out a lot closer to hell.