The Vanderbeekers and the Hidden Garden

by Karina Yan Glaser

  Once inside, they surveyed the land.

  “We can put the fountain over there,” Laney said, pointing to the middle, around where the bathtub was.

  “Who said we were getting a fountain?” Oliver asked.

  “I thought it up right this minute,” Laney said proudly.

  Hyacinth showed Oliver where she wanted Tilia of the Eternal Spring to go—right next to the Silver Queen—and Oliver moved the tree off the hand truck and set it down in the designated spot.

  “Let’s get all the trash picked up before we do any planting,” Jessie advised. She passed out the gardening gloves and trash bags and told the younger kids to watch out for broken glass and to be careful with what they touched. “And for goodness’ sake, don’t go anywhere near that toilet!” she added.

  The kids got to work. Laney picked up a potato chip bag and Hyacinth picked up a plastic Coke bottle and threw it away. Oliver and Jessie grabbed trash and pulled weeds, and within half an hour, everyone was sweaty and the trash bag filled up.

  They were weeding along the fence line that bordered the sidewalk when they heard the staccato taps of shoes.

  Oliver shushed his sisters. “It’s Mr. Huxley!” he whispered.

  The Vanderbeekers immediately froze.

  The steps approached and stopped by the fence.

  The kids took shallow breaths.

  Then they heard clicking, the same sound Mama’s and Papa’s phones made when they used the camera.

  There was rummaging in the ivy on the fence, as if Mr. Huxley was looking for something. Was he looking for the way in? Oliver hoped the opening had been concealed when he’d shut the gate. The ivy before the Vanderbeekers rustled while they inched away from where they thought Mr. Huxley was.

  Finally, the movement on the other side of the fence stopped and they heard Mr. Huxley walk away. Which left the Vanderbeekers wondering: Why was Mr. Huxley so interested in the lot now? And was it just a happenstance that his interest coincided with their own?

  * * *

  After a few minutes of waiting to see if Mr. Huxley would return, the Vanderbeekers got back to work. Oliver picked up another plastic bottle and threw it toward an open trash bag a few feet away. It missed by two inches. Oliver’s spirits sank. He could already envision what position Coach would assign him on the basketball team: benchwarmer.

  “Are we done yet?” Laney asked. She had settled herself on an empty milk crate under the silver maple tree, her hair plastered to her forehead. She scratched the insides of her arms, which always got super itchy in the summer humidity. The sun was burning hot, and Oliver wondered if they should go back home for sunscreen. This was a thought that had never once crossed his mind in his entire life, but one look at Laney made him think going home would be a good idea.

  Jessie stood up from where she was pulling weeds and stretched her back. “This is going to take a while.”

  “I think it’s getting cleaner,” Hyacinth said, grabbing a weed and tugging it. The weed refused to budge. She yanked harder, putting all her weight into it, and the weed came loose and Hyacinth tumbled to the ground. “Is it lunchtime yet?” she asked, not making any move to get up.

  Jessie looked at her watch. “It’s eleven thirty. I think we can take a break.”

  “Yay!” Oliver said, then wiped his face with his sleeve.

  The Vanderbeekers gathered up their tools, put them in an old paint bucket, and left it by Tilia. Oliver opened the gate slowly and peeked out.

  “Coast clear,” he reported. They filed out and pushed the gate closed again. Oliver, who had used the Internet the night before to research how to reset the lock, changed the combination to 0307, the month and day of Laney’s birth, to make it more secure but still easy to remember.

  They were a few steps away from the garden gate when Herman Huxley biked down the sidewalk. Oliver’s mind raced. Had Herman seen them leave the garden?

  Herman was wearing a pair of brand-new sneakers and riding his Eastern Racer 500. He braked when he got to them and let the wheels squeal. “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing,” Oliver said, unconsciously rubbing his scraped elbow.

  “I saw you coming out of that gate. What’s in there?”

  Oliver’s heart stuttered at the thought of being discovered. “None of your business.”

  Herman’s face hardened. “Who wants to be in that toxic waste dump, anyways?”

  “That’s not a very nice thing to say,” Hyacinth called from behind Jessie, where she was hiding.

  “Whatever. I’ve got to get to robotics camp.” Herman pushed off on his bike and raced down the street.

  Oliver glared at him. Herman had no idea how good he had it: nice sneakers, awesome bike, and now robotics camp? It wasn’t fair.

  Oliver thought about their morning in the lot and had a moment of doubt. What if Herman was right about it being an irredeemable toxic waste pit?

  * * *

  The kids returned home later that afternoon, and the second they opened the door, Franz pounced on Hyacinth and licked her face as if they had been separated for years. Then Mama came out from the kitchen and took one glance at the state of her children. She clucked over their sunburns, the scratches on their arms and legs from the weeds, and the state of Laney’s arms and neck, which were red and puckered from all the scratching she had done.

  “What have you been doing all morning?” Mama cried.

  “Picking up trash!” Laney said, scratching at her neck.

  “We were helping clean the, uh, park,” Jessie said, glancing at her siblings.

  “It looks like you’ve been rolling around in thistles,” Mama said. “Go take showers and I’ll get lunch ready for you.”

  Oliver took the upstairs bathroom while the girls showered in the downstairs bathroom, and when they were clean, Mama tended to Laney’s eczema flare-up with lotion to help with the itchiness. Finally, they sat down for lunch.

  The kids sucked down huge glasses of water along with wraps Mama had made tortillas filled with roast turkey, tomatoes, and lettuce. The food tasted so good! Jessie wanted to go upstairs and take a nap after her stomach was filled.

  “Did you go to the hospital this morning?” Hyacinth asked.

  “Uh-huh,” Mama answered.

  There was a long pause.

  “How’s Mr. Jeet?” Laney finally asked.

  “When is he coming home?” Oliver said.

  “I don’t know,” Mama said. “He’s got a long recovery ahead of him.”

  “Two days?” Laney asked.

  “Longer than that.”

  “A week?” Jessie asked.

  “Maybe longer than that. I don’t know,” Mama said. “He can’t rush it. Now tell me more about this park project.”

  Oliver raised his water glass to his mom. “That’s a classic move.”

  Mama raised her eyebrows at him.

  “What does that mean?” Laney said.

  “It means,” Jessie explained, “that Mama is really good at changing the subject when there’s an uncomfortable conversation.”

  A quiet fell over the table. Jessie swallowed the last bite of her sandwich. Mr. Jeet and Miss Josie had been gone for only two full days. Why did it feel so much longer?

  Twelve

  After lunch, Hyacinth ran upstairs to get her knitting supplies. Her yarn rope was getting out of control. She could tie it around the doorknob of her bedroom and trail it all the way down the stairs, through the living room, and to the basement! It was beautiful, her most impressive yarn project to date.

  Hyacinth stuffed the project in her backpack, then reached for her knitting pouch and attached it to her belt. Inside the pouch were two sets of knitting needles in different sizes and two skeins of yarn, purple and green. This was the last of the yarn from Mama’s collection, and Hyacinth wondered what she would do once it was all gone.

  Hyacinth stepped outside her bedroom door and went downstairs with Franz bumping his nose against her ankles. Her
siblings were already waiting for her by the door. She clipped a leash to Franz’s harness, and off they went.

  When they got to the gate, Oliver opened the lock and the Vanderbeekers sneaked in. The garden welcomed them with a chorus of birdsong and a summer breeze that smelled like ripe strawberries and sunshine. Hyacinth put her backpack on the ground and picked up a spade from the paint bucket. She hummed as she worked, enjoying the way the cleared area was growing. Soon enough, bags filled with weeds were jumbled in a pile by the gate.

  Jessie consulted her watch. “The garbage truck will be here in an hour. Hyacinth, can you put these trash bags by the curb?”

  Hyacinth was ready for a knitting break anyway, so she put on her backpack and picked up the trash bags. Franz trailed after her, his leash dragging behind him. After opening the gate a tiny crack and seeing no one, she opened it wider and stepped onto the sidewalk with the bags. She threw them on the pile of garbage already in front of the church, then grabbed a plastic milk crate that had been put out for recycling. She walked back in front of the garden fence and sat on the upside-down milk crate. Franz lay next to her, rolling over so his belly was exposed to the sunshine, while Hyacinth took out her yarn and garland. She wove the end of the garland back around her fingers and got into a good knitting rhythm while the sun crept up the sky and warmed the neighborhood. She was about to switch yarn colors when a voice interrupted her peace.

  “What are you working on?”

  Hyacinth looked up and shaded her eyes against the sun.

  It was Herman Huxley.

  She looked back down at her knitting, hoping Herman would go away. His footsteps faded, but they returned only a minute later. A second milk crate was placed next to hers, and Herman sat down and leaned over to pet Franz.

  “I thought you had robotics camp,” Hyacinth said, squinting at him.

  “It got canceled. Nice dog,” he said, rubbing that special spot on Franz’s belly that made his left leg twitch in happiness. “I used to knit with my hands like that, but now I like knitting with needles.”

  Hyacinth didn’t say anything, but she unzipped her pouch and pulled out a set of knitting needles and some spring-green yarn and handed it to him.

  “What are we making?” he asked.

  Hyacinth shrugged, continuing her massive yarn garland.

  Herman, in the meantime, was casting on stitches at a remarkable rate. Hyacinth was shocked. Here was a kid, just like her, who could knit!

  Hyacinth wanted to say Did you knock my brother down on purpose? but instead she said, “I’ve been working on this rope for weeks. Maybe I’ll enter it in the Guinness Book of World Records for longest yarn rope.”

  He didn’t respond.

  “Who taught you how to knit?” she asked.

  “My mom.”

  “Do you think she can teach me to knit really fast like you?” Hyacinth asked.

  “Probably not. She works for the United Nations, so she’s always working and traveling. She’s never around.”

  “Oh.”

  “She taught me when I was five. My grandma said it was silly for her to teach a five-year-old boy how to knit, but I ended up liking it.”

  “My mom taught me too, but she’s not that good. Sometimes I go upstairs and knit with Miss Josie.”

  Herman held up his knitting. He had transformed his green yarn into a four-leaf clover. He leaned over and tied the loose ends around her wrist to make a bracelet.

  Before Hyacinth could say thank you, Herman said, “We should do some yarn bombing.”

  Hyacinth did not know what yarn bombing was. It sounded violent.

  “It’s like graffiti for knitters,” Herman explained when he saw Hyacinth’s uncertainty. “One time I knitted something to wrap around lampposts. Another time I covered some parking meters. The point is to make really industrial things look less depressing.”

  “Okay. How do we start?” Hyacinth asked.

  “We can start easy, since it’s your first time. How about covering that post?” He pointed at the silver post holding up a sign that announced that street cleanings were on Tuesdays and Fridays from three to five in the afternoon.

  Hyacinth looked at Herman. “That sounds good, but do we have enough yarn?”

  “We don’t have to cover the whole thing,” he explained.

  Hyacinth watched Herman cast on new stitches using the purple yarn. Then she thought, Herman actually is pretty nice.

  * * *

  Since they had a limited amount of yarn, Herman said goodbye after they attached the yarn bombing to the pole, and he went home. Hyacinth rejoined her siblings in the garden, where no one had even noticed she had been gone.

  An hour later, much progress had been made, and they headed to the brownstone, where they found a note from Mama on the dining room table.

  They had an hour before dinner, so Hyacinth and Laney decided to check in on Mr. Beiderman.

  The two youngest Vanderbeekers went up the stairs. Franz trotted next to Hyacinth, his nails clicking against the wood staircase. When they got to the top floor, Hyacinth knocked on the door and Mr. Beiderman’s voice rang out.

  “Who is it?” a voice demanded.

  “Hyacinth and Laney!” the girls chorused.

  “Hold on! I’m . . . cleaning up.”

  A minute later, the door cracked open and Princess Cutie squeezed out before it fully opened. Franz promptly licked the kitten’s face, making the fur spike up on top of her head. Mr. Beiderman opened the door wider, and Laney sniffed the air suspiciously.

  “I smell that meat-in-a-tin stuff,” Laney reported, making a face.

  “Oooh,” Hyacinth said as she wagged a finger at Mr. Beiderman. “Mama is going to be mad at you!”

  “You have no proof,” Mr. Beiderman retorted. “That’s just the smell of . . . turpentine. For my paintings.”

  “Uh-huh,” Laney said, disbelieving. “I know that meat smell when I smell it.”

  Laney marched inside and made a beeline for the garbage can, where she found an empty SPAM tin under a magazine. She then inspected the lower cabinets until she came upon a secret stash of SPAM behind some canned beans. “You are good at hiding things,” she told him. “Was Luciana good at it too?”

  “She was . . . well, yes, she was very good at hiding things,” Mr. Beiderman said.

  Hyacinth and Laney stilled, hoping Mr. Beiderman would keep talking. Laney liked to ask about Luciana even though sometimes Mr. Beiderman did not want to talk about her.

  “She loved burying things too,” he continued, surprising the girls as he went on. “I used to take her to the playground when she was your age, and she would bury things in the sandbox and then forget she had done it. She was like a squirrel.” Mr. Beiderman closed the cabinet doors and noticed that Laney’s neck was covered with scratches. “What happened to your neck? And did you get sunburned?”

  Laney squinted at him. “Are you changing the subject?”

  Mr. Beiderman glared at her.

  “We were outside all day,” Laney said hurriedly.

  “Doing what?” Mr. Beiderman asked.

  “Oh, you know,” Hyacinth said.

  Mr. Beiderman narrowed his eyes, but Hyacinth refused to reveal anything.

  “I was wondering,” Laney began as she stacked the SPAM tins in a pyramid on the table, “do you think plants and flowers like music? Jessie says no because they’re not nervous.”

  “They don’t have nervous systems,” Hyacinth corrected her.

  “Isa played violin music for Miss Josie’s plants yesterday, and they loved it,” Laney said.

  “Luciana had a window box full of lavender in her bedroom,” said Mr. Beiderman. “She used to play the violin for them all the time. She said it made plants grow better.”

  “You want to come with us tomorrow to Ms. Hiba’s store and buy some lavender?” Laney asked.

  “I . . . can’t,” Mr. Beiderman said.

  Hyacinth could tell Laney was getting ready for a
big counterargument, so she said, “It’s okay, Mr. Beiderman. Mama always says healing takes time.”

  And she curled up on the couch next to him and they looked ahead at the wall, which was covered with black-and-white paintings Mr. Beiderman had made of his wife and daughter over the course of many years after their deaths. Princess Cutie hopped lightly onto his lap and curled up against his stomach, purring. Hyacinth leaned her head on his shoulder, and Laney cuddled up on his other side.

  Death had never been real to Hyacinth, but now, with Mr. Jeet being so sick, she could understand a tiny bit of Mr. Beiderman’s loss. She felt Mr. Beiderman’s shaky breaths, and she wondered how his heart could keep beating and how his lungs could keep drawing in air even though he’d lost the two people he loved most in the world.

  Thirteen

  That night, as Oliver chewed the quinoa and spinach salad at dinner, he thought about what life had been like just three days earlier, back when Mama had made real desserts, like butterscotch cookies and gooey chocolate brownies. When he could hear Mr. Jeet and Miss Josie puttering around upstairs, the sound from their evening game shows drifting through the brownstone and their laughter bringing life to the building.

  Now the brownstone was so hauntingly quiet that Oliver felt suffocated. He needed to get out. His breath came out in a whoosh as he pushed his chair back abruptly. “Can I go visit Angie?” Mama glanced at him, surprised, but after one concerned quirk of an eyebrow, she let him go.

  Oliver raced out of the brownstone and skidded to a stop on the sidewalk. He gulped in the cooler air. Instead of going to Angie’s place, he went to the back of the brownstone, squeezed by the trash cans, and entered the backyard through the side gate. He climbed the ladder to his treehouse. If Jimmy L were around, they could talk on their walkie-talkies. He looked across the yard at the brownstone where his friend lived; the bedroom would be empty for the next three weeks. Oliver was careful not to look toward his own brownstone—he knew the second floor would be dark and empty.