Turnabout

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  “You are one tough broad,” Melly had answered. “Can you quit your husband just like that?”

  “Watch me,” Anny Beth said, but her voice held none of its usual buoyancy, and she turned her face so Melly couldn’t see.

  They’d schemed together to get the agency to fake Anny Beth’s death, “so at least he won’t go mooning around wondering where I went,” Anny Beth said. Anny Beth and Melly moved to Minnesota and threw a party the day of her fake funeral. Melly found the “Anny Beth Flick Funeral” Web site on the Internet, but tried to keep Anny Beth away from the computer as long as the Web page was posted.

  For her part, Melly had never married this time around—Anny Beth teased her about being a spinster. Spinster, of course, was a word that no one used anymore. It was fashionable never to marry in the twenty-first century. Melly wondered about herself—in the twentieth century, when most people got married, so did she; in the twenty-first, when marrying was akin to admitting an affinity for horses and buggies instead of electric cars, she’d followed the trend once again. But she’d been bowing to the restrictions of Project Turnabout, not society. She knew she wasn’t strong enough to walk away from a husband she loved, the way Anny Beth had. And what was the alternative?

  Now she sat beside Anny Beth looking out into the desert, wondering about the alternatives for the rest of her life.

  “So what are we going to do?” Melly asked.

  “Call the agency. We need them to give us fake ID so we can get a new place.” But Anny Beth made no move toward her computer.

  “You want to move here?” Melly asked without enthusiasm.

  Anny Beth shrugged. “Seems as good as anyplace else. There aren’t many places left without twenty-four-hour cameras going.” For the last several decades every major city—and most minor ones—had had all public streets under constant video camera surveillance, with the tape available at any time from any computer. It had cut crime down considerably, but Melly knew what Anny Beth was implying: If the tabloid reporter knew what they looked like, they couldn’t hide in any city.

  “Remember when we were in our tour-the-world phase?” Melly asked. When they were in their midsixties the second time around, they both got the travel bug bad. They each circled the world twice. “I said I’d rather live in Timbuktu than anywhere grass won’t grow. How could we live here?”

  “Want to go somewhere else?”

  Melly shrugged. “Where else can we avoid the cameras?”

  “Then it’s sand, sweet sand,” Anny Beth said. “You live long enough, you’re bound to have to eat your words one time or another.”

  That sounded ominous to Melly’s ears. She knew they both needed to get out of this blue funk. “Anyhow, if we’re going to find someone to take care of us when we get younger, it’ll have to be someone without nosy neighbors to ask why we’re shrinking, not growing. We need a hermit. And if there are any hermits left in the world, it’d be in Sky, New Mexico.”

  Her voice shook, but she went to the computer anyhow and instructed it to dial the agency. The cheery face of the agency secretary quickly appeared on the screen.

  “Melly!” Agatha said. “What a surprise! I thought you and Anny Beth only checked in once a year. What gives?”

  Melly explained. Agatha’s face grew more concerned with each word.

  Agatha began punching buttons on her computer before Melly finished her last sentence. “Oh, you’ve got to come back, then. Let me arrange a flight—”

  “No!” Melly said. She could feel her jaw thrusting forward stubbornly. She knew the image Agatha saw on her screen was of a petulant child. She tried to sound mature and decisive, but her voice didn’t work that way anymore. “We’re fine. We just need new ID. And some way to transfer our bank accounts that can’t be traced.”

  Agatha sighed, but she stopped punching buttons. “I’ll talk to the directors and see what we can do. But you know this is very exasperating for them. Why do you insist on fighting the inevitable?”

  Anny Beth stepped up behind Melly. “Because coming back to the agency is not inevitable. It’s out of the question.”

  Melly gave her a glance of gratitude. Agatha sighed once more, then said patronizingly, “Whatever you say. Call back tomorrow and I’ll let you know the directors’ decision. Good-bye.”

  Agatha’s image faded from the screen.

  “They’re not going to be happy with us,” Melly muttered.

  Anny Beth shrugged. “They don’t have to be happy. They just have to help.”

  Melly looked out the window, thinking about settling in in this strange place. “We’ll have to get them to transfer your college credits, too,” she said.

  “Yeah,” Anny Beth said. “Not that it matters. You know I’m just playing around in college. It’s not like I’m going to use this degree for anything.”

  Melly nodded. She watched the sand blowing in the wind. Now that they were kids again, nobody expected them to be useful anymore. Funny—she’d never realized how much being young and being old were alike. But she still had a big goal, she reminded herself: finding surrogate parents. Surely there was someone here—

  Anny Beth stood up and stretched. “I don’t know about you, but I’m starved. How about some biscuits and gravy?”

  Melly recognized the offer for what it was: comfort food, pure and simple. They’d both eaten biscuits and gravy growing up in Kentucky. Nobody ate them nowadays. Gravy had practically been outlawed after the cholesterol scare of 2010.

  “You’ll clog your arteries,” Melly warned.

  “Haven’t so far,” Anny Beth said.

  “Then you’ll clog your pores.”

  Anny Beth’s hands flew to her face. “Oh, no—zits!” she exclaimed melodramatically. “I forgot I’d have to worry about those again soon.”

  Melly nodded, rubbing the small pimple beginning to grow on the tip of her nose. “Now, that’s one human affliction I really expected science to cure by now,” she said.

  “That and the common cold,” Anny Beth said.

  “And baldness,” Melly said.

  “And aging,” Anny Beth said. When Melly didn’t answer right away, she added, “I guess there’s still hope.”

  “For the Cure?” Melly said. “Not in my lifetime.”

  The words were out before she realized how meaningful the phrase really was.

  “If they came up with another possibility,” Anny Beth said, “would you try it?”

  “I don’t think so,” Melly said. “Who’d want to be a teenager forever?”

  “People who don’t remember what it’s like,” Anny Beth said. “Peter Pan.”

  Anny Beth got up and went into the kitchenette. Melly could hear her muttering to the automatic food machine: “Throw in some flour—oh, that’s right, you need precision. One cup. And a half cup of milk . . . ”

  Melly went over and stood in the kitchen door to watch the machine stamp out perfectly round circles of dough, flip them onto a pan, and begin baking.

  The biscuits, Melly knew, would not taste anything like what she remembered from her childhood—her first childhood. But they would be adequate. And how trustworthy was her memory, anyway, after 184 years?

  “Remember when we believed in the Cure?” she asked Anny Beth dreamily.

  “Something like that’s hard to forget,” Anny Beth snorted.

  November 8, 2006

  Mr. Johnson wanted it to stop.

  “You have the chance to stay any age. Why pick seventy-five?” Dr. Reed argued. “You still have arthritis. You still have wrinkles. You’re still bald.”

  “And I still have most of my memories,” Mr. Johnson said so softly that Amelia had to lean in to hear him. Maybe it had been a little too soon to throw away her hearing aid. She’d placed it in the trash can only moments before being summoned to this meeting. The doctors said Mr. Johnson owed it to his fellow Project Turnabout volunteers to discuss his decision, but Amelia thought their true agenda was to have everyone gang u
p on him and talk him out of it.

  “What’s a few memories, here and there?” a gruff voice came from the back of the room. Amelia recognized it as one of the other men in the project, Mr. Simon. “You want to be an old man the rest of your life?”

  Amelia thought that was a funny question, given that they’d all expected to be old the rest of their lives before Project Turnabout came around. But nobody laughed. Mr. Johnson sat still at the front of the room. He seemed to be staring off into blank space, but then he began answering Mr. Simon.

  “My wife died when I was seventy-four,” he said. “I don’t want to forget her funeral. Everyone came up to me and told me what a wonderful woman she’d been. . . .”

  His voice trailed off. Amelia waited for some-one—probably Mrs. Flick—to break the tension with a joke like, “Come on, people say things like that at everyone’s funeral. Probably half the people there didn’t even know your wife.” But the room was silent. All the old people seemed lost in memories of their own—memories they also feared losing.

  “Look, we’re very sorry about the memory problems,” Dr. Jimson said impatiently. “Believe me, we’re working as hard as we can to fix that. But this decision would be permanent. In our lab tests, once we stop an animal’s unaging, we can’t start it again. Trying just . . .” She cleared her throat and hesitated for a second, then went on, more forcefully than ever, “Trying just kills the animal.”

  Everyone shifted uncomfortably in their seats—all regular chairs now, no wheelchairs. Even the ones who had been in wheelchairs for decades were walking on their own now. Amelia thought it was easier to force yourself to walk when you knew the skill was going to come back. She’d resigned herself to a wheelchair after she broke her hip at ninety-five and overheard the doctor say, “Doesn’t all that physical therapy seem like a waste? The therapists will struggle and cajole and kill themselves getting her to walk, and she’ll just fall again a month or two later. Or die.” So she really couldn’t understand Mr. Johnson wanting to give up unaging. Except for the doctors and, now, an occasional nurse or aide, she hadn’t seen anyone in five years who wasn’t unaging. It was easy to forget that wasn’t the natural order of things.

  “You fixed the problems of aging,” Mr. Johnson said now, stubbornly. “You say you’re gonna fix our memories. Maybe you can fix me for more unaging, too. Later. But I can tell you this: You’re not going to make me lose anything about Lucille.”

  “But if you write it all down—,” Dr. Jimson started. The doctors had asked all the Turnabout patients to keep what they called Memory Books, to record what they were about to forget. “A temporary measure,” Dr. Reed called it. “Like using candles during a power outage.” Amelia wondered how much longer he could keep saying that. She had five Memory Books now, one for each year that had disappeared from her mind.

  “Writing’s not the same as remembering,” Mr. Johnson said forlornly.

  The doctors exchanged glances.

  “Okay,” Dr. Reed said gently. “Meeting dismissed.”

  There were whispers up and down the hallways the rest of that day: “He’s going to do it—” “No, he’s not—” “Well, I heard he already took the medicine—” “The doctors are trying an experimental memory treatment on him instead.” Amelia wondered why the doctors had kept everyone so well informed about everything else but were suddenly so secretive now. Mrs. Flick roamed the halls of the agency, looking for Mr. Johnson, and came back to report, “No one saw him leave the meeting.”

  Amelia counted squares in her cross-stitch, lost track, and gave up on it. “They’ll tell us what happened,” she said. “They always do.”

  Mrs. Flick nodded. “Yeah. If I hear the doctors getting all hepped up about those telly-mirrors one more time, I’m going to croak.”

  Amelia stuck her needle back in her cross-stitch, guessing at the right place. “Now we’re going to have to listen to lots more. Dr. Reed will compare Mr. Johnson’s telomeres to all of the rest of ours. Then Dr. Jimson will talk about how his wrinkles won’t go away, but ours will, because of all the millions of cells in the skin, which is our largest organ—”

  Mrs. Flick laughed because Amelia had mimicked the doctors so precisely. Funny imitations hadn’t been part of her pre-Turnabout life. She sometimes had the feeling that she herself would be the biggest surprise of this second chance at life. She took a few more stitches.

  “You don’t reckon anything went wrong with Mr. Johnson, do you?” Mrs. Flick asked.

  “I don’t know,” Amelia said. “Probably not. Nothing except him making a foolish decision.”

  But she felt guilty saying that. Roy had died when she was fifty. She had years and years before she would lose any memories of him. So far she’d really lost only the memory of great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren she barely knew. She still had pictures. As for her other relatives—the children and grandchildren and nieces and nephews—those she preferred to remember as their younger selves anyhow.

  An aide poked her head in the door.

  “The doctors are calling a meeting in fifteen minutes in the conference room,” she said.

  “About Mr. Johnson again?” Mrs. Flick asked.

  The aide shrugged. “They don’t tell me nothing.”

  Amelia folded her cross-stitch and stood up, trying to ignore the sick feeling in her stomach. She and Mrs. Flick shuffled out the door together, joining the stream of other people already moving down the hallway. Amelia was struck by a strange desire to join hands, the way she’d held hands with her sisters and cousins on her first day walking to school, all those years ago. Today she stifled the longing for comfort. She wasn’t a frightened seven-year-old. She was a woman of the Turnabout. She could handle whatever was going to happen on her own.

  When they got to the conference room, Dr. Reed was already standing at the podium. He didn’t look up until Dr. Jimson shut the doors and went to stand beside him.

  “Everyone is here now,” she said dully.

  Dr. Reed looked down at the paper in front of him.

  “I regret to inform you,” he began reading in a monotone, “that Edward Johnson died at one fifty-seven this afternoon. He received an injection of the antitelomerase stimulator PT-2 at one forty-five and apparently suffered a violently allergic reaction. My wife and I offer our condolences to all of you, who are, essentially, his surviving family.”

  Dr. Reed backed away from the podium, reminding Amelia of dozens of press conferences she’d seen where the president comes in, announces bad news, then leaves before anyone can ask any questions. Dr. Reed, normally so talkative, showed no inclination to say any more.

  He had already turned his back on the crowd before a voice rang out.

  “Now, wait just a cotton-picking minute!” one of the women yelled. “You can’t just leave it like that! Why didn’t it work? What went wrong? Is that what’s going to happen to the rest of us?”

  Dr. Reed stepped back to the podium. He leaned into the microphone and whispered, “I don’t know.”

  Hysteria broke out then. People screamed, “But you have to know!” “How could you let this happen?” “But Mr. Johnson believed in you—”

  Dr. Jimson rapped on the podium until the hubbub subsided enough that she could make her voice heard.

  “Silence!” she screamed. “Silence. Don’t yell at us! PT-2 worked on mice. It worked on monkeys! We had every reason—well, almost every reason—to expect it to work on Mr. Johnson. We didn’t know—”

  “But you’re supposed to know—,” someone hollered.

  Dr. Jimson hit the podium again.

  “We can’t know everything!” she screamed. Amelia watched in amazement. She’s going to cry. Dr. Jimson, the ice queen, is going to cry. But Dr. Jimson didn’t. She swallowed hard and seemed to regain her composure.

  Still, her loss of control momentarily shocked the crowd into silence. That gave Mrs. Flick an opening to say, in a perfectly calm voice, “Then maybe Mr. Johnson isn’t
dead.”

  Everyone turned to stare at her. She went on.

  “Maybe it’s just a coma. Like before,” Mrs. Flick said. “Remember? You all thought we died after the first shot. But you were wrong. Maybe you’re wrong now.”

  “No.” Dr. Jimson was shaking her head wildly. “No. You don’t understand. You’d have to see—”

  “We’ve got to show them the video,” Dr. Reed said in a hollow voice.

  Dr. Jimson turned to stare at him. But for once he was a few steps ahead of her. He was already turning the TV toward the crowd and hitting buttons on the remote control.

  The picture that appeared on the screen was of Mr. Johnson sitting in this very room. His shirt-sleeve was rolled up, and Amelia could see the swath of orange antiseptic already swabbed on his arm. Dr. Reed and Dr. Jimson both hovered over him.

  “I’ll ask you one last time,” the Dr. Reed on the screen said in a patient voice. “Are you absolutely certain this is what you want?”

  “One hundred percent,” Mr. Johnson replied, his voice ringing with confidence.

  “Okay,” Dr. Reed said doubtfully. He picked up a syringe and eased the needle into Mr. Johnson’s arm. He pushed on the syringe, and the yellowish liquid inside disappeared into Mr. Johnson’s arm.

  “Feeling all right?” Dr. Jimson asked.

  “Just fine,” Mr. Johnson said. But his face had already begun to change before he said the second word. His cheeks went hollow, his eyes bulged, his jowls drooped. His body hunched over. He was aging. Rapidly. Amelia looked over at the untelevised Dr. Reed to see if he had hit the fast-forward button on the remote. But that was crazy, because even fast-forward couldn’t condense decades into seconds. On the screen Mr. Johnson shriveled further, faster. Amelia almost felt relieved when his head dropped forward, obviously in death. At least it was over for him.

  The televised Dr. Reed and Dr. Jimson could only stand back in horror.