Turnabout (13 page)

Anny Beth snorted. “More like, you’re seeing the glow of the Wal-Mart Universal parking lot on the other side of the preserve.”

“Oh.” Melly looked at Anny Beth questioningly.

“I looked it up,” Anny Beth said. “I had to do something while the car was on autopilot and you were asleep. I memorized all the area around here.”

Melly frowned. “Can anyone trace us through the autopilot?” she asked.

“I hope so,” Anny Beth said. “Because the car has lots of miles left to go tonight. We can’t keep it here longer than it would take to make a pee break.”

“I thought we were going to keep the car—”

Anny Beth shook her head grimly. “And have the license plate spotted by satellite? We can’t risk that.”

“But you said that reporter wouldn’t have access to satellite records—”

“No, but I got to thinking—what about the agency? If they’ve had enough access to change our
IDs every year, couldn’t they get into other government records? And if the reporter is getting information from the agency . . .”

Anny Beth didn’t have to finish her sentence. Melly shivered. She felt like she was traveling in a maze—wasn’t there some route that didn’t lead to the monster in the middle?

“Aren’t you going to help?” Anny Beth asked. Melly realized Anny Beth had begun unloading the bags of flour, sugar, and salt. She dropped a particularly heavy load right at Melly’s feet. “I can’t do everything around here, you know.”

Anny Beth’s indignation was just the prod Melly needed. She followed Anny Beth and grabbed the boxes of milk. Better to do
something
than sit around worrying. After just a few minutes they had everything out that they needed. Anny Beth leaned over the steering wheel and double-checked the programmed coordinates.

“Wait,” Melly said. “My Memory Books . . .”

She pulled out her two big boxes, one of her journals since the year 2000, and one of the books full of memories that now existed only on paper.

“Won’t be fun carrying those uphill,” Anny Beth said. But she, too, leaned back into the car and pulled out two boxes.

Melly gaped. “I didn’t know you kept those,” she whispered.

Anny Beth shrugged. “Under this stunning physique I’m just a sentimental old lady. Just like you.”

Then she pressed the button that sent the car on its way alone. Melly and Anny Beth watched until its laser license-plate glow disappeared over the next rise, a mile down the road. Melly felt a threat of panic at her throat. Without the car their only means of escape would be on foot.

“Where’d you send it?” she asked

“Back to our old house. So it’ll look like we just went on a quick around-the-country vacation.”

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.

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 mumbled 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.