Turnabout (4 page)

Melly always knew Anny Beth was totally serious when she slipped back into bad grammar. It was sort of comforting. But Melly refused to be comforted. “Fine,” she said. “You fiddle while Rome burns. I’m going to find someone to take care of us.”

“Tonight?” Anny Beth asked.

“Soon,” Melly said. She hated it when Anny Beth deflated her grand pronouncements.

“Shouldn’t it be ‘fiddle while Rome unburns’?” Anny Beth asked. “Because that’s pretty much what we’re doing. Ever watch a fire video on rewind? It’s really awesome to see a house put itself back together. . . .”

Melly let Anny Beth’s chatter envelop her like a cocoon. Anny Beth was probably right—she should just enjoy herself tonight. But tomorrow—she’d start her search tomorrow.

Amelia rolled her chair up to the dinner table in her usual spot beside Mrs. Flick. The fifty Project Turnabout volunteers had been at the agency for three months now, and they’d broken down into cliques just like kids at school. It hadn’t happened that way at Amelia’s old nursing home, because there was always someone new arriving or someone old dying. But no one had died at the agency. And they certainly never saw anyone new. Just the same handful of nurses and doctors and aides. It reminded Amelia of growing up in the hills of Kentucky. She could remember only two or three times in her entire childhood when she’d met an outsider.

But there had been no one like Mrs. Flick around when Amelia was growing up.

Amelia wasn’t quite sure why she and Mrs. Flick had hit it off. If the agency had been a school, Mrs. Flick would have been the unofficial leader and class clown and Most Likely to Get Into Trouble all at once. She was the one everyone else talked about—or would have, except that she herself liked to do most of the talking. And somehow she always knew everything that was going on. She was off the stretcher now and in a wheelchair once more, but still—how did the wheelchair make her so mobile
that she seemed to know what Dr. Reed and Dr. Jimson were thinking before they knew themselves?

“You hear what the meeting’s about tonight?” Amelia asked, leaning back while the attendant placed a plate of food in front of her.

“Our families. Again,” Mrs. Flick said, her eyes rolled skyward in disdain. At 102, she was the oldest at the agency but somehow managed to seem the most youthful.

“I miss my Morty and Angeline,” Mrs. Swanson whined across the table. “Why, oh, why won’t they let me see them?”

Mrs. Swanson was afflicted with a flair for melodrama.

“Nobody’s stopping you, toots,” Mrs. Flick shot back. “There’s a pay phone in the hallway. Why don’t you use it?”

Amelia decided to stay out of the discussion. She took a bite of her chicken à la king.

“But they don’t want us to contact our families,” Mrs. Swanson said with a sniff. “I don’t know how you were raised”—the look down her nose made it clear she had some definite ideas—“but I have always shown proper respect for authority. After they’ve been so kind as to save our lives, I believe it’s my duty to—”

“Oh, stow it, Louise,” Mrs. Flick said in disgust. “They don’t know what they want. They’re fighting among themselves too.”

Chewing a particularly stringy piece of chicken, Amelia wondered if Mrs. Flick was right. Certainly Dr. Reed and Dr. Jimson had been nothing but cordial to each other in public, but they mostly seemed to contrive to be at opposite sides of the room at every meeting. For a pair that had just orchestrated a scientific miracle, neither one of them seemed particularly happy.

Amelia swallowed her chicken carefully. “What about you?” she asked Mrs. Flick. “Why aren’t you in on the fight?”

“Yeah,” Mrs. Swanson contributed. “If anyone was gonna call from that pay phone, it’d be you—”

“Maybe I just don’t care about seeing my family,” Mrs. Flick said defiantly. “Ever think of that?”

Amelia and Mrs. Swanson exchanged glances. Amelia was willing to let it lie, but not Mrs. Swanson.

“Well, why ever not? You have family, don’t you?”

“Sure,” Mrs. Flick said. “Five kids, fourteen grandkids, and a passel of greats. Only, I raised every single one of them wrong. The ones who ain’t dead are in jail—or should be.”

Mrs. Swanson wasn’t going to let it go. “Surely one or two of them—”

“Nope,” Mrs. Flick said cavalierly. Amelia wondered if Mrs. Swanson saw the glitter of pain in Mrs.
Flick’s eyes. “They’re reprobates and blackguards through and through.”

“My word. Anny Beth Flick, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. Why, a woman’s family is her crowning glory, which is why I worked so hard on Morty and Angeline—”

“Louise,” Amelia said. “Shut up.”

There was a shocked silence. Even Amelia couldn’t quite believe what she’d said.

Then, “Well,” Mrs. Swanson sniffed. “I know when I’m not wanted.” She jerked her chair back from the table and walked away. She was probably the best walker in the group. Amelia could hear her muttering as she left, “My word, such rudeness. You’d think if they were going to grant immortality, they’d have screened people a little more closely. . . .”

“My view exactly,” Mrs. Flick hollered after her. “How’d you get in?”

Amelia went back to eating docilely, just a little old lady minding her own business. She didn’t look at Mrs. Flick.

“Thanks,” Mrs. Flick murmured. “Thanks for sticking up for me. Not many people have done that in my life.”

Amelia shrugged. “You stick up for yourself well enough,” she said.

“Yeah.” Mrs. Flick grinned, and for a second Amelia could see past the wrinkles and picture how
she must have been as a kid: eyes full of mischief, probably pigtails perpetually askew, a streak of mud across her cheek. Some things didn’t change with age, and orneriness was one of them. But now, if the doctors were right, Mrs. Flick would get the chance to be a kid again. Or, not a kid, Amelia reminded herself, but middle-aged, which sounded plenty young to her. Even after six months the idea still took some getting used to. Amelia kept waiting for the doctors to discover a catch. So far, the only thing was she couldn’t remember the last few months before the first injection of PT-1. But the doctors still said that was nothing to worry about, that the memory was bound to come back. And even if it didn’t, what was there to remember of any worth?

“It makes you wonder, though, don’t it?” Mrs. Flick asked.

“Excuse me?” Amelia said, wondering what she’d missed.

“How did they pick us? Why didn’t they get them some ex-presidents? Or geniuses—you know, real important people?”

Amelia had noticed that everyone at the agency seemed dead ordinary. “Do you see fifty ex-presidents lying around in nursing homes? We were handy. Convenient. And don’t you remember what Dr. Reed said at that last meeting—that PT-1 will probably never be offered to the whole world, just selected
people who have earned the right to live forever. So we should be grateful—”

Mrs. Flick shook her head. “This ain’t going to the Mother Teresas of the world. Can’t you see how people are gonna fight over it? Dr. Reed and Dr. Jimson, they’re on the verge of starting World War III. But you know how it’s all going to end up. Same way as everything else. The people who can pay will get what they want. Only, bet you anything it won’t be legal. They’ll have to pay in dark alleys—and maybe get their throats slit trying to live forever. This here thing’s a curse.”

“Not for us,” Amelia said.

“We don’t really know that yet, do we?” The grin broke out again. “But hot-dang, I do like trying to figure out what’s going to happen next around here!”

Amelia looked around at the rows of gray and white heads bent over their dinners. People didn’t seem ecstatic at the thought of living forever. They seemed mostly confused. What exactly would it mean to live in middle age for as long as anyone could imagine? What would they do with all that time?

Dr. Jimson had begun hinting that maybe they should stop thinking so much about their families—“the families from the life where you aged,” as she put it—and realize that they would probably marry again, have more kids. But Amelia wondered:
Unless their kids got PT-1 too, wouldn’t it be strange for them to someday be older than their parents? And who would she marry? There were only fifteen men in Project Turnabout, and she couldn’t imagine marrying any of them. Anyone else would grow old on her, always traveling the other direction in time.

All the complications gave her a headache. It made her want to pick up the phone and call one of her sons, ask him to solve her problems for her. It’d been kind of nice doing that the last few years. But had she relied on them too much—so much that they were relieved when they heard she was dead? Had they seen her only as a burden toward the end? She’d seen herself that way.

Amelia closed her eyes for a moment, more befuddled than ever. She did long to call her family. Now that Mrs. Flick had planted the notion of just rolling right up to the pay phone in the lobby, she wanted to do that. She wanted to find out if her three surviving children were still doing okay, if her granddaughter’s breast cancer had gone into remission, if her newest great-great-grandchild, the one with the funny name—Lakota? Shoshone? Something Indian—was walking yet. But if she had been just a burden, would they really want to hear from her? Should she wait until she was more independent again—walking on her own, able to live on her own, maybe even—good grief!—working?

She wished she’d been able to see her funeral. Then she could have understood what she meant to people. Somehow, she realized, she had always expected to be able to watch everyone’s reactions at her funeral, see who cried and how hard. Sure, she’d expected to be dead before her funeral, but she did believe in an afterlife. And her view of heaven always included the ability to spy on Earth. She never expected to find herself still alive, but dead to her family.

“Want that?”

Amelia opened her eyes, realized that Mrs. Flick was pointing her fork at the slice of apple pie to the left of Amelia’s plate.

“No,” Amelia murmured. “You can have it.”

“Thanks.” Mrs. Flick beamed and slid the plate across the table. She dug in with relish.

Watching her friend, Amelia suddenly envied Mrs. Flick’s lack of attachments. In the midst of all the confusion, one thing was sure: Mrs. Flick was going to enjoy her second chance at life.

Melly sharpened a pencil. Pencils were antiques now, and had been ever since erasable ink had finally been perfected sixty years ago. And of course computers made even pens pretty much unnecessary. But pencils helped her to think; her brain needed the physical act of turning the sharpener handle, the smell of wood chips and lead, the sight of the pencil point against the white paper. And today she needed all the help she could get.

Her pencil taken care of, she switched on the computer.

“Um, something about families looking for kids to adopt. Nice families,” she told the computer. Even though she knew it was ridiculous, she hoped the computer didn’t hear the note of anxiety in her voice. This was an old model—she got it five years ago when she was pretending to go to college—but it still had the obligatory emotion sensor. She and Anny Beth joked that computers had become so human there was no reason for people still to exist. But everyone else in the twenty-first century was so used to computers they didn’t think a thing about it.

“Good morning,” the computer said in a voice oozing empathy. Yep, the emotion sensor was still working. Unfortunately. “Would you care for information
about adoption costs? Adoption laws? Adoption process and procedures? Adoption statistics? Availability of children to adopt? International adoptions?—”

Sometimes Melly really hated computers.

“No, no,” she said irritably. “I don’t need information that would help me adopt a child. I’m fifteen years old, for God’s sake. I want to find someone to do the adopting.”

The computer made a sound that could have passed for a gasp.

“Ah,” it said. “Now I understand your anxiety. You are the victim of an unwanted pregnancy. And just a teenager . . . oh my. You need counseling, my dear. I don’t mean to pressure you, and I certainly will not judge your actions, but you face several important choices. One should not rush too hastily into any of them. Shall I refer you to a counseling service right now?”

“No,” Melly said. “Just show me a list of people wanting to adopt kids.”

“But my dear—”

Melly switched off the computer’s speakers. Seconds later the screen was flooded with images of happy families frolicking together in autumn leaves, playing pitch and catch, laughing together around a dinner table, building snowmen in a tree-lined yard. In spite of herself, Melly had to blink back tears.
She’d taken marketing classes once upon a time, she knew it was all just image. She lived near dozens of families and had never seen any of them act so happy together. But the videos got to her anyway.

Because she’d killed the voice option, the images were quickly replaced by text.

THE ADOPTION SITE!
the screen trumpeted in large letters. Then, in smaller print, it urged, “Choose the family that’s best for your baby!”

Then the screen filled with choices: race, creed, color, religion, spanking/no spanking, strong disciplinarians/lax disciplinarians, income level, professional standing, geographic preference, urban/suburban lifestyle, athletic/sedentary, intellectual/nonintellectual, casual/formal, pets/no pets, boaters, bikers, swimmers, aversion to water sports, cat people, dog people, ferret people . . .

Melly typed at the bottom, “
I don’t care about any of that.”

“Congratulations! Your selection process resulted in”
appeared on the screen. Melly waited.
“500,000 families!”
blinked out at her.

Melly gulped. She should have known. Birth control had been virtually perfected fifty years ago and made mandatory for all women from puberty onward, unless they and their mate could pass the rigorous Parent Test. So very few women had babies they didn’t want. Meanwhile, medical ethicists had
prevented cloning, and fertility problems had skyrocketed because of environmental disasters. So there were lots of potential parents who wanted babies they couldn’t have.