I thought I might wake up my parents, and see if they could pick out some of the whispered words, but before I could wake them, the voices were gone. The truck was closed back up, and in a few moments it left, the throaty sound of its muffled engine trailing off as it turned the corner.

  The lights stayed on in Mr. Vandermeer’s house for about half an hour—but the curtains were pulled, and I couldn’t see what went on inside. Finally his lights went off, and I drifted to sleep.

  * * *

  There’s a trick your mind plays when you look at an empty room. When your brain just sees a floor, and a wall and four corners, it makes you see the place as something small and unpleasant; perhaps that’s where claustrophobia starts. But add some furniture, and it all changes. The empty space becomes warm and homey; it becomes a room instead of a box. If you furnish it just right, you can even learn to feel comfortable living in a closet if you have to.

  I know all about that, because, between my parents and my brothers, there’re six of us living in a tiny two-bedroom house. I share a bedroom with my three brothers, which is kind of hard when you’re the only daughter in the family. At night I have to close my eyes and imagine myself in my own room, where the posters on the wall are ones that I want, and there aren’t always dirty socks and underwear strewn around the floor. My parents say that someday we’ll have a bigger house, although they’ve been saying that for years.

  But not all the homes in this neighborhood are like ours. Mr. Vandermeer’s home, for instance. It’s one of the larger ones, set on a double plot of land. An old two-story Victorian filled with rooms, and very well kept. Did I say well kept? I mean perfectly kept.

  Mr. Vandermeer always had a pristine lawn, manicured as well as his fingernails and trimmed as closely as his short gray beard. His planters were kept full of winter-blooming plants in the chillier months, and replaced in the summer with more delicate warm-weather flowers. And in the fall, there was not a leaf to be found on the lawn.

  “The leaves wouldn’t dare to fall on his lawn,” my mom would joke. “That man keeps everything in order. Everything in control.”

  I never thought much of it until I began to notice those late-night deliveries, and the strange voices. The fact was, now that I took the time to notice, there was always someone working on Mr. Vandermeer’s house. When I went off to school, a gardener would be planting tulip bulbs, sweaty even in the chilly air. In the afternoon, someone else would be cleaning the drainpipes, or washing the windows, or painting the porch railing. And each day, I began to notice that it was someone different. It was the same inside. He had a housekeeper who would take out the trash and beat out the rugs every day… but the face I saw carrying those heavy, heavy trash bags to the curb was often different. One day it would be a Latina woman with eyes wizened from a life of labor. Then, a few days later, it would be a young Chinese girl.

  “He goes through housekeepers like I go through stockings,” my mother said when I mentioned it to her. “Some people are like that. Never satisfied with anyone’s work.”

  And the fact that his workers were always of different ethnicities didn’t seem odd to me, because I was used to living in this neighborhood. You see, our neighborhood is like a melting pot that never boiled, so nothing ever melted. Vietnamese families live among Latinos, among Koreans, among Armenians. While there are never any major battles between the groups here, there aren’t many friendships either. We live side by side, but our circles never cross.

  Still, as I watched those workers silently going about their business at Mr. Vandermeer’s house, I knew there was something not quite right about it, but I couldn’t say what it was.

  * * *

  There are times that a mystery begins to feel like a mosquito bite, irritating you in a place you can’t scratch, until it seems there’s nothing left of you but that nagging bite, screaming for relief. That’s how it was with me and Mr. Vandermeer’s house.

  The next late-night delivery came in the rain. Again I heard the voices, and I snuck out to watch. Just as before, the voices disappeared into the house, the truck drove off, and the lights went out in half an hour. I just had to know what was going on in there. And so, the next Saturday morning, when Mr. Vandermeer went out for his morning walk—which he did like clockwork—I ventured across the street, where three gardeners pruned the bushes, and someone else detailed his spotless Mercedes on the driveway. So busy were they in their work that they didn’t notice me stepping onto the property. I suppose they weren’t used to visitors, because no one ever visited Mr. Vandermeer, except for the people who worked there.

  Unobserved, I made my way down the side of his house to the backyard, where I found one more worker. It was a man. No, a boy. He couldn’t have been any older that I was. He was thin, frail, dressed in fading, frayed clothes. There in the center of the backyard lawn, he labored over a brown patch in the lawn, carefully pulling up the dead grass and planting new seeds. Only, as I got closer, I could see he wasn’t planting the seeds the way a regular person might plant them. He wasn’t spreading them out to cover the dead spot. Instead he picked up each individual seed, and, with a pair of tweezers, placed it perfectly in the grass. Then he went back for another.

  Mr. Vandermeer will see that, and fire him for sure, I thought.

  “Hey,” I called out, “that’s not the way you plant grass.”

  He spun his head to me and locked eyes on mine. They were Asian eyes, like mine, but there was something different about them. Different from me, that is. The way he held himself, the expression on his face… even without hearing him speak, I knew that he hadn’t been in this country long.

  “Do you speak English?” I asked.

  He bolted, heading straight for Mr. Vandermeer’s back door.

  “Hey, wait!”

  I grabbed for him but he was too fast. Instead my hand fell on his back pocket, dislodging something there. It was a book.

  “Hey, you dropped this!” I picked up the book and dared to do something that I never thought I actually would. I followed him right into Mr. Vandermeer’s house.

  The aroma hit me right away. The wonderful smell of Christmas and Thanksgiving all rolled into one. A turkey cooking in the oven; vegetables baking; sauce simmering. It almost whisked me off my feet.

  The gardener boy spun around the banister post and sped up the stairs, turning back once to look at me. The expression on his face now was clear. It was fear. Terror. He was terrified of me, but why?

  Then, as I looked around, I could see that he wasn’t the only one. There was a housekeeper polishing the brass fixtures of an oversized fireplace. She had stopped in mid-stroke when she saw me barge into the house. Another maid was polishing the already spotless wood floor. She saw me, and her eyes registered even more fear than the boy’s. She whispered an exclamation in some language I didn’t know and hurried to leave the room, as if it was a crime to be seen by me. Through the swinging door of the kitchen, I saw a chef slink quickly out of view.

  I tried to ignore their strange behavior and hurried up the wide staircase, to the second floor, holding the boy’s worn book in my hand—but by the time I got there, he was gone.

  It felt strange to be trespassing like this, but I did have an excuse. I had to return the book. I clutched the book tighter and slowly walked down the hall.

  “Hello?” I peered into the open bedroom doors. No one there. Not in the master bedroom, or in the two other bedrooms. I even pushed open the door to the bathroom, but it was empty.

  Only one door remained for me to check now. It was slightly ajar, and I couldn’t see anything through the crack. At first, I thought it was a closet—that for some strange reason, this boy had decided I was such a threat, he had to hide in a closet—but when I opened the door, I saw steep stairs, leading up into darkness. It was an attic.

  Suddenly I was startled by a stern voice behind me.

  “Bạn đang lãng phí thời gian! Trở về với công việc!”

  It was Mr. Vandermeer. He stared at me with cold gray eyes. From what Vietnamese I understood, I knew he was telling me to get back to work, thinking I worked for him.

  “I’m Lien—from across the street,” I said.

  It took a moment to register, then his hard expression softened. “Of course you are. I’m sorry, I didn’t recognize you. How can I help you?”

  “There… there was this boy…”

  Mr. Vandermeer smoothly pushed the attic door closed. “Yes?”

  I still held the book, but suddenly I didn’t want to give it to Mr. Vandermeer. I didn’t want to give him anything. “Well… I—I just wanted to show him how to plant grass.”

  Mr. Vandermeer’s smile left his face. He became just the slightest bit worried. I wished I hadn’t said anything. “Was he doing a poor job?”

  “No,” I said, not wanting to get the boy in trouble. “I’m sure he was trying to do the right thing. It’s just that he was using tweezers.”

  And then Mr. Vandermeer threw his head back and laughed. “Well, of course he was,” Mr. Vandermeer said, putting a firm hand on my shoulder and guiding me back down to the first floor. “That’s what I asked him to do.”

  “What?”

  “How do you think I get my grass to grow so neatly? Every seed is hand-placed.”

  I thought about the size of his front and back yards. “But… how can that be… it must take months to hand-plant a lawn that way….”

  “And that’s what his job is. Believe me, there are millions of people who would beg for a job like that.”

  I shrugged. I didn’t know anyone who would. “I guess you must be rich to have all these people working for you.”

  “I’m an importer,” he explained. “It affords me a nice income.”

  “What do you import?”

  “Oh, this and that.”

  As we reached the first floor, the smell of dinner hit me again. “Big party tonight?”

  “Yes,” he said gently, as he led me to the front door. “Please stop by again. It’s always good getting to know my neighbors.”

  Before I knew it, I was out on the porch, and the door had shut behind me. As I was crossing the street, I realized that Mr. Vandermeer’s big turkey dinner couldn’t be for many people. Because his dinner table was only set for one.

  No sky today. We stay below deck. Rough sea makes my father sick. Captain says we will eat soon, but we still wait for the food. My mother says traveling to America is like being born. We must suffer the pains before we see the light of day.

  “It’s a diary,” my brother Ran explained, as he read it and translated it from Vietnamese.

  I closed the door to the bedroom, worried that our parents might discover we were snooping into someone else’s business. With my two younger brothers off at soccer practice, it gave Ran and me some time to translate alone in our room. “I knew it,” I said. “He’s just gotten here.” I felt a bit ashamed to be reading the entries in the gardener boy’s diary, but my curiosity overwhelmed any shame I felt.

  Ran flipped a few pages. “So Vandermeer’s got all these undocumented people working for him?”

  “We don’t know they’re undocumented,” I countered.

  “You’re so naive,” he said, finding another entry in the journal.

  Sea is calm today. No storms. Too many people down here, though; many fights. People fight for space. People fight for food. People fight for nothing. It’s something to do to pass the time. My father says English is a hard language, but schools there will teach if I want to learn. And I do want to learn.

  Ran looked to me thoughtfully. “So you say there are always different people working at Vandermeer’s house? And the old ones just seem to disappear?”

  I nodded. “What do you think happens to them?”

  Ran scratched his hair. “I think he eats them.”

  “Ran!”

  “Sure. He gets people that no one will miss, has them do the yard, then cooks them up for dinner.”

  “Don’t be gross.”

  “You said you smelled something cooking.”

  “It was TURKEY!”

  “How do you know that human doesn’t smell like turkey? Frog legs taste like chicken, don’t they?”

  I pushed him back onto his bed, and he laughed.

  “That’s not it,” I told him. “There’s something else going on there. I just can’t figure it out yet.”

  I told him to turn to the last entry. He did. It was dated the day before yesterday.

  Room enough for all of us here. I have my own bed. Hot water enough for whole family. Land to grow our own food. No time for school right now. Dad works the machine twelve hours a day. I work ten. Sisters work in factory. Mom farms. No frost here—food grows all year round. Tomorrow I work in Mr. Vandermeer’s yard. A great honor. I hope I do not disappoint. Maybe then I won’t have to go back to the machine.

  “Oh no! I ruined it for him!” I thought back to that fearful look in the boy’s eyes when I chased him into the house. “I got him into trouble.”

  “What’s this machine he keeps talking about?” asked Ran.

  I just shrugged. “Keep reading.”

  Ran found his place and continued.

  When I work at the machine, I turn my eyes to the sky, trying to remember that my time at the machine will pass. Windy today. Heavy clouds blow past and melt in the corners of the world. I look to the windblown clouds, and the great beams beyond.

  “Kind of poetic,” said Ran. He turned the page. “It ends there.”

  I took the diary back from Ran and looked at it thoughtfully. “I should get his book back to him. I wonder where he lives.”

  “I’m sure Vandermeer knows,” said Ran.

  * * *

  There are some people who live in their own private world. They go about their business, away and apart from others, keeping guard over the things they do and the things they think, the same way they keep guard over the things they own. Their faces are NO TRESPASSING signs. Their words are wrapped in barbed wire. That was Mr. Vandermeer. But a NO TRESPASSING sign was also an invitation to explore and find out what was so special that it needed to be protected.

  The next weekend, I stepped once more into Mr. Vandermeer’s world, offering him no warning that I was coming. I didn’t ring the bell—in fact, I waited on my own lawn, until I saw one of his housekeepers open the door to take out the trash. Then, as she went back in, I snuck up behind the bushes and kept the door from closing. I took a deep breath and quietly slipped inside.

  Again, the overwhelming smell. Turkey once more, and the table set for one. Two men stood on ladders in Vandermeer’s study, carving designs into the wood molding on the ceiling. Two women, with dark circles under their eyes, carried heavy cardboard boxes down from upstairs, then went back upstairs again and didn’t come down. I could hear Mr. Vandermeer’s voice—he was in the downstairs bathroom, instructing another worker. He spoke in a language that sounded European.

  I slipped past the bathroom and into the kitchen. The chef was gone for the moment, and so I dared to open the oven and peer inside, unable to get Ran’s cannibal suggestion out of my head.

  There was a turkey in the oven. I sighed with relief.

  “What were you expecting to find, Lien?”

  I jumped and the oven door slammed with a jarring bang.

  Mr. Vandermeer laughed, incredibly amused at my reaction. It irked me, and made me just a little bit bolder.

  “So how come you’re having turkey again?”

  “It’s Saturday,” he answered. “I have it every Saturday. Like clockwork.”

  “And you’re eating alone. Again.”

  His smile didn’t falter. “A party of one.”

  “What a waste of food.”

  “If you’d like to join me, I could have a place set for you.”

  His offer actually sounded genuine, and although dining with Mr. Vandermeer was not something I really wanted to do, I accepted. “Yes,” I told him. “I love turkey.” It allowed me more time to figure out just what was going on in his house.

  I called my parents and told them I was having dinner at a friend’s house—I didn’t dare tell them that it was Mr. Vandermeer, as they were convinced he was the lunatic of all lunatics, and they were probably right. We sat down in the living room to wait for dinner. He asked me questions about my family, about school, and what subjects I liked, and through it all, he kept a sense of patient control of the conversation that was as unnerving to me as the ticking of the grandfather clock in the corner.

  Another woman came downstairs and put down a heavy box, then went back up.

  “Would you like to see what I do?” he asked, and without waiting for an answer, he went over to the box and pulled out a blouse, handing it to me. The label said VANDERMEER FASHIONS. I looked in the box to find a whole collection of identical blouses. Nothing strange or awful was in those boxes at all.

  “You import clothes?”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes.”

  It was, in its own way, a letdown, and I began to wonder if Mr. Vandermeer was less mysterious than I had thought.

  Another woman descended the stairs and deposited a box of Vandermeer Fashions at our feet. I noticed that this was a different woman than any of the others I had seen before, but her eyes were just as tired and worn. I felt a warm breeze caress my face, and searching for its source, my eyes were drawn up the stairs, to an open door. The attic door.

  The woman went back up the stairs, began to climb up the steep attic steps, and disappeared into darkness. What was it about that attic?

  And then it finally occurred to me what was wrong with all the workers at Mr. Vandermeer’s house. There were never any cars out front, and none of the workers ever seemed to leave. They simply went into the house… and disappeared.