The Compound

Chapter THREE

IN HER OUTBURST ON MY BIRTHDAY, TERESE ACCUSED DAD OF planning all of it. Of course he planned the Compound. We wouldn’t still be alive if he hadn’t. But she had made me think.

My father had given us a detailed orientation to the Compound when we first arrived. The structure was three stories underground, made mainly of concrete and steel. The operation of the Compound was fairly simple, as Dad explained it. Room temperature was kept at a constant seventy-two degrees, reverse osmosis technology made our water drinkable, and three industrial incinerators burned all the garbage and waste products, miles of ductwork taking the smoke far away from our pristine air supply.

The Compound itself must have taken years to build. I never asked for the details. It would be like a lion asking about who built his cage. Knowing more wouldn’t make any of it easier.

But our birthday got me thinking about Eddy, about what he’d be like. Eddy would want to know everything about the Compound; he was always curious. Maybe that was a fault of mine—accepting things without ever questioning them. Or maybe I had just let him take care of that. But he wasn’t around to take care of things anymore.

Across from my room was a blue door. Eddy’s room. I had never been able to bring myself to enter. Besides, I assumed it was an exact copy of mine. I reached for the doorknob, but my hand hovered there, inches away, trembling a bit. Why did I feel the need to do this now? What good could it possibly do?

Maybe I was looking for a way to feel closer to Eddy. Maybe that’s all it was.

With a deep breath, I twisted the knob and pushed.

The air smelled of oranges, almost too much so. I’d expected the room to smell musty, like a museum. I’d forgotten that it was connected to the same ventilation system as the rest of the Compound. The light switches were in the same spot as in my room. Nothing seemed to happen after I hit the first switch, but I soon saw that his ceiling was set to the sunrise. I turned it off and switched on the regular fluorescents.

I walked over to the bookshelves, ran my hands over a few of the books and toys. The bookshelves looked like mine used to; until I’d outgrown the books and toys and shoved everything in my closet. As I looked around that room, so much like mine had been, I felt strange, like I’d traveled back in time.

But something was missing. Dust. There was none.

I looked in the trash can. Several used dusting cloths lay inside. I leaned closer and sniffed. That was where the orange smell was coming from.

Except for the recent cleaning, it didn’t look like anyone had stepped foot in there for a long time. If ever.

Inside the closet, I found nine-year-old Eddy’s wardrobe on hangers; orderly, neat, and pressed. Never touched. I slammed the closet door, not wanting to see, not wanting to remember. As I backed away, my hip collided with the desk.

I shifted around. Something on the desk caught my eye. I grinned and reached out. A laptop. A duplicate of the ones we’d gotten at our clown and Seahawks birthday.

Whatever happened to mine?

I remembered.

Shortly after we entered the Compound, Dad had borrowed it, saying he wanted to upgrade it for me. Then he’d given me a different one, a better one. He said mine wasn’t worth upgrading after all. I’d never asked for the first one back.

This laptop, the one intended for Eddy, was plugged in, the light proclaiming the battery to be charged. Had it been charging for six years? I opened it and hit the power button. As the icons appeared on the screen, my fingertips rested on one I hadn’t seen for so long. Internet. That was the difference between this laptop and the one I used. Mine had no integrated wireless Internet.

My elbow rested on the desk and my head automatically leaned on my palm. I stared at the screen. I hadn’t forgotten about the Internet. I had just put it in the category of things I no longer had, things too painful to think about. Like Eddy.

Eddy and I had lived on the Internet, playing online games, instant messaging our friends. We even IM’ed each other at night, even though we were separated by only a bedroom wall.

My finger rubbed the cursor pad.

A message popped up on the screen.

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.