Turnabout

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

“Didn’t you say you two were the oldest in Project Turnabout? Wouldn’t most of the others be little kids now? Four, five, six years old?” A. J. asked.

  “Yeah. So?” Anny Beth asked.

  “Where’s the playground? Why aren’t there any toys in sight?”

  Melly shivered, feeling a sense of foreboding she didn’t understand.

  “Believe me, the others would be the kind of geeky kids who stayed glued to the computer all day,” Anny Beth said. Melly wondered if she was really as unconcerned as she sounded.

  A. J. rang the doorbell, and someone buzzed them in.

  The entryway was empty and felt forbidding. The lights weren’t even turned on.

  Anny Beth elbowed Melly. “Look.”

  Melly turned and saw an old-fashioned pay phone still hanging on the wall by the door. As if a voice from the past were echoing in the hallway, she remembered the taunt Anny Beth had once flung at Mrs. Swanson: “There’s a pay phone in the hallway. Why don’t you use it?” She wondered why it was still there. Why did this feel more like a museum than an institution for kids?

  “Hello?” A. J. called.

  Agatha, the receptionist Melly, Anny Beth, and A. J. had spoken with before, appeared from around a corner.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I was checking on some things in the back. Come right in. We’re so glad to see you. We were so worried when we lost touch with you, Anny Beth and Melly.”

  To Melly’s surprise she found herself engulfed in a tight hug. Then Agatha threw her arms around Anny Beth, too. Melly wondered if she and Anny Beth had been too hard on the agency people all these years. Maybe they did care, even if they were misguided.

  But Anny Beth, never one to be distracted by emotion, blurted out, “Where is everyone?”

  “Everyone?” Agatha echoed, looking puzzled.

  “All the inmates,” Anny Beth said. When Agatha only looked at her blankly, she added, “I mean, the kids. The other Project Turnabout victims.”

  “I hope you don’t think of yourself as victims,” Agatha said reprovingly. But Melly noticed she didn’t answer the question. Agatha’s expression was now as closed as if automatic doors had swung shut across her face. “Here. Let’s go into the conference room. The doctors are eager to talk to you.”

  She paused at the reception desk, pressed a button, and announced, “They’re here.” Then she led them down the hall. The room they entered wasn’t the big conference room where they’d had meetings before—where Mr. Johnson had died, and Dr. Reed and Dr. Jimson had married, and Melly had realized she was forgetting the past. This room was small and nondescript, containing nothing more than a table and six chairs.

  An elderly man and an elderly woman walked in, and Agatha introduced them. “Melly, Anny Beth, A. J., I’d like you to meet Dr. Jimson-Reed-Lenoski-Yee and Dr. Jimson-Reed-Alvarez-Braun. Doctors, this is Amelia Hazelwood and Anny Beth Flick, as you know, and their great-great-great-granddaughter, A. J. Hazelwood.”

  Everyone shook hands. Melly judged the two doctors to be in their late fifties or early sixties, clearly aging. So here was another set of doctors who had access to PT-1, but hadn’t used it.

  “Well,” the female doctor said. “I never expected to see the two of you back here again.” There was a silence she hastened to fill. “I have to tell you how sorry we are for not doing a better job of protecting your phone numbers from public access. Because of the sensitive nature of our computer files, we’ve tried to handle all the data protection by ourselves. I guess this proves we’re not computer experts.”

  “And after eighty-four years we weren’t as concerned as we used to be about tabloid snooping,” the male doctor added with an accusatory look at A. J. “Evidently we should have been.”

  A. J. looked steadily back at him. Anny Beth glared. Melly decided she should play peacemaker.

  “That’s all right,” Melly said. “As it turned out, it was a good thing that A. J. found us. And I’m sure you’ll be more careful now.”

  She knew they were: A. J. had checked and said she couldn’t get any access to agency records at all in the past few weeks. So Melly could afford to be forgiving.

  Everyone fell silent again, and Melly wondered how long Anny Beth could stand the polite tension in the air around them before she broke through with a direct question. But it wasn’t Anny Beth who spoke next.

  “All right,” A. J. said, leaning intently across the table. “Now that that’s out of the way—what else are you hiding from us that we need to know?”

  The two doctors exchanged glances. Melly wondered if the hyphenated names meant that they were spouses or siblings. Regardless, that comparing look had remained in the gene pool, just as Anny Beth’s directness had somehow been passed down to A. J. intact.

  “It’s a long story . . . ,” the female doctor demurred.

  “We’ve got all the time in the world to listen,” A. J. said, undeterred.

  Both doctors sighed.

  “Some of it’s not very pleasant,” the male doctor added.

  “We could have figured that out,” Anny Beth said. “Now, tell it. And don’t pretty it up any.”

  The female doctor began. “After you left, our grandparents thought they’d have the Cure figured out in a matter of years. Or, at the very least, they thought they could solve the memory problems. But both solutions eluded them, and that was . . . agonizing for the patients who remained here.”

  She fell silent. Now it was Melly who found the suspense unbearable. “Look, we know some of them committed suicide. Your grandparents told me thirty years ago, so you don’t have to pussyfoot around that. What about the others?”

  “They’re all dead,” the male doctor said harshly.

  Melly gasped, stunned beyond words. She waited for some tide of grief to overwhelm her for the people she’d lived with eighty years ago—Mrs. Englewood, who’d sipped her tea so daintily; Mr. Wilde, who’d told stupid jokes; Mrs. Kretz, who’d always bragged about how she and her husband had been such wonderful dancers. But she’d known them all so long ago, and she’d known so clearly that she had to break with them. . . . In her mind they were already dead.

  “Why?” A. J. asked softly.

  The male doctor shook his head regretfully. “That’s what we’ve spent years trying to figure out. We’ve analyzed their psychological profiles—what we have, from the primitive records of the early part of this century—and studied their cellular structure. If you view premature requests for the Cure as essentially suicidal in nature, none of the other subjects had any desire to keep living much past the accepted human life span of one hundred twenty years. We’ve concluded that humans are just not meant to live too long.”

  “What about us?” Anny Beth asked, with more finesse than she usually bothered with.

  The male doctor shrugged. “We’ve studied everything about you two, as well. As you know. We have enough theories to fill multiple computer databases. But we don’t know. Perhaps it would help if we could find the other two people who left and cut off all contact with the agency. We’ve searched for them as thoroughly as possible. Because we haven’t found them, we can only assume they died as well, probably decades ago, when it was easier to die in anonymity.”

  “So,” the female doctor explained, “given the dismal failure of this experiment, we’ve found it necessary to switch the focus of the agency. As long as you two are alive, we will never make the full story available to the public. But we’ve been working behind the scenes to prevent other efforts to extend human life span.”

  Melly gaped at her.

  “But what about—,” Anny Beth started to protest.

  “We thought you were working on the Cure—,” Melly said simultaneously.

  Neither of the doctors would look Melly or Anny Beth in the eye.

  “You have to understand,” the male doctor said. “The breakthrough that cured cancer in the early 2020s could have also enabled humans to live virtually forever. We didn’t have much time to stop i
t. And other researchers keep circling closer and closer to the solution—it’s a full-time job just trying to throw them off track.”

  Melly’s head was reeling. She looked at A. J. across the table, hoping she would go into the same interviewing mode she’d exhibited with Anny Beth and Melly, and somehow pull enough information out of the doctors to make everything make sense. But A. J. sprang back from the table, her eyes flashing with outrage. Melly waited for her to yell at the doctors for trying to change the entire fate of humankind based on forty-six failures. But that wasn’t what she was mad about.

  “So you abandoned them,” she said, pointing at Melly and Anny Beth. “You changed their lives and promised to help them, and then you abandoned them. How could you? They were counting on you.”

  “No,” Melly said quietly. “We weren’t.”

  A. J. turned her head and looked curiously at Melly.

  “That was one of the reasons we left in the first place,” Melly said. “We couldn’t expect the doctors at the agency to be superhuman. They were playing God, yes, but—they weren’t God.”

  A. J. wasn’t appeased. “But, having given you PT-1, they had an obligation to keep working in your interest. They should have kept working on the Cure, they should have—”

  “We didn’t give them PT-1,” the male doctor interrupted. “Are we to be held responsible for our grandparents’ mistakes?”

  “Yes,” Melly said. “And no. You apparently feel responsible enough that you’ve devoted yourself to their cause.” She thought it horribly sad, suddenly, these two old people working in this forgotten place. How much of their lives had they given to the agency?

  A. J. had more immediate concerns.

  “But when Melly and Anny Beth regress back to infancy, are you going to be there for them?” A. J. argued. “Are you going to be there to help them when they lose the ability to read, to walk, to talk?”

  “We’re willing to, yes,” the female doctor said. “But they’ve been quite vocal in resisting our intervention up until now. In fact, I believe that’s the whole reason they’ve involved you in this, to avoid depending on us. Are you going to be there to help?”

  A. J. looked from Anny Beth to Melly.

  “Yes,” she said with the ringing certainty that Melly had heard in people’s voices at wedding ceremonies, at baptisms, in court. “I will.”

  Anny Beth cleared her throat.

  “Maybe I’m missing something,” she said with a touch of the Kentucky drawl that came back into her voice, it seemed, when Melly most needed to hear it. “But tell me if I’ve figured this right. If all the others are dead, then no one has unaged back to the beginning. So all this talk of us going back to being babies—it’s all just guesses, right? And even that notion of us dying when we hit zero—you don’t know for sure that’s going to happen, right?”

  “Right,” the doctors said together.

  “So we could die, we could stay infants forever, we could—who knows—start aging again?”

  “Like touching base and turning around?” Melly offered.

  “Maybe,” the female doctor said doubtfully. “All the lab subjects our grandparents used—before animal testing was outlawed, of course—all of them died at zero.”

  “But the mice and rats and monkeys also stopped unaging with the Cure,” the male doctor added. “So correlations aren’t . . . perfect.”

  “You’ve got to start working on this again,” A. J. said threateningly. “Melly’s only got another fifteen years. Before she gets back to zero, you’ve got to find some way to help. And you’ve got to let us know what you’re doing—”

  “No.” Melly shook her head slowly. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life worrying about that. But I’m not sure you should keep messing up other people’s research.”

  “What?” the male doctor asked in surprise.

  “Think about who your grandparents picked for Project Turnabout. We were all ready to die. Cheating death was more confusing for us than joyous. And then, for practical reasons, we all agreed to be cut off from the people who meant the most to us. . . . What if they’d given PT-1 to a bunch who were fighting to live, who had people and causes to live for?”

  The two doctors looked at each other thoughtfully.

  “But why did you two want to live when the others didn’t?” the female doctor asked. “You were as close to death as any of them.”

  Melly frowned. It was hard to analyze her own motives, especially since they’d changed over the years. She tried to think of something that had been constant throughout her entire second lifetime. And then she had it.

  “I think I was just determined to prove that I could make it outside the agency,” she said. “During my first lifetime I’d just done what people told me to do, been who they expected me to be. Once I realized I had another life coming, I had to prove I could meet the challenge.”

  Anny Beth nodded. “And I had such a bad life the first time, I had to prove I could manage not to mess up again,” she said.

  A. J. tilted her head thoughtfully to the side. “It’s going to be real interesting living with you two,” she said.

  The doctors were looking horrified.

  “So we’ve been wrong all these years?” the female doctor asked. “You think we should offer PT-1 to just . . . just anyone who wants it? Voluntarily?”

  “Why not?” Anny Beth asked. “As long as they knew the risks.”

  The male doctor buried his face in his hands. “My life’s work,” he mumbled.

  Melly felt a surge of sympathy. She knew how hard it was to give up ideas that had lasted a lifetime. She hurried to console him. “Maybe you haven’t been all wrong. In the early part of the century, with all the overpopulation problems, PT-1 would have been very bad for society. But now—don’t you think people would be less self-obsessed if they had a longer time to live? If they weren’t scrambling to make their mark on the world before they’d gained any wisdom about what kind of mark to leave?”

  “We’ll . . . we’ll have to think about all of this,” the female doctor said.

  “Can we go home now?” Anny Beth asked. “There’s a cool trail we’d like to hike this afternoon, and poky old Melly over there always wants to be in bed in time to get up and see the sunrise the next day. . . .”

  “Sure,” the male doctor said. “Just—you’ll stay in touch, won’t you?”

  They all shook hands, a strangely formal ending to their meeting. As they walked out to the car A. J. shook her head.

  “That was not at all the way I expected things to go,” she said. “I was ready to scream and yell about getting them to tell us everything, and not letting them keep you there. I had the president’s office number programmed in on the portable in my purse, in case I had to bring in the heavy hitters—”

  Melly stopped short, in horror. “So you would have blown our cover.”

  A. J. put a steadying hand on her shoulder. “Good grief, no. Don’t you think the president of the United States is capable of secrecy? You guys have seen the public face of this society. But believe me, there’s more. And we’re going to live in secret for the next two decades.”

  Melly turned and faced her. “Is that really okay with you?”

  A. J. nodded. “It’s what I want. I swear. On the graves of my ancestors. At least—the ones who are really dead. That I know of.”

  They all laughed.

  They got into the car and leaned back in comfort. It would only be a couple hours to home.

  “But I’ve got to ask you,” A. J. said suddenly. “How can you stand not knowing what’s going to happen at the end, when you turn zero? How can you not be grabbing those doctors by the collars and begging them to find out for you?”

  Melly shrugged. “Life’s full of uncertainty. Whether you’re aging or unaging.”

  Anny Beth nodded her agreement.

  A. J. squinted over at them. “I never know with you two—is that teenage profundity or the wisdom of two lifeti
mes?”

  “How am I supposed to know?” Melly said. “It’s just something I thought.”

  June 3, 2085

  They reached the crest of the hill, and then the entire valley lay at their feet—the vista Melly had been longing to see again for her entire second lifetime.

  “So,” Anny Beth asked, “was it worth the wait?”

  With tears in her eyes, Melly nodded. She looked out over the acres of treetops and took a deep breath of the cool mountain air. They’d been living with A. J. for a month now and had been back from the agency for two weeks, but Melly had held off on making this hike until exactly the right time.

  “It has to be in June,” she’d told Anny Beth and A. J. “That’s when we used to go there picking blueberries. . . . That’s when it’ll be at its best. . . .”

  Now she stood peering out at the valley in silence. It was beautiful, and yet—

  A. J. puffed up the trail behind them.

  “I’m going to have to get some of that PT-1 just to keep up with you two,” she joked. “Could you have stopped running for a few minutes to save my pride?”

  “Would you ever take PT-1?” Melly asked quietly.

  “I don’t know,” A. J. said, just as seriously. “What do you two think?”

  “I think it’s a personal decision that every human will have to make for him- or herself, according to the guidance of his or her conscience, and God, if he or she so believes,” Anny Beth said jauntily, as if quoting from a manual.

  “Gee, thanks for the psychobabble,” A. J. said. She bent over, panting, then looked out at the view. “Wow,” she said. “I know it’s inadequate, but, wow. No wonder you wanted to come back here.”

  The tears began sliding down Melly’s face.

  “Memories?” A. J. asked gently.

  Melly wiped the tears away with the back of her hand. “No. I mean—yes, there are lots of memories. It seems like memories are always most vivid right before I lose them. And I came here a lot the summer I was fifteen. Me and Roy. . . . But that’s not why I’m crying. It’s because . . . because I feel old again.”

  “What?” A. J. asked. “After the way you charged up that mountainside?” She looked from Melly to Anny Beth and back again. “Is it just because the memories seem so long ago?”