Turnabout (6 page)

“I’m sorry about your grammy and all,” she said, “but I still don’t get it. Maybe you’ll have to talk a little slower. I only went up to fifth grade before I had to drop out, so this science stuff is kind of too much for me. Why didn’t you just sneak into your grandmother’s room in the dark of night and inject some of that PT-1 in her butt? Why mess with the rest of us and all your lies?”

“I needed Dr. Jimson,” Dr. Reed admitted. “I won’t go into all the technicalities, but I didn’t trust myself to figure out how to translate PT-1 to human conditions. She’s more experienced than I. And I knew she was too ethical to sign on to an experiment just for emotional reasons. So . . . I needed the rest of you to get her.”

“I didn’t know Dr. Reed’s grandmother was one of the subjects,” Dr. Jimson said self-righteously. “That was unethical too.”

The room was silent again, except for the TVs babbling. Then Mrs. Flick rolled over and turned all of them off. She waited until all eyes were on her.

“Okay,” she said. “I’ve had enough of this bellyaching and hand-wringing. Dr. Reed, Dr. Jimson, you got to quit letting that guilt eat you up. What’s done’s done. So some people died. So what? Their number was up. So that weasel Morty Swanson got a little shaken up. I’d say he deserved it for never visiting his mother in the nursing home. Didn’t even recognize her . . . So Louise didn’t exactly die a Christian death—I’d say that’s between her and God, and we can’t worry about it. I say it’s time we get grateful for what these doctors did, whether they feel good about it or not. They worked a miracle. I’m here to tell you I messed up my first life right bad, and I’m tickled pink to get another chance. I plan to enjoy it.”

In the back someone started clapping. The applause spread. Dr. Reed and Dr. Jimson looked around in astonishment. Dr. Jimson even blushed.

“But what about Louise? And our families—,” someone half whined. It was Mrs. Rivers, who’d spent a lot of time with Mrs. Swanson.

“Louise made her choice, and we’ve got to make ours. I say we agree none of the rest of us are going to contact our families. I’ll tell you why. We tell our kids, and our kids’ kids, and maybe their kids, and
that’s too many people knowing. They’ll want some of this PT stuff too, and the docs ain’t handing it out to all comers, right?” Behind Mrs. Flick, Dr. Jimson shook her head in an emphatic no. Dr. Reed joined in a second later, looking regretful. Mrs. Flick went on. “If you worried about your kids fighting over who got Aunt Mary’s good china, and who got Uncle George’s gun collection, think about what this battle’d be like! Who’s with me on this?”

Amelia thought about saying, “Wait a minute. You don’t even like your family. What right do you have to tell the rest of us to give up the people we love most?” But for that moment, at least, she could see Mrs. Flick’s point. She thought back decades to the time one of her boys, Burrell, had got his hand caught in a corn picker the autumn he was twelve. The hand got infected, and the doctor who rode out to look at it said he’d have to cut it off; otherwise, the infection would spread and Burrell might die. Amelia thought she wouldn’t be able to bear it, but she heard Roy say, “Then do it.” And after that Amelia never looked back, never wondered if the hand might have healed, if it should have been saved. She cleaned and bandaged Burrell’s stump every day for weeks, answering every one of his complaints, “Well, it had to be done. God let you live, so you’ve got to live the best you can.” This was the same kind of decision, requiring a clean cut, no regrets.

“I’m with you,” she announced.

Around her others began to mumble agreement too. At last only Mrs. Rivers hadn’t spoken. Everyone looked her way.

“Oh, all right,” she grumbled. “I’m with you too.”

A cheer went up, and Dr. Reed went around thanking everyone and shaking hands. Later Amelia would remember the next hour in the meeting room as one of the happiest in her entire life—her second life. People hugged one another. Dr. Reed and Dr. Jimson started kissing, right in front of their patients. Everyone danced, with or without wheelchairs. Nobody cared. Someone brought out champagne, and they all toasted Dr. Jimson and Dr. Reed and one another. A few people also toasted the memory of Louise Swanson. That reminded Dr. Reed to toast his grandmother as well, “whose death led to the second lives of all these people.” Amelia thought that was simplifying things too much, but she didn’t say so. She wasn’t used to champagne. The bubbles tickled her nose. As everyone around her pledged eternal loyalty to Dr. Reed and Dr. Jimson and the agency and one another, Amelia leaned over and whispered to Mrs. Flick, “I thought you said this thing was a curse.”

Mrs. Flick shrugged. “Maybe I changed my mind.”

“Only ‘maybe’?” Amelia asked. “You’re not sure?”

But Mrs. Flick was swept away onto the dance floor before she could answer.

Melly tried to fight the rising tide of panic as she stared at the glowing E-mail. Someone wanted to find her. Someone doubted the official records saying she had died. Soon her name and likeness would be splashed on computer screens across the world as a freak. She wouldn’t have to look for parents—all those 500,000 weirdos would come after her, beseeching her to be their child.

“Oh, no,” she repeated. “Oh, no.” She felt too dizzy to think clearly.

“Will you just chill out?” Anny Beth muttered. “This may be totally innocent. . . .”

In a daze, Melly watched Anny Beth punching buttons on the computer.

“Recent newscasts,” Anny Beth muttered. “Something connected to genealogy.”

In seconds Anny Beth had some TV show up on the computer screen. A blow-dried anchor type was confidently asserting, “People of all walks of life are trying to find out whose footsteps they’re walking in, so to speak—”

“Why is it,” Anny Beth asked, “that with everything else that’s improved in the last eighty years, TV news still stinks?”

Melly didn’t answer. The anchor was talking about how interest in genealogy was overwhelming
once again, surpassing even the
Roots
craze of the late 1900s.

“The information about your family history is out there,” he said solemnly. “You just have to find it.”

The shot cut to a gray-bearded expert who began describing a popular method of searching: “It’s called saturation. You just tell your computer to E-mail everyone in the world with the same last name as you.”

Anny Beth zapped the TV broadcast off the screen, and the E-mail reappeared. It didn’t look quite so threatening anymore, especially when Anny Beth asked the computer, “Sender?” and the computer replied, “A. J. Hazelwood. Do you need to know more?”

“Nope,” Anny Beth said.

“How did you know?” Melly asked.

Anny Beth shrugged. “I watch a lot more TV than you do. And you know my memory—steel trap. At least for this lifetime.” She slapped her hands together. Melly wondered if there were a single other person alive who could watch that motion and bring up a mental picture of metal teeth clamping down on a raccoon’s leg. More and more she felt like she was living in a foreign land, because her most vivid memories were of a different time and place. Oh, well, she’d forget hunting and trapping soon enough.

“Want to get rid of it?” Anny Beth asked, her finger hovering over the delete button for the E-mail.

“Shouldn’t we tell the agency?”

“And have them bring out the E.T. SWAT team? I don’t think so.” Decades ago, not long after they left the agency, Anny Beth had fallen in love with the movie
E.T.
She’d watched it over and over, until one day she quit, cold turkey. She confessed the reason only to Melly: that she’d begun having nightmares that she was on her own, living a normal life, when suddenly scientists in space suits swarmed her home and hooked her up to monitors, just like E.T. Only in her nightmare the scientists were followed by TV journalists thrusting microphones in her face. Anny Beth and Melly had done their best to turn their fears into jokes. They didn’t think the agency would ever whisk them away against their will, but they could never laugh wholeheartedly at each other’s “E.T. SWAT team” jokes.

“All right,” Melly said. “But leave the message. I still want to think about it.”

“Don’t answer it,” Anny Beth warned.

“Do you think I’m crazy?” Melly asked. But she couldn’t explain to Anny Beth why she wanted to hold on to the message. Just a few more hours, just a day—now that she wasn’t frightened by it, the message made her feel good. She liked the thought that someone she was related to wanted to remember who she’d been.

“See, what’ll happen is, one of your descendants will write back to this A. J. person and tell her all about being dragged to her great-grandmother’s funeral when she was only six or seven, and about how scary you looked in that coffin—”

“I wasn’t in any coffin,” Melly said sharply. “Remember, all our families agreed to donate our bodies to science? They knew they weren’t burying us.”

“Yeah, but they never said whether they had us posed at the funeral beforehand. And think about it—in Kentucky? Back then? Got to have an open casket.”

Melly knew Anny Beth was just teasing, but it still disturbed her. From the beginning the agency had discouraged curiosity about how the fake funerals had been conducted, how the families had handled the details. Once everyone had agreed not to contact their children or grandchildren or great-grandchildren, Dr. Reed and Dr. Jimson wanted all their patients to forget their families entirely. They even brought in a psychologist to counsel them. The psychologist was told only that she was dealing with a bunch of elderly people who were irreversibly estranged from their offspring. Melly had hated that meeting. She would have sobbed if she’d been that kind of a person.

Now Anny Beth was warming up to an imitation of Melly’s supposed great-grandchild. “And my
mamaw took me up to the casket and made me look in, and I tell you, I was so scared I thought I’d pee my pants. Then I saw this face that was like wax, except someone put too much makeup on it. Then I started giggling so hard I did pee my pants, and my mamaw tanned my hide, right there, for disrespecting the dead—”

Melly couldn’t help laughing.

“I think you’ve got my funeral mixed up with your own,” she taunted. “But you do a great old-lady imitation.”

Anny Beth backed away from the computer desk to give a fake bow.

“Imitations are my specialty,” she said, rising from the bow with a graceful flourish. “You should see my teenager impression.” A sad look crossed her face. “Do you ever get confused about what’s an imitation and what’s real?”

“It’s all the same,” Melly said, shutting her computer down.

They went down to lunch and clowned around until it was time for Anny Beth to leave for class and Melly to go baby-sit for the Rodneys. Kicking her shoes against the foam-rubber pavement as she walked across the street, Melly thought back to the E-mailed genealogy request. It was a shame, really, that she couldn’t write back to this A. J. Hazelwood and tell him or her everything about growing up in
rural Kentucky. She could tell her grandfather’s stories about fighting in the Civil War, her grand-mother’s stories about helping fugitive slaves go north. . . . What genealogist wouldn’t kill for something like that?

Her mind still on the past, Melly knocked on the Rodneys’ door. Then she remembered what century she was in and punched the automated video-screen doorbell.

“Melly the baby-sitter is here,” a disembodied voice announced, the doorbell having recognized her fingerprint instantly.

“Oh, Melly, come on in,” Mrs. Rodney’s voice floated out of an unseen speaker.

The door opened on its own, and Melly stepped over the threshold into the foyer. The sounds of a computer game came from the next room. It was Melly’s opinion that kids in this century spent entirely too much time glued to their computers, but nobody had asked her. Mrs. Rodney came down the stairs, her beehive hairdo towering as high as ever. It swayed slightly as she walked.

“Melly, little Logan Junior has come down with a bad cold, so we won’t be needing you today. But I wanted to talk to you about something.” Mrs. Rodney peered intently into Melly’s face. Melly felt like she was being given a test—one Mrs. Rodney had already decided she would fail.

“And what is that?” Melly asked, as politely as possible.

“How old are you? Honestly?”

Melly hesitated. It had been so much easier even a few years ago, when she was in her twenties. People never expected grown-ups to be truthful about their age. She’d been able to live in the same place for entire decades without anyone noticing anything suspicious. Now that her unaging was going to be more conspicuous, would she have to start moving every year? How would she ever find someone to take care of her then?

“You have to answer, my dear,” Mrs. Rodney said. “As the employer of an age-challenged individual—”

Melly stifled the instinct to giggle. Oh, if Mrs. Rodney knew what a challenge Melly’s real age was!

“I have every right to ask for that information,” Mrs. Rodney finished. “And I have the right to check your records if I want.”

Melly gave up. She knew Mrs. Rodney was right.

“I’m fifteen,” she muttered. That’s what her records would say now. The agency changed them every year.

Mrs. Rodney leaned away from Melly, so far back that Melly half feared her beehive would topple her.

“That’s interesting,” Mrs. Rodney said. “I’m sure you said you were sixteen when we first hired you a year and a half ago.”

“Maybe I said, ‘almost sixteen,’” Melly mumbled.

Mrs. Rodney tapped her foot. “Hmm. If you were almost sixteen a year and a half ago, wouldn’t that make you sixteen now? Or—more likely, seventeen?” Melly had heard Mrs. Rodney use exactly this tone with Logan Junior, who was barely five. Melly felt the same kind of powerless rage a child feels. She suddenly sympathized with Logan Junior for his many out-of-control tantrums. But she was much too old for tantrums.

“Have you had any complaints about my work?” Melly asked stiffly.

“No,” Mrs. Rodney replied. “Not until now. But this makes me wonder—if you lied to me about your age, what else would you lie about? Anyhow, I really want a baby-sitter who could drive Logan Junior to the hospital in an emergency. I thought you said you could do that.”