Turnabout (14 page)

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 looking 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.

Feeling dazed, Melly closed her eyes, trying to
adjust to only one sensation at a time. Sound first. Voices swirled around her: A mother scolding a child, “Suzie, keep those hands to yourself!” An elderly woman asking someone, “Would you kindly reach that box on the top shelf for me?”

Melly smiled, able to hear more with her eyes closed than open. There was still a twang in these people’s voices that sounded like the Kentucky she remembered. She thought back on all the news stories she’d read over the past half century explaining that TV and the transient nature of American lives had finally killed all regional accents, all regional differences in speech and thought. But those stories had been wrong. She could still hear home.

She opened her eyes and looked around. Was it her imagination, or did the stock boy getting the box from the top shelf have the same jutting jaw-line as all the Lawsons who’d lived down the mountain from her family growing up? Wasn’t the little girl in the shopping cart—probably Suzie of the wandering hands—a dead ringer for Pearl Gaines, who had been one of Melly’s playmates in grade school 170-some years ago? These people had to be the descendants of the people Melly had known, so long ago. The families had lived on, even if the individuals hadn’t. Melly felt the resemblances were a gift; a part of her that had gone
numb over the disappearance of Dry Gulch felt much better.

Then she turned around and saw the woman from her old house. This was her lucky day.

The woman was buying dog food. Melly followed her at a distance as she also picked out a box of computer disks and threaded her way to the checkout counter. While the woman emptied her cart for the price scanner, Melly ducked into a checkout line labeled OUT OF SERVICE and pretended to examine the rows of candy and gum. She absentmindedly fingered a pack of gum that promised day-long bubbles while she watched the woman over the top of the rack.

The woman’s computer screen flashed the total, and she swiped her debit card across the sensor. Then Melly got the reward she’d been waiting for: The screen flashed
Thank you, Ms. Hazelwood
in response.

Hazelwood! So she had to be some relative of Melly’s!

As foolish as she’d felt for following the woman before, Melly felt entirely justified now. She couldn’t wait to tell Anny Beth that she’d found something out today too.

Melly had only two seconds of feeling triumphant before the buzzers started going off around her.

“Warning! Warning!” a voice boomed around her. “Shoplifting suspect in line fourteen!”

Melly gasped and looked around. She was in line fourteen. She was the shoplifting suspect. How could she have been so stupid, drawing attention to herself like that? She knew that the surveillance cameras were programmed to set off alarms over suspicious behavior. And lingering over a candy rack was suspicious. Well, she’d just have to buy the gum. She said aloud, “I’m planning to pay for it.”

The alarms stopped. But as she reached into her pocket for her debit card she remembered: No, she couldn’t pay for it. Not without announcing to the whole world exactly where she was.

Melly looked around cautiously, contemplating throwing the gum to the floor and dashing out of the store. The surveillance cameras would memorize her image and probably track down her identity by comparison to some international data bank of surveillance tapes anyhow. Running would only increase the chances that she would be found out.

Melly moved to the back of a long checkout line, hoping that would give her time to come up with a better plan. The woman from her old house—Ms. Hazelwood—glanced her way once, without much curiosity. Then she picked up her dog food and computer disks and began walking for the door.

Melly advanced in her line, in agony. How could she be the one to blow her own cover? How could she be so stupid?

She was next at the computer. Resignedly she dug deep into her pants pocket, pulling up her debit card. And then—something else. Paper. Money.

Melly pulled the green strip up as though it was an artifact from another time. She stared at it stupidly for an entire minute before she remembered: This was what she’d been paid for baby-sitting—or, truly, not baby-sitting—for little Logan Junior, back when Mrs. Rodney had told her about the reporter calling. Melly had crammed it in her pocket and
forgotten about it in the rush of fleeing, first from home and then from the hotel. But these were the same pants she’d been wearing that day.

Melly breathed a silent prayer of thanks that even in the twenty-first century parents still sometimes paid teenage baby-sitters in cash. She stepped up to the checkout computer and inserted her cash into the dusty hole at the top. The letters on the computer screen blinked slightly, as though the computer were stunned to get anything but a debit card.

“You paid fifty dollars for a two-dollar piece of gum,” the computer informed her. “Do you expect change? You must go to the service desk for that. Or shall I credit the amount to your debit card?”

If she hadn’t feared arousing more suspicion, Melly would have let the computer keep her forty-eight dollars and been done with it. But she meekly trudged over to the service desk and filled out the form—in triplicate—explaining why she deserved cash back.

The man behind the counter searched in vain for something to give her.

“You’ll have to wait until we call the bank and ask for a delivery,” he explained. “Are you sure you left your debit card at home? Can’t you go back for it?”

“Okay,” Melly said with fake enthusiasm. “That’s a great idea! That’s what I’ll do!”

He wanted her to leave her name, but she talked him into giving her a receipt instead. It didn’t matter. By the end of the conversation he was staring at her so suspiciously that she knew he’d be reviewing the surveillance tapes anyhow.

She slunk out of the store and back into the woods feeling totally disheartened. She’d been stupid, yes, but there was just no way to hide in this world. Probably there were surveillance cameras somewhere in the woods that had captured video of Melly and Anny Beth entering and leaving the preserves. Probably someone was already searching for them, to arrest them. No wonder crime was so low nowadays. No wonder nobody understood the word
privacy
anymore.

Back at the cave Melly crawled into her sleeping bag. There was nothing she could do until Anny Beth got back. She just had to hope that Anny Beth got back before someone came to arrest her.

Melly was dreaming about playing chase with her brothers and sisters when she felt someone poking her in the side.

“Hey,” came Anny Beth’s welcome voice, “it’s not fair that I had to walk twelve miles and work all day while you did nothing but sleep!”

Melly didn’t bother correcting her. She sat up quickly, wide awake. “What’d you find out?”

Anny Beth handed her a thin electronic pad. “I downloaded everything into that. Believe me, you and I have spawned a load of exhibitionists. We can pick out people to take care of us based on belly button size if we want.”

Melly winced.

“Of course, it’s going to take us a year or two just to read all of that,” Anny Beth continued.

“We don’t have that kind of time,” Melly muttered. “Did you find out if the tabloids have anything about us?”

Anny Beth shook her head. “There’s nothing in print. And of course all the records of what they’re working on are off-limits. They probably protect their files better than the government protects military secrets.”

Melly turned the electronic pad’s switch to “on” and asked for an index.