The Vanderbeekers Lost and Found

by Karina Yan Glaser

  “Where is he?” Jessie said, letting the bag of books fall to the ground. She crossed her arms on her chest and crouched on the sidewalk, hunching her shoulders as if protecting her heart from breaking.

  “We’re going to find him,” Isa said, putting her arm around Jessie’s shoulders. “He’s going to be okay.”

  Four

  The Vanderbeekers headed back uptown, jumping on the subway because of the bags. Instead of going home, they made their way to the Treehouse Bakery and Cat Café.

  Isa immediately felt her body relax when she spotted the cat café. It was like a beacon on 143rd Street. Delicate lace curtains allowed a glimpse into the cozy space through the large french windows, and mums in burgundy, sunshine yellow, and burnt orange were settled into window boxes. A large orange-and-white cat sat on the windowsill, observing their approach with focused, unblinking eyes.

  Isa helped Hyacinth tie Billie Holiday and Franz to a pipe in front of the bakery where there was a bowl of water for animals passing by. Then she opened the door and the Vanderbeekers squeezed through the entrance with all of the bags. Purl One immediately greeted them and pounced on their sneakers, gripping Oliver’s shoelaces in her mouth and giving them a strong yank. Oliver leaned down and carefully disentangled the laces from her teeth, then picked her up and settled her inside the front of his hoodie as if she were a kangaroo baby. Mama, who was unloading a tray of cookies into the display counter, looked up.

  “Hey,” she said. “What’s with all the bags?”

  “We need to talk to you about something,” Isa said.

  Mama’s brow creased in worry. “Uh-oh. What did you do now?”

  “Nothing bad,” Oliver said hurriedly, but Mama’s forehead refused to smooth out.

  “Take the table by the window so you can keep an eye on Billie Holiday and Franz,” Mama said. “I’ll be right there.”

  Isa shoved the bags of Orlando’s belongings under the table, and the Vanderbeekers took seats and waited for Mama. Hyacinth picked up one of the adoptable kittens and brushed her fingers against its forehead. Laney pulled her turtleneck to her mouth and chewed on the fold. Oliver, who still had Purl One in his hoodie, traced his fingertips along the grooves in the wood table. Jessie sat hunched in her chair, staring out the window, one foot tapping an erratic beat against the ground.

  Mama arrived with a tray of teacups and a teapot that released a trail of fragrant steam from its spout. She also set down a plate piled with cookies and fruit, but no one had an appetite, not even Oliver.

  “Talk to me,” Mama said, settling herself between Jessie and Isa.

  Jessie was a statue, not taking her eyes from the window.

  Isa looked at her siblings, then back at their mom. “You know how we’ve been leaving food for the Person of Mystery?”

  Mama’s stranger-danger radar went on alert. “Did you see this person? Is everything okay?”

  “We didn’t see the PM, but we have a good idea who he is,” Oliver said. “Hyacinth found this in the shed.” He slid the T-shirt across the table to Mama.

  Mama’s hand flew to her mouth. “But . . . how could . . . That’s Orlando’s . . .”

  “We went to his apartment,” Isa continued, “and two men were emptying it out. Just tossing his stuff into a dumpster. The super said the Stewarts haven’t paid the rent in three months, so the management company evicted them two weeks ago. He gave us five minutes to grab some of Orlando’s things.” She gestured to the bags surrounding them.

  “We tried looking for him at cross-country practice, but he wasn’t there. His phone just rang and rang,” Hyacinth said.

  “What should we do?” Isa finished.

  Mama’s eyes were bright, as if she were trying to blink back an emotion that she didn’t want her kids to see. “I think,” she said, “we need to talk to Miss Josie.”

  * * *

  Mama took the rest of the day off work, instructing the store manager to close early if they ran out of cookies. The Vanderbeekers headed for home, the two dogs leading the way. Autumn was showing its colors, the leaves on the trees a mix of reds, oranges, and golds. The brownstones and buildings along their path were adorned with pumpkins and Halloween decorations: cotton stretched thin to look like cobwebs; black plastic spiders the size of quarters perched on fences; and, at one building, a set of fake gravestones that Hyacinth refused to look at.

  On 141st Street, the Vanderbeekers navigated the slightly uneven sidewalks where tree roots had pushed up the concrete. They had memorized every bump and crack many years ago. The trees, growing in pits spaced about twenty feet apart and surrounded by foot-tall fence guards, stretched their limbs toward the sky, competing for sunshine with the buildings that surrounded them. Laney brushed her hands against the tree trunks as she passed, running her fingers against the rough bark and trying to absorb comfort from the old maple trees.

  As Laney walked down the block, she chewed on her turtleneck and thought about Orlando. She knew some homeless people in her neighborhood. There was Osbourne, who spent his days on the corner of 137th Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard and held open doors at Uptown Grocer in hopes of tips. He spent his nights at a men’s shelter in East Harlem and went to local churches during the day for meals and showers. Laney also knew of a man who sometimes sat in a wheelchair by the subway turnstiles at 135th Street. He sort of scared her because his eyes were always closed and he moaned as if in pain. Sometimes she left a snack from her backpack next to his wheelchair, but she never knew if he found it.

  Laney had never thought about kids not having a place to live—or having to sleep in a tiny, dark shed. It made her stomach feel hollow and empty.

  When they arrived at the brownstone, they dropped off Franz and left Orlando’s things in the basement. Then they all went up to the second floor with Billie Holiday. Oliver knocked on the door, and a few seconds later Miss Josie appeared and Billie Holiday wiggled her way into the apartment and beelined for Mr. Jeet.

  “Hello, my dears!” Miss Josie said, her face filled with a beautiful smile. “Come see the hospital bed!” Her smile vanished at the sight of their somber faces.

  “Is everything okay?” she asked.

  Mama ushered the kids into the apartment. The hospital bed was set up in the living room, right next to a window. Mr. Jeet was sitting in his wheelchair next to the couch, and his eyes sparkled when he saw them. Laney ran to him and wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed his cheek. Then she reached her hand into her pocket and pulled out a rock she had collected and put it into Mr. Jeet’s hand.

  “Why is the hospital bed in the living room?” Laney asked, pointing.

  “It was too wide to fit through our bedroom door,” Miss Josie explained. “But I think it works fine to have it in the living room. Why don’t you try it out?”

  Laney nodded, then crawled up onto the bed and rolled around, bumping into the safety bars on each side. “It’s so comfortable!” she announced.

  “Don’t give her the remote,” Oliver said, but it was too late. Laney had already located it hanging on the rail and was making the back of the bed lower and rise.

  Mama took a seat on the couch next to Mr. Jeet in his wheelchair, and Isa and Jessie settled down next to her. Hyacinth stood next to Mr. Jeet, gripping his hand, and Oliver paced restlessly around the living room. Laney was still playing with the hospital bed.

  “You guys are making me worried,” Miss Josie said.

  “The kids,” Mama began, “have found some things in the garden shed that might reveal who has been sleeping there.”

  “Oh gracious,” Miss Josie said, turning her head to look at Mr. Jeet before her eyes met Mama’s again. “Is it someone we know?”

  Mr. Jeet made a noise and his right arm reached forward. Oliver hurried over and grabbed him in case he lost his balance and tipped out of the wheelchair.

  “Yes,” Mama said. “It’s someone you know.”

  Five

  Miss Josie fingered th
e T-shirt that Jessie had given her. “He promised he would tell me if this happened again.”

  “What do you mean, again?” Jessie asked, squinting.

  Miss Josie sighed. “Remember when he spent the summer here, a few years ago?”

  The Vanderbeekers nodded.

  “It was the same situation, only back then he called us when his mom didn’t come home for two nights. We took the next flight to Georgia, picked him up, and brought him back here. We finally heard from his mom a few weeks later, and together we decided to keep Orlando for the rest of the summer while his mom worked out whatever was going on. At the end of August, we took him back to Georgia and made sure his mom was doing okay before leaving him there. We wanted to be his guardians, but she didn’t want that.”

  “What does that mean?” Laney asked. “Being his guardians?”

  “It would mean we would take care of him permanently, as if we were his parents,” Miss Josie said. “We wanted that very much.”

  “He never said anything about his mom disappearing,” Jessie said, her face stricken. “I had no idea.”

  “He didn’t want to talk about it,” Miss Josie explained. “It was a really confusing time for him.”

  “What do you think we should do?” Mama asked. Her hands were pressed before her face in a prayer.

  “Let me get the full story first,” Miss Josie said. “I’ll call around to my folks in Georgia and try to reach Orlando’s mom. Then we need to talk to Orlando tonight.”

  The Vanderbeekers gave Miss Josie some privacy while she got on the phone, calling family back in Georgia to ask if they had heard anything from Orlando’s mom in the last month. Miss Josie asked the Vanderbeekers to come up to their apartment that night for dinner. As always, Orlando was planning on eating at the brownstone.

  The Vanderbeekers went back down to their apartment, and the afternoon dragged on. Jessie and Isa made their way to the basement, taking refuge next to the whistling radiator and burrowing into the nest they created with the throw pillows. When Isa eventually got up to practice her violin, Jessie tortured herself by looking up homelessness on her phone. There were so many statistics: one study said that 4.2 million kids experience homelessness in America each year. She read about how in New York City, one in ten kids was sleeping in a homeless shelter or in the home of friends or relatives. As she read, she wondered if there were people in her own class and school who lived in shelters.

  After an hour, she felt Isa’s hand on her shoulder.

  “Hey,” Isa said. “Why don’t you take a break from the research? Maybe we’re making assumptions and there’s an explanation for all of this. Orlando’s mom could have found another place in the area. Remember how Orlando’s always complaining about how mean their building manager is? He talked about the possibility of moving a few months ago.”

  Jessie put down her phone. “Yeah,” she said, trying to breathe through her worry. “Maybe everything is okay.”

  They headed upstairs, where Mama was making dinner: cauliflower Parmesan and a gigantic salad. Hyacinth was sitting on the floor leaning against the couch, knitting with a vengeance, Franz’s head on her lap and one of his ears flipped open to the ceiling. Oliver was sprawled on the couch reading Other Words for Home by Jasmine Warga.

  “What’s with the super-speedy knitting?” Jessie asked, pushing Oliver’s legs off the couch so she could sit down.

  “She’s stress knitting,” Oliver commented from behind his book. “She thinks she needs to make Orlando enough cold-weather accessories to last him until he’s eighty.”

  Hyacinth’s brow furrowed. “I just want him to be warm. Being cold is the worst.” She continued to knit, the ends of her needles bouncing against Franz’s head as she worked.

  Isa sat on the carpet next to Laney, who had spread out her whole shell collection from the beach over the summer. She was carefully pasting googly eyes on them.

  “Hey, Laney,” Isa said as she watched Laney arrange and rearrange the shells. “At dinner, don’t mention anything about the shed or the apartment we went to see today, or about our conversation with Miss Josie. Okay?”

  “You know what, Laney?” Oliver piped in. “Maybe don’t even talk to Orlando. Or look at him.”

  Laney turned to face Oliver, her hands on her hips. “I can talk to Orlando if I want to.”

  Isa walked over and put her arm over Laney’s shoulders. “What Oliver means,” she said, narrowing her eyes at her brother, “is that we should let Miss Josie do the talking. Orlando might be sensitive about what’s going on, and we should see how he feels instead of bombarding him with questions and worries.”

  “I have a lot of questions for him,” Jessie said, glowering from the couch and ignoring Hyacinth. “Number one: What the heck is going on? Number two: Why did you hide this huge thing from your best friend?”

  Isa sighed and got ready to launch into her let’s-not-jump-to-conclusions speech again, when the doorbell rang.

  “He’s here! He’s here!” Laney shrieked, running toward the door, Franz and Tuxedo racing after her.

  “Just act normal, just act normal,” Hyacinth whispered to herself, her knitting needles clacking furiously.

  Laney flung open the door. “Orlando!” she said, wrapping her arms around him so suddenly that he had to helicopter his arms to keep his balance. “You’re okay!”

  “Wow,” Orlando said. “That’s a . . . strange welcome. Why wouldn’t I be okay?”

  “She’s been like this all day,” Isa interjected. “Don’t mind her.”

  Orlando, finally released from Laney’s grip, paused as he took off his coat, and looked in surprise at the five Vanderbeeker kids lined up in front of him. “What’s going on?”

  Laney gripped the top of her turtleneck with both hands and pulled it so high that it covered her mouth and rested right under her nose.

  “Nothing!” Isa said. “Everything’s fine!”

  “Where have you been?” Jessie asked, crossing her arms and glowering at Orlando. “I’ve been calling nonstop.”

  “I didn’t have my phone with me today,” Orlando said. “Did you need something?”

  “You would know if you picked up your phone. And when I called, it didn’t go to voicemail or anything,” Jessie pressed. “It just rang and rang.”

  “That’s weird,” Orlando said, turning away to hang up his coat.

  “It’s weird?” Jessie said, her voice rising. “Or maybe it’s because—”

  “Orlando!” Mama interrupted Jessie, coming in from the kitchen. “How are you, honey? I made your favorite dinner tonight, cauliflower Parmesan with garlic bread and Caesar salad.”

  “Wow, Mrs. Vanderbeeker, that’s so nice of you—”

  “And for dessert, pound cake with raspberry drizzle!” she finished.

  “Pound cake!” Laney said from behind her turtleneck. “I love pound cake!”

  Orlando’s smile dimmed. “Mrs. Vanderbeeker,” he said, his eyes creased in puzzlement, “you know my birthday isn’t until February.”

  “I was in the mood to cook. We’re eating at your aunt and uncle’s place tonight. Help me bring the food upstairs, okay?”

  The Vanderbeekers and Orlando grabbed the dishes from the kitchen and made their way to Miss Josie and Mr. Jeet’s apartment on the second floor. Miss Josie had the door open before they knocked.

  “Hello!” she said, her eyes seeking out Orlando. Even though there was a big smile on her face, her eyes were worried.

  “Hey, Aunt Josie,” Orlando said, leaning down to kiss her cheek.

  She patted his shoulder, then turned away. “Come in, come in.”

  Jessie noticed that Miss Josie wiped her eyes as she led them into the kitchen.

  “Mrs. Vanderbeeker made a feast,” Orlando commented as he laid the huge baking dish of cauliflower Parmesan on the counter and took off the flowered oven mitts he had been wearing. He turned to face the living room and spotted the hospital bed.

  “Hey! T
he bed looks great!” Orlando said. “But why’s it in the living room?”

  “Didn’t fit through the bedroom door,” Laney said with authority. “Want to try it? I’ll show you.”

  Orlando laughed. “I’d probably break it!”

  She eyed his football-player frame, then shook her head. “It would be fine for you. I bounced on it and everything.”

  Another knock on the door revealed Mr. Beiderman in his signature all-black outfit with his cat, Princess Cutie, in his arms. Mr. Beiderman’s eyes settled for a moment on Orlando before scanning the rest of the room. “Hi,” he said gruffly.

  Laney ran to him and gave him a hug, and Princess Cutie hopped into Laney’s embrace.

  “Come, come,” Miss Josie said. “Let’s eat before the food gets cold.”

  Miss Josie and Mr. Jeet had only a small dining table that could seat four at a squeeze, so people filled up their dishes at the kitchen counter and then found seats in the living room. Miss Josie made a plate for Mr. Jeet and brought it to him, pulling out a side table that swung right in front of his wheelchair so he could eat comfortably. Laney wanted to sit next to him on the couch, but Papa steered her toward the table. She’d been forbidden to eat on Miss Josie’s pristine couch ever since she’d upended a bowl of tomato soup on it the previous month.

  Once everyone was settled, Mama gave thanks for the food and they dug in. Jessie sat next to Orlando on the long couch, seemingly one hundred percent focused on her food, while Isa sat on his other side and kept up a stream of chatter to fill the uncomfortable silence. She talked about the violin piece she was working on and about the annoying kid in her chamber group who never practiced, and about her teacher, Mr. Van Hooten, who had recently adopted his first pet, an enormous gray cat he had fallen in love with at the Treehouse Bakery and Cat Café. He had named the cat Arpeggio, and his love for it was beginning to rival his love for the violin.

  Hyacinth looked forlornly at Orlando between bites of her garlic bread (she refused to touch the cauliflower Parmesan; cauliflower was ghost broccoli), and Oliver kept tapping his foot nervously on the floor. Mama, Papa, Mr. Beiderman, and Miss Josie were having a hushed conversation near the kitchen, stopping suddenly whenever any of the kids glanced at them.