Turnabout

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  The real Dr. Jimson rushed to her husband’s side and grabbed for the remote.

  “For God’s sake,” she shrieked. “Don’t show them everything!”

  She stabbed a finger at the remote and the TV screen went black.

  “His body disintegrated,” Dr. Reed mumbled, as if in a trance. “Into dust. Right before our eyes.”

  Dr. Jimson slapped her husband.

  Chaos broke out in the room once more. People screamed and sobbed and pleaded. The doctors made no effort to restore order.

  Amelia sat still and silent, so numb she barely noticed when a chair hit her in the leg. People were throwing things? Somehow it made sense to her. This was a horrible shock. This wasn’t Louise Swanson killing herself because of her son’s betrayal. This was Mr. Johnson getting the cure they all planned to get someday, and having it kill him. She’d spent the last five years believing she was virtually immortal now—they all believed that. She’d never realized how much that had changed her outlook on everything. How could she believe in her own mortality again? Did she have to? Couldn’t the doctors fix PT-2?

  She didn’t realize she’d spoken the question aloud until Mrs. Flick answered, “You mean the way they fixed our memories? Hey, stop that!”

  Amelia turned and saw that Mrs. Flick was fending off a crazed man flailing his arms at everything and everyone in sight. Finally the melee around her registered with her eyes and ears. In the front a gang of men had advanced on the two doctors and were pounding on their backs, screaming, “How dare you! You lied to us!” Another group was trying to stop the first, with cries of, “Don’t hurt them! They’re our only hope!”

  Amelia blinked in astonishment. How could all the others be acting like this? They were old. Old people took bad news sitting down. They swallowed all their hopes and dreams and fears and nodded off toward death.

  Except she was wrong. The people around her weren’t old anymore. Neither was she. Sure, they’d all lived a long time, and they still sported the white hair and wrinkles and bald pates that marked them as elderly. But part of being old was knowing you were near the end. And none of them did. None of them were. That’s why they’d reacted to the news of Mr. Johnson’s death like teenagers in a riot.

  Amelia stood up, steadying herself with one hand on the arm of the chair. She looked with pity at Dr. Reed and Dr. Jimson. But there was nothing she could do to help them.

  “I have to leave,” she said to no one in particular. She walked out of the conference room, closing the door firmly behind her. Then she went to her room to pack.

  April 24, 2085

  Melly and Anny Beth lay flat on their backs in the sand, peering up at the night sky. The stars wheeled over their heads. Melly picked up a pebble and threw it as far as she could toward the moon. The pebble went straight up, then plopped back into the sand a few yards away. In spite of her problems, in spite of the uncertainty, something about the sound of the falling stone made Melly feel good. Maybe it was just those crazy teenage hormones coursing through her veins. Or maybe it was just life. After almost two hundred years perhaps she’d learned to appreciate it. She took deep breaths of the clean desert air.

  “Do you ever wonder what our lives would have been like if we’d never left the agency?” she asked Anny Beth.

  “No,” Anny Beth said. She propped herself up on one arm and drew waves in the sand with one finger. “It would have been eighty more years of the same thing. Meetings twice a day with the doctors. So much talk about telomeres that our brains would glaze over. Constant gossip about, ‘They’ve almost fixed the memory problem,’ ‘The Cure will work the next time.’ We’d spend all our lives wondering whether or not we were going to be able to live forever.”

  Melly threw another pebble at the sky. “It was the other people I had to get away from,” she said. “More than the doctors. If I were only around others who were unaging, I would go crazy.”

  “Thanks,” Anny Beth said. “Want me to leave now?”

  “You’re different,” Melly said. “You don’t dwell on things.”

  “Whatever,” Anny Beth said. Her waves in the sand turned into circles, then swirls. “But I thought you were crazy that day you said you were leaving. I’m glad you talked me into coming along.”

  “Remember that form they made us sign? How many ways can they make you say, ‘I will not contact any of my family, go anywhere that I might be recognized, or take my story to the media’?”

  “Well, there were about two hundred clauses on that form. So about that many times,” Anny Beth replied.

  Neither of them talked for a few minutes, and Melly could almost make herself believe they were just ordinary teenagers hanging out looking at the sky. (Did ordinary teenagers do that anymore? she wondered. They had the last time Melly was fifteen.)

  “I could get to like this place,” Anny Beth said. “Puts me in mind of Kentucky.”

  “What?” Melly asked. “Let me remind you: Kentucky has trees, grass, and mountains. All this place has is sand. I feel like I’m in the middle of nowhere.”

  “And that’s how I felt in Kentucky. When I was eighteen—the last time, I mean—I hated that so bad.”

  “So you should hate this, too,” Melly said.

  “Nah, there’s no such thing as being nowhere anymore. All you need is a phone line, and you’re connected to the whole world.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” Melly said, and shivered, thinking of the tabloid reporter again. Once the agency gave them new ID, she wouldn’t have to worry anymore. Would she?

  They heard the phone ringing back in their hotel room.

  “Let the computer get it?” Anny Beth asked.

  “No, it might be Agatha.”

  “So?”

  “We need to be nice to her, especially right now. And remember all those job applications we put in today? It may be someone calling for an interview.”

  “Can’t we play hard to get?”

  Melly was already opening the sliding glass door. She hit the switch on the side of the computer that turned it into a speakerphone.

  “Picture?” the computer asked. Melly didn’t want any potential employers thinking she was paranoid, but she hesitated. She hit the button for caller ID. The words scrolled out on the blank screen: Caller: A. J. Hazelwood.

  Shaking, Melly quickly typed in the command for the computer to ask for a message.

  “Hello?” A woman’s voice filled the room. “My name is A. J. Hazelwood, and I’m trying to reach Amelia Hazelwood. I believe we are distant relatives, and I’m trying to track down some family information. I’d appreciate it if you could call back at—”

  Melly didn’t stay around to hear the number.

  “Anny Beth!” she shrieked out the door. “It’s that reporter!”

  Anny Beth raced inside just in time to hear the message click off. Melly played it back for her.

  While Anny Beth just stood there in shock, Melly began typing in numbers. “I’ve got to call the agency. They have to get us fake ID right now!”

  Anny Beth put her hand over Melly’s to stop her. “No, wait. Let’s think about this.”

  Melly stopped typing, but she was too scared to think.

  “How did she find you again?” Anny Beth asked.

  “She saw satellite pictures of our car’s license plate. She called up the hotel registration or the credit transfer records. You didn’t hide anything.”

  “Well, you can’t,” Anny Beth said defensively. “The computers detect fraud instantly. And it’s not like I could have paid cash. But those records are like state secrets. Nobody can get to them unless they’re authorized.”

  “Maybe she is.”

  “No.” Anny Beth shook her head violently. “Reporters are the last people who would be authorized. It has to be something else—”

  “Maybe it’s that E-mail postcard I sent Mrs. Rodney—‘Gosh, I wish I were still baby-sitting for you instead of lying in this sandpit,’” Melly said s
arcastically. “Come on, Anny Beth, you know we didn’t tell anyone where we were.”

  “Yes, we did,” Anny Beth said slowly. “We told the agency.”

  April 24, 2085

  Melly stood still, trying to figure out what Anny Beth meant.

  “You think the agency turned us in?” she asked. “You think they’re out to get us?” It was a thought that never would have occurred to her on her own. She thought of the people at the agency as misguided, not malicious.

  Anny Beth sank to the bed and buried her face in her hands. After a moment she looked up at Melly. “I don’t know,” she said miserably. “What other explanation is there?”

  Melly gritted her teeth, thinking. “Maybe this A. J. is just a really good hacker. Maybe she broke into our records—”

  “With the government? Come on, the government’s had antihacker protection for seventy-five years.”

  “Then, at the agency?” Melly trembled as she made that suggestion. If the reporter had access to the agency’s computer records, she knew everything about them. Their private lives were over. “Wouldn’t they have antihacker protection too?” It was strange, the number of things she didn’t know about the agency. Once she’d left, she tried not to look back.

  Anny Beth threw up her hands helplessly. “It doesn’t really matter, does it? Either the agency spilled the beans on purpose, which means we can’t trust them, or your darling descendant is so brilliant she figured out how to get information from them without them knowing it. Either way, we’ve got to hide from the agency.”

  Melly sat down beside Anny Beth and stared bleakly out the window. The desert scene beyond looked even more desolate than before. Hiding from the agency would mean no fake ID, no help at all. She’d spent the last eighty years thinking she was independent of the agency, but that wasn’t true. She’d always known she could rely on the agency officials, if worst came to worst. It was like still having a family, but one that you rarely saw because Aunt Mildred drove you crazy and Uncle Arnie was an embarrassment. But now, if they cut off contact with the agency, they would truly be alone.

  “We could go back,” Melly said quietly. “Or just me. I’m the only one she’s after. Then you could do whatever you wanted.”

  “You’d go back to the agency?” Anny Beth said. She launched herself off the bed and began pacing the floor. “Is that what you want?”

  “Of course not,” Melly said. “But—”

  “No buts,” Anny Beth said firmly. She began hitting the wall at each end of her pacing: Two steps, hit! Two steps, hit! Then she whirled around to face Melly. “There are two problems with that plan. First, it doesn’t solve anything. You go back to the agency, it just makes it easier for the reporter to track you down. And it guarantees that all the other Project Turnabout people will be exposed too.”

  “Oh,” Melly said weakly.

  “And second, it leaves me on my own. Listen, I’ve been married four times. The first three times were pretty much duds—at least that’s what I wrote down when I remembered them. The fourth time, with Bill, was great. He was the best husband anyone could ever have, and I loved him like crazy. But even when I was married to him, the person I counted on the most was still you. You’ve kept me in line for eighty-five years. What would I do without you?”

  Tears blurred Melly’s eyesight. Anny Beth had never said anything like that to her before. She’d never had to.

  “Okay,” Melly said. “I feel the same. We’re in this together, no matter what. But what should we do? Where do we go? Would—” A new thought occurred to her. “Could you go back to Bill?”

  She thought about how strange that would be—Bill’s one-time wife now showing up as his grandchild. Could Bill and Anny Beth adjust to such a different relationship? Would Melly want to have to watch them try?

  “No,” Anny Beth said evenly. “Bill died right after I did.”

  Melly hadn’t known that. They’d had the same policy with Bill that they had with most things from the past: It’s better left unspoken. She thought about the way Anny Beth had phrased that announcement. “Bill died right after I did.” It was a revealing slip of the tongue, maybe proving that Anny Beth felt the same way Melly did about the different portions of her life: that she really had been different people at different times. She thought about some of the dopey books she and Anny Beth had read about adolescence when they were trying to fit in. “Adolescence is a time of finding your identity.” It was such hogwash. Even in the first half of Melly’s life, which had been dead ordinary, she’d had many identities: daughter, sister, wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother. This time around she’d been a virtual change artist. The question was, What should she change into next?

  Melly turned to Anny Beth, who was staring, clear-eyed, out the window.

  “All right,” Melly said. “There’s no one we can go stay with. We’ve just got to find someplace so remote neither the reporter nor the agency would find us there. And we’ve already eliminated the most godforsaken place I’ve ever seen.” She pointed out the window.

  “I know what we have to do.” Anny Beth spoke as if in a trance. “We’ve got to go home.”

  “Home?” Melly asked, puzzled. She thought of all the places they’d lived in the past eighty years. It was a list of practically every state in the country. Every state but one. Melly began to understand. “You mean—?”

  “Yes.” Anny Beth’s voice was solemn. “We’ll go to Kentucky.”

  Just the word, Kentucky, brought back a flood of memories for Melly of her first childhood, of hard work and hard play and loving family around her. Yes, she thought with a rush of longing, that’s where we belong. But she knew it wasn’t possible.

  “Anny Beth,” she said, “there’s a story I never told you. . . .”

  April 2057

  The depression hit when Amy was forty-four. For weeks she filled her journals with her misery: I take no pleasure from my life anymore. I forget to eat. I can’t sleep. What’s the point? Anny Beth had just got married and was in a state of newlywed bliss with Bill. Amy told herself she wasn’t jealous, and she really wasn’t. She’d had a perfectly happy marriage herself, the first time around, and it was easy in the twenty-first century to be happy without a spouse. She liked Bill well enough but didn’t want him or anyone else for a husband. No, what she wanted was a baby.

  How can my biological clock be ticking? she wrote. This is ridiculous. My best years of fertility lie ahead of me. If I wanted to, I could get pregnant ten years from now, even twenty. But she stared at babies in stores, sometimes even reaching out to touch their little curled fists before their parents snatched them away, frightened by the strange woman with the longing look in her eyes.

  She had never tried to find out any extra information about unaging, beyond what the agency told her, but now she began some surreptitious research. She sat up late at night, surrounded by computer printouts, and made notes on old-fashioned lined paper with antique pencils:

  CAN I HAVE A BABY?

  1. I probably have no more eggs. They’re one of the things, like teeth, that don’t come back with unaging.

  2. But if I wanted to, I could go to a fertility specialist and have him inject my DNA around some other woman’s egg. They do that nowadays. And I could have artificial insemination.

  3. Would I be able to carry a baby to term? Probably not. My body goes backward, not forward. Surrogacy is outlawed, but they have artificial wombs now. It seems unnatural, but still—

  She paused and looked at the words she’d written in her early-twentieth-century script: Fertility. DNA. Insemination. Artificial wombs. Crazy words that should have nothing to do with having a child. She’d never even heard of such things the last time she had babies; anytime during the first half of her life most of the words on that list would have made her blush violently. She crumpled the paper and threw it across the room. She swept all the computer printouts onto the floor, then stuffed them into the trash. “You’re wrong!”
she yelled into the emptiness of her house. She’d been looking at “Can I have a baby?” as a biological question. It wasn’t. It was a moral one.

  She grabbed her journal and scrawled, Can I have a baby? Of course not. It’s not fair to any child to have a mother who’s unaging. We’d have to keep so many secrets. And if the worst happened—if the media found out about me—her life would be ruined too. And when I unage all the way, when I’m four and two and then just a baby—how could she look at me and call me Mom?

  Amy cried for days, devastated at the thought of never having a family again. She hadn’t ever realized how much she’d held out hope for that. She wouldn’t marry, she wouldn’t bear children—in her first hundred years those had been the things that mattered. How could she find significance in anything now? She began watching the tabloid TV shows, taking notes during all the “ordinary-people exposés” of what people valued in their lives: Hot computers. Sharp cars. Good food. Great sex. Money. Easy jobs. She took to shouting, as feistily as Anny Beth, at the TV screen, “You fools! Your lives are nothing!”

  And then one morning, while she lay in bed preparing to cry again, a new idea came to her. She needed to start over. If she retraced her steps and went back to Kentucky, where she’d lived practically her entire first life, surely she could get her life back on track. She’d find meaning once again.

  She began thinking of the journey as a religious pilgrimage. If she could just look out on the Appalachian Mountains once more, she’d understand what God wanted her to do with the rest of her life. There was one particular spot, not far from where she’d grown up, where you could stand on a peak and reach for the clouds, an entire valley at your feet. She needed that place.

  She scoured video maps and satellite maps and travel tapes, and discovered, to her overwhelming relief, that her special place was still there. It hadn’t been bulldozed to make way for a Wal-Mart Universal store. It was protected wilderness. There was even a quick view of her spot in the computer video archives, though she resisted looking at it for very long. She didn’t want a virtual pilgrimage. She needed the real thing.