The Compound (5 page)

My finger rubbed the cursor pad.

A message popped up on the screen.

Wireless Server Not Available
.

Duh.

In that slim span of time, from the moment I’d powered up until that message appeared, I’d felt something. Was it hope? I hadn’t felt hope for so long. Did I actually expect to be connected to the Internet? Maybe, somewhere in the back of my mind, I believed that one resourceful survivor had hooked it back up.

Yeah, right.

Dad told us early on that the Compound was wired for communication. At first, he checked daily for a signal, but his updates were always the same: Nothing. After a while, it was too depressing to ask. And he stopped mentioning it.

I maneuvered the cursor and clicked fast. The laptop hadn’t yet been set up for Eddy. So I put in my own password, username, even entered my ID in the IM program.
TwinYan2
.

I smiled, imagining that
TwinYan1
was still out there,
just an IM away. I unhooked the power cord and wrapped it around my wrist.

“Eli?”

I jumped, and then felt stupid for being startled yet again.

Mom stood at the open door. “What are you doing in here?”

Did I even know? I shrugged. “I, uh … was missing Eddy. I’ve never been in here.”

She nodded. “I don’t think anyone has but me.”

“You cleaned it?”

“Yes, I come in here now and then.” She noticed the laptop in my hands. “What are you doing with that?”

“I was going to take it.” I felt guilty.

Her eyes shifted, as if she was mulling something.

“I won’t, though.” I set the laptop back on the desk.

One hand covered her mouth for a moment. She started to shake her head, and then stopped. “No, take it.”

“Are you sure?”

Mom nodded. “I kept it charged, I think.” She never touched any computers. Maybe because it was Dad’s thing. Maybe because she didn’t like technology. She just didn’t think they could add to her quality of life.

I said, “Yeah, it’s charged.”

“Just—”

“What?”

“Don’t show it to your father, okay? He knows I come in here. That … it helps, somewhat. But I told him I’d leave everything as it was.”

I picked up the laptop again. “I won’t show anyone.”

“Promise me you won’t.”

I promised. “Thanks, Mom.”

My mother smiled. “And if there’s anything else you want, go ahead. I don’t think Eddy would mind.” She straightened up. “Only keep it to yourself. Don’t tell—”

“Who?”

“Never mind.” She glanced around and left.

My eyes went to the closet door. Inside, I pawed through the hangers. Eddy’s orange rugby was tucked between two sweaters. I pulled the shirt from the hanger and wrapped the laptop in it, then dropped the bundle off in my room. One day late, but hey. Happy Birthday to me.

I found myself grinning. What a great find. And in the first place I looked. Eddy would have been proud. I imagine he would have kept looking, to see what else he could uncover. Thinking about it spurred me on.

As I neared the family room, Dad’s high-pitched cackle filled the air, which meant only one thing. He was watching a Woody Allen movie. I thought they were so stupid, but he would sit there for hours, laughing out loud. Maybe it was the combination of the two, Woody Allen’s humor that I didn’t get, along with my dad’s bizarre laugh, but I just could not deal. I turned back the other way.

Down the hall, I came to Terese’s room. I opened the door. It was still done up like the Hundred Acre Woods from Winnie the Pooh; her bed was still a giant honey pot. I suppose at the time he was building the Compound, my dad thought it was perfect. But she wasn’t six anymore.
Dad had offered to paint it and put in a canopy bed from the storeroom. Terese refused, though, still climbing the little ladder into the honey pot every night.

I stepped closer to the bed and ran my hand over a ladder step. Dust came away on my fingers. I wiped it off on my shirt and walked over to the closet. Inside were dozens of empty hangers. A few clothes hung here and there, but it looked like she had moved out. I wondered what was up.

A ways down the hall was my parents’ room. We weren’t allowed in, although I’d caught a glance one time, and it looked to be an exact replica of the one in our mansion on Puget Sound. That one I had been in, plenty. When we were little, Mom had let us jump into bed with her after Dad went to work. He probably would have had a fit if he knew rowdy kids were eating their Cap’n Crunch on his expensive Egyptian linens.

The bedroom was decorated in wine and cream, with an oak king-size bed and matching armoires, dressers, and bureaus. Mom’s favorite Monet hung on the wall over the headboard. It was the original, of course. I wondered if a replica hung on the wall of this bedroom.

Well, I wasn’t going to snoop in there. Not yet, anyway.

I walked quickly past the next door, as I always did. I didn’t want to acknowledge, let alone set eyes inside, that room. Knowing what was inside was bad enough. The door was painted a cheery yellow. Ironic.

The rooms went on and on, like berries on a bush. I stopped at the library, which held thousands of books in
every possible genre: mystery, biography, historical, classics, legal thrillers, science fiction, and children’s literature. Anything we might ever, or never, want to read.

Terese read every piece of British children’s literature she could find. When she was younger, it had been
Paddington Bear
and
Winnie the Pooh
. Later it was
The Chronicles of Narnia
and everything by Roald Dahl.
Peter Pan
was her favorite.

Maybe that’s why she still had her stuffed Winnie the Pooh and watched
Mary Poppins
. She saw the Compound as never-never land, a place where she would never have to grow up. Last time I’d seen her with a book, it had been
The Hobbit
, so maybe she finally decided to move on. For her sake, I hoped we had a lot of British stuff. I had even recommended some American authors to her, but she seemed stuck in her English fantasy.

A two-sided fireplace sat in the middle of the library, burnished leather armchairs facing it on either side. Cherry shelves stretched up to the top of the ceiling. Sliding ladders on each wall allowed us to reach everything.

Lexie read a lot of lengthy epic stories. She read
Cold Mountain
at least a dozen times. I finally got it away from her long enough to see what was so great about it. For a novel of the Civil War it was okay, but the ending was so depressing. I pegged Lexie as more of a fan of happy endings. But she still read it again and again. Maybe she was deluded enough to think the ending might change eventually. I gave up trying to figure it out.

My routine was to pick authors and read every book
they’d written. The entire previous spring I had spent many dreary hours with Dostoyevsky. I should have quit, but once I started something, I liked to finish. Stephen King was my current read. Living with anxiety and uncertainty (anxiety and uncertainty unrelated to my own circumstances) was invigorating. It was generous of Dad, I suppose, to furnish the place with so much stuff he would never read himself. He only read nonfiction, usually about wars or generals or politics.

I thought about stopping to read for a while, but I was too restless. I was ready to make another discovery, if there were any more to be made. And my gut said there were.

I
PASSED BY THE GYM. NO NEED TO SEE WHAT
I
ALREADY SAW
every day. The restaurant-style kitchen was next. Stainless steel pots and pans in every size hung from the ceiling above a long butcher-block-style counter. Two ovens sat side by side on one wall. They were the Hansel and Gretel type, big enough to shove a good-size witch inside. Three stainless steel coolers with clear glass doors lined another wall. It seemed like overkill, to have such a massive kitchen for just our family. Not like we’d be throwing any parties.

The other end of the kitchen held the breakfast nook and the counter. Past them was the door into the dining room. One large crystal chandelier lit the room, which housed an oak dining table with seating for sixteen. Again, overkill. We ate Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Easter dinner in there. That was it.

I left the kitchen and headed to the infirmary. Although it was state of the art, it looked like an old-fashioned
doctor’s office, when the doctor had a small place and did everything in one room. It smelled like antiseptic, like a hospital. White cabinets with glass doors lined one wall, holding bandages, medicines, and other supplies. Two hospital beds were set up on one side. I pushed aside a curtain divider. Behind it were several machines. I knew the one was an EKG machine, but the rest I was unsure of. I assumed my dad had been trained on all of them at some point, otherwise why have them?

Every room in the Compound also held a defibrillator. It didn’t make much sense to me. If one of us was going to check out, why not let us go? If we truly had a heart problem, there was no one to do surgery on us. What could a defibrillator buy us? A few minutes?

I looked over the medicine cabinet. It wasn’t locked, despite having a lot of controlled substances inside. I don’t know who, if anyone, ever took them. Dad told us never to touch any of them. That was all he had to do. The one quality the Yanakakis kids did have in common was obedience. I switched off the lights before I left.

The beauty salon was next. I didn’t ever go in there, definitely a girly place. In the old world, I’d been dragged along a few times when my mom went, so I knew what everything was. The smell of nail polish remover made me cover my nose. In front of a mirrored counter sat a hair-cutting stall with a nearby hair dryer. I looked in the mirror and saw a face.

I jumped, and then felt stupid when I saw what it was. A nearby shelf held a row of practice heads, plastic heads
with real hair. I exhaled, surprised at myself for being so on edge.

There were also two pedicure chairs with attached footbaths. A manicure table sat nearby, and glass shelves filled with bottles of nail polish ran along one whole wall. I shook my head and backed out the door.

The laundry and sewing room was next. The room had a bleachy smell. Stacked washer-dryer units were lined up next to one another, next to large sinks. One of the dryers was running, and something metallic clicked every time the clothes flipped. Across from them was a long table that held several types of sewing machines. Thick bolts of fabric were piled on shelves behind the table. Boring. I shut the door and moved on.

Through the glass door of the dance studio, I saw Lexie practicing ballet. Her hair was twisted in a dancer’s topknot, and she wore a black leotard and pink toe shoes. (Her wardrobe was slightly more extensive than mine.) In the old world, she attended a performing arts school, where she studied both ballet and piano. Since Eddy and I went to a Chinese immersion school on the other side of the city, our schedules were different enough that I really only saw Lexie during summer vacation. Before the Compound, anyway.

I stood there, watching for a while. She danced with a confidence she never showed other times. Lexie tended to cover up her insecurities with her lousy attitude. My reasoning was her being insecure came from being adopted. From how she treated us, though, you’d think she didn’t give a crap about any of us. Except Dad. He could do no wrong where she was concerned.

And he ate it up, all her attention. Like he didn’t already have people groveling at his feet every day. Lexie would never go against Dad. It was a little ridiculous really, how she went along with everything he said. Mom had no sway with her. I hated that Lexie could get Dad to go against Mom’s wishes just to please her, his oldest daughter.

Still, I did like to watch Lexie dance. Even at her school recitals Eddy and I would quit fidgeting when she was onstage. As I watched her through the door, there was something about the long lines of her lithe body, the strength of her jumps, and the grace of her movements. She seemed so focused, so lost in the dance, like nothing else existed.

I wished there were something like that for me, something more than free throws and tai chi that I could get lost in.

Lexie stopped when she noticed me and stood with one hand on her jutted-out hip, the other holding up a middle finger.

Acknowledging her greeting with a wave, I called out in Mandarin,
“Si san ba.”
Years ago I’d told her it was an affectionate term for a “big sister.” I’d have to find a new phrase if she ever discovered what nasty word it actually meant.

On my way once more, I passed the rock-climbing wall and media room. Next door was the music studio. Mom was playing cello, so I slipped in, sinking to the floor to listen. Mozart.

Her back was to me, and her long hair hung straight down in an even plait. My mother was the gentlest person
I’d ever met. Gentle in her manner, her voice, her touch. I imagined that Clea Sheridan Yanakakis had never mustered up even an iota of bad feeling toward anyone. However, her gentle nature didn’t mean she wasn’t intense. One only had to watch her play cello for a short while to understand her depth. You don’t have to be loud or forceful to take up a lot of space in the world.