Turnabout

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

Melly snorted, wondering how gullible someone would have to be to think they’d been on vacation.

  “There’s a cave, up this hill—,” Anny Beth began.

  Melly squinted into the darkness of the woods ahead. “I know,” she said quietly. “My brothers and sisters and I used to play there.”

  Pine branches rustled in the breeze, and for a second Melly could imagine it was one of her sisters playing hide-and-seek. “A-meal-yuh! Come and get me!” echoed in her head, and she stepped forward, as though she truly expected to find Gemima or Liza Mae or Ray Lee or Joe behind the tree. But it’d been almost two centuries since they’d been children; they’d all died and been buried in the cemetery on the other side of the ridge decades before Melly had begun her turnabout. She suddenly missed them all again with an intensity she’d rarely felt in the last century. She bit her lip, willing herself not to cry. So this was why she wasn’t supposed to come back to Kentucky.

  “Earth to Melly,” Anny Beth said. “You gonna help me, or stand there mooning the night away?”

  Melly saw that Anny Beth had pulled almost all of the boxes behind a tree. She was piling the rest of the supplies into two backpacks.

  “Doesn’t this make you feel at all nostalgic?” Melly asked.

  Anny Beth turned to face her squarely.

  “Kentucky,” she said, “is where my stepfather beat me once a day, minimum. Twice, if the dog wasn’t around to kick too. And where he left off, my husbands took over. So, in a word, no.”

  “So you’ve been running away from this for the past eighty-four years,” Melly said, waving her arms to indicate the woods in front of them.

  “I prefer to think that I’ve made my peace with the past and moved on,” Anny Beth said stiffly. “We’ve both been to enough psychology classes to know it could be interpreted either way.”

  Melly remembered that Anny Beth had got a Ph.D. in psychology several decades ago.

  “Still,” she said. “Is this going to be too hard on you?”

  Anny Beth shrugged. “What’s done is done. You’re the one who had a problem with coming here.”

  To show that she wasn’t suffering from second thoughts, Melly picked up one of the backpacks and thrust her arms through the straps. She watched Anny Beth do the same.

  “You first,” Anny Beth said. “You know the way.”

  They started hiking up the hill. Once they passed the first few trees, the path broadened enough that they could walk side by side.

  “You left the computers in the car, didn’t you?” Melly said.

  Anny Beth nodded. “I’m pretty sure they could be traced too. You know, one of us should have taken a few years out to study computer technology or advanced hacking, instead of all that social science.”

  Melly thought of the degrees they held: social work, psychology, sociology, nursing, education. Nothing that would help them defend themselves against a tabloid reporter.

  “Everybody else in this century knows all the computer stuff. I figured we could always ask,” Melly said. “We’ll have to find a public library.”

  “What for?”

  “We need to find out if there’s already anything on-line about us. And we need to investigate our descendants to find someone who will take care of us when we get too young.”

  Melly waited for Anny Beth to protest. Instead she said, “I wondered how long it would take you to reach that conclusion. You’re breaking promises right and left today, aren’t you?”

  Melly shifted the pack on her back. “Morality just isn’t as easy as it was the last time I was fifteen,” she mumbled. “I’ve thought and thought about this. I even prayed. I think this is the right thing to do.”

  Mercifully, Anny Beth didn’t challenge her again. They walked in silence in the moonlight for almost a mile. Then the path split and Melly hesitated.

  “You go on that way and I’ll catch up,” she said. “I just want to see something—”

  “No, let’s stick together,” Anny Beth said.

  They walked around a curve and through the trees and stepped into the clearing. And there, in the moonlight, stood the house Melly remembered. She’d once thought it impressive—huge compared with the shacks many of their neighbors lived in. But after all the years she’d spent living in electronic splendor, with all the luxuries of the twenty-first century, this place seemed like a rustic cabin. The wooden walls were bare brown, the windows unadorned, the porch plain concrete. Melly dropped her backpack and stood and stared, soaking in the sight.

  “Someplace you recognize?” Anny Beth asked.

  “Where I was born,” Melly said. “Where I grew up. Home.”

  Anny Beth was kind enough not to say anything for a long time.

  “Could we stay here?” Melly asked. “It’d be better than the cave—”

  “Maybe someone’s already there,” Anny Beth retorted.

  “In protected territory? And look, there’s no smoke from the chimney.”

  “There wouldn’t be,” Anny Beth said. “Wood-burning fires were outlawed fifty years ago, remember?”

  “I forgot,” Melly murmured. Being back in Kentucky had somehow thrust all her memories of the current century far to the back of her mind. But she latched onto a sudden concern. “Oh, no—how are we going to cook?”

  Anny Beth sighed. “I brought a portable cooker,” she said. “I had to rethink the idea of roughing it. We can’t hunt, we can’t have fire—living in the past is really impossible now.”

  Melly wasn’t sure exactly how she meant that. “But we can still stay here,” she said. “Not because of nostalgia. It’s more practical.” She reshouldered her backpack and prepared to step forward.

  Just then the door of the house opened and the porch light came on. A dog ran out, followed by a young woman.

  “Go on, you silly mutt,” the woman yelled good-naturedly. “But hurry back. Why can’t you learn to go before bedtime?”

  The dog yelped in response and scrambled down the porch stairs. Melly and Anny Beth simultaneously slid behind the nearest tree, out of sight. It didn’t matter. The dog ran right toward them, sniffing deeply. He stopped at Melly’s shoes and began barking. Melly froze in fear.

  The woman on the porch laughed.

  “Leave the raccoons alone, you idiot,” she called. “Want to get us kicked out of the preserve? Now, do what you have to do and come on back.”

  The dog gave three more barks, then evidently decided that if his mistress didn’t care about intruders, neither did he. He galloped back toward the house.

  Melly allowed herself a sigh of relief. While the dog was still cavorting around, making a huge racket, she and Anny Beth turned and ran from the house.

  “So much for that idea,” Anny Beth said when they reached the main path once more.

  “It’s not fair,” Melly complained. “That house should be mine.” For some reason she couldn’t get the image out of her head: a stranger on the porch of her home.

  “After one hundred and eighty-five years you still expect life to be fair?” Anny Beth asked. But she put her arm comfortingly around Melly’s shoulders as they walked toward their cave.

  April 26, 2085

  Melly woke early the next morning. Cave floors were not the most comfortable places to sleep, even with high-tech sleeping bags to cushion the rock. And even though she was quite tired, there was a song repeating itself in her brain all night, it seemed: “Get up, get up, find out what’s next—” The sun was barely over the horizon when she stepped over Anny Beth’s sleeping form and tiptoed to the cave’s entrance.

  The rays of pink and blue shot across the sky, like so many exclamation points over the tops of the budding trees. The cave was near the peak of the mountain, so Melly could look down on miles and miles of unspoiled woods. She summoned a mug of hot chocolate from the automatic cooker and sat on a rock to drink it with the full vista of wilderness at her feet.

  “Who wouldn’t want to live forever in a place like this?” she mumble
d to herself. But she didn’t have forever, and there was too much to take care of right now to just sit around enjoying the scenery. She gulped down the rest of her hot chocolate and instructed the cooker to make bread for breakfast. Then she headed downhill to bring up the rest of their things from the hiding place beside the road.

  Just as she carried the last box up the hill—panting, because all those Memory Books were heavy—she heard a scream from inside the cave.

  “No! Leave me alone!”

  Melly dropped the box on the path and rushed in to find Anny Beth thrashing in her sleeping bag. Her skin was clammy and her hair was plastered to her head with sweat. Melly grabbed her by her shoulders and shook.

  “Anny Beth! Wake up! Are you having a nightmare?”

  Anny Beth fought her off at first, knocking Melly against the cave wall. Then Melly got a firm grip on Anny Beth’s arms. Anny Beth’s eyes slowly focused on Melly.

  “Oh,” she said. “It’s you. I was dreaming—”

  “Your stepfather?” Melly asked.

  Anny Beth nodded weakly. “But when I’ve dreamed about him before, he’s always stronger than me. . . . I always lose. This time he was little and I was big. I beat him up. I threw him across the room. I really think I’m okay now.” Anny Beth’s face shone with triumph and sweat.

  “Yeah, well, you threw me, too. Now, can you help me clean up this blood?” Melly showed Anny Beth the gash on her arm.

  “I’m sorry,” Anny Beth said. She reached for their first-aid kit and expertly dabbed at the wound with Speedy Healer. They both watched the ragged edges of the cut close up into a faint pink line. Anny Beth started giggling. “I’m sorry. But if it was you I threw, no wonder my stepfather seemed so light and easy to beat.”

  “Hey, anytime you need help overcoming psychological traumas from the past, call on me,” Melly said. She hesitated. “So, he was big?”

  “Six three, probably three hundred pounds. Known for miles around as the meanest man in the state. I never had a chance against him.”

  “I’m sorry,” Melly said. “Isn’t it strange that, as long as we’ve known each other, we’ve never talked about him before?”

  “No,” Anny Beth said. “Since the turnabout, we’ve had different lives. Now maybe we’re melding them together.”

  It was the most philosophical statement Melly had ever heard from Anny Beth.

  “Should we?” Melly asked quietly.

  Anny Beth shrugged.

  They made their plans during breakfast. Anny Beth agreed to hike to the nearest library, which she calculated to be about six miles back up the road.

  “It’s safer for me to go than you,” she explained. “No reporter’s looking for me.”

  “But surely this reporter has figured out that we’re together. . . .”

  Anny Beth took a huge bite of bread, chewed, and swallowed before answering.

  “I’ll be six miles from our hiding place. I don’t expect to be there more than this once. And what other option do we have?”

  Melly nodded slowly, not wanting to agree. Really, she wanted to be at the library too, getting the information at the same time as Anny Beth. “But what’ll I do while I wait?”

  Anny Beth washed her bread down with hot chocolate, draining the mug and placing it back on the rock they’d been using as a table. She stood up and stretched.

  “Hey. I guess you get to relax.”

  It was a laughable notion. Melly put a ridiculous amount of effort into cleaning up after breakfast. She picked crumbs from the rock as though expecting some Sherlock Holmes to come around looking for hints of any human presence. A squirrel upset at the lost chance for food chee-cheed a scolding.

  “Oh, leave me alone,” Melly grumbled back.

  She carried all the boxes into the cave and made sure their sleeping bags and other supplies were as far back from the entrance as possible, hidden from any passers-by. She didn’t really expect any: Visitors were rarely allowed into protected lands. Technically, she and Anny Beth were violating dozens of environmental laws. That was why she was surprised that anyone was living in her old home.

  The memory of the woman standing on the porch of the old house—Melly’s old house—kept coming back to her. So when she’d finished every chore she could possibly think of, she found herself heading down the trail toward the house. The sensible thing to do would be to hide until Anny Beth returned—all the wisdom she’d gained in her long life told her that—but there was no way she was going to sit alone in the dark for an entire day. What teenager could?

  In daylight the house looked different: smaller, darker, more run-down. Hiding in an enormous forsythia bush that hadn’t existed in her last lifetime, Melly squinted through leaves and wondered how much the house had changed in the past century, compared with how much her memories of it had changed. It was her home—she knew that—but she didn’t feel the same emotional pull of the night before, when shadows and darkness had hidden all the changes.

  Still, Melly watched with great interest when the woman stepped out on the porch again, calling back to the dog, “No, you silly mutt, you’ve got to stay home this time. And don’t wear yourself out barking at the squirrels through the window, you hear?”

  Now that Melly got a better look at the woman, she could tell she was fairly young—Melly guessed late twenties, early thirties at the most. She had small features, short, light brown hair, and a jaunty swing to her stride. She reminded Melly of someone, but as Melly thought back through all the people in all the places she lived, she couldn’t think who.

  The woman started down the hill in the opposite direction from the cave. Without thinking, Melly started following her, stepping carefully to avoid attracting attention. One of their neighbors when she was growing up had boasted that in his youth he’d served as a scout for the great Daniel Boone himself. The neighbor, Mr. Craven, had gone so far as to show Melly’s brothers how to creep silently through even the densest brush, as if that proved his wild tales to be true. Melly and her sisters had laughed at the boys’ mincing steps, their anguished winces at every cracking twig and rustling leaf. But secretly the girls had practiced too, and Melly had somehow mastered the trick of putting down her feet without placing her full weight in any one spot. It was something about the swaying of her hips—maybe that wasn’t the way Mr. Craven did it, but that was what worked for her. Somehow the skill came back to her now, as she followed the woman from her old house.

  When she was a kid—the last time—Melly and her brothers and sisters had always pretended to be hiding from Indians. Sometimes when they miscalculated their steps and accidentally made a huge ruckus, they’d clutch their hands around the imaginary arrows sticking out of their chests and cry, “Oh, no! He got me!” One of her sisters, Liza Mae, had been good at dramatic death scenes too. Now, of course, Melly knew children no longer played that Indians were the enemy. All the textbooks had been rewritten, and Columbus Day had been turned into a national Day of Atonement, an annual time of apologizing to Native Americans. Melly understood the reasons and mostly approved, though she kind of missed the simplicity of the past. Even now what she feared was not clear-cut and definite—like death—but entirely abstract. If the tabloid reporter found her, if her secret was exposed to the world, she’d go on living. It would just be a miserable existence.

  Melly was so busy thinking that she got sloppy and snapped a twig. Melly quickly crouched, hoping the undergrowth would hide her, but the woman in front of her didn’t even turn around to look. Perhaps she was lost in thought too.

  After a mile or two the woman began veering downhill. The woods changed too. Melly tried to remember why everything suddenly seemed so unfamiliar, then realized—this had been Dry Gulch, the nearest town. Melly’s family had come here to shop just about every Saturday morning. And now all the stores were gone, along with all the houses, all the roads, all the cleared land. Melly could see no trace of the past.

  Melly briefly considered stopping and look
ing more closely, in memory of all the people who’d once lived here. But what was the point? She kept following the woman.

  At the bottom of the hill Melly could see that the woods ended. The woman stepped out onto blacktop. Melly slid downhill, suddenly worried that she’d lose track of the woman. Melly landed on the blacktop several paces behind. Without the trees around her the glare of the sunlight was blinding. She had to squint and let her eyes adjust before she saw where the woman had led her: a Wal-Mart Universal store.

  “Guess this proves Anny Beth knows how to read a map,” Melly muttered.

  By now the woman was practically on the other side of the parking lot, nearly up to the door. Without stopping to analyze why it was important to keep up with her, Melly took off running. She heard the screech of brakes but didn’t have time to react. An automated shopping cart slammed into her leg.

  “Ow—” Melly crumbled in pain.

  “Watch where you’re going!” The man driving the cart didn’t seem to feel a smidgen of guilt or compassion. His wrinkled face was twisted in an expression of disgust. “Kids! Think you’re going to live forever, so you endanger everyone else! I could have got whiplash!”

  Melly straightened up and decided nothing was broken, only bruised. As the pain ebbed she wanted to giggle. Oh, if only the man knew how far she was from believing she would live forever.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” she said in the most polite voice she could summon up without laughing. “I’ll be more careful next time.”

  She walked away, chuckling to herself at the man’s drop-jawed astonishment. She hoped she’d never been that kind of bitter old person.

  The woman from her house was in the store now, totally out of sight. Melly rushed in through the vacuum doors, but her cause was hopeless now. The woman could be in any one of a hundred aisles. Melly could search all day and never find her. She walked up and down the aisles anyway.

  After just one night in the woods the sights and sounds of an ordinary store were overwhelming. All those bright colors, the brand names shouting from the shelves—no wonder most people avoided nature nowadays. The reintroduction into civilization was too jarring.