Turnabout (17 page)

“No,” A. J. said slowly. “I’m not. But I’m really not sure anymore what I am interested in.”

“Then what are you looking for?” Melly asked. “Why dig up the past?”

“I don’t know,” A. J. said with a misery that Melly remembered well. “I think, in the beginning, I
wanted some sense of where I’d come from, so I’d know where I was going. Both my parents died when I was fairly young, so I felt . . . cut off.”

“So why didn’t you reconnect with all your current relatives?” Anny Beth asked. “The living ones?”

A. J. frowned. “I can find out anything I want to know about any of them just by turning on my computer. None of that information is very . . . helpful.”

After a night spent reading about chest sizes, strange hobbies, devout causes, and belly button fuzz, Melly was inclined to agree.

“I have a tendency to overresearch,” A. J. said. “I wanted to find out everything I could about my family several generations back, when information wasn’t so plentiful. I started thinking about looking at how my ancestors had been affected by the times they’d lived in—not just wars and riots and the various rights movements, but public affairs in general.”

“To convince yourself that public affairs really were important,” Anny Beth said.

Melly elbowed Anny Beth in the side and hissed, “Shh!”

But now A. J. seemed too deep into her story to care that the teenager in front of her was not sounding much like a teenager.

“Maybe,” she conceded. “Or maybe to convince myself that public affairs really weren’t important. Because what I found was, when I went very far
back in my family, they were largely unaffected. In the hills of Kentucky it was generations before civil rights or women’s lib had an impact. I thought, what a great premise! I thought a book about how people can live without constant updates on the rest of civilization could be revolutionary in this day and age. I got permission from the Department of Protected Lands to move back here. I wanted to live like my ancestors had, cut off from the rest of society.”

Melly and Anny Beth exchanged glances.

“Did I figure her out or what?” Melly muttered under her breath.

“Okay, fine, you can have my Ph.D. in psychology,” Anny Beth muttered back.

A. J. seemed not to notice their whispering. She seemed hypnotized by her own story. “Except for research on my book, I haven’t made or taken any phone calls or E-mails in six months. I’ve avoided all news. Occasionally I go to the Wal-Mart Universal for supplies, but those are my only outings. I’ve been entirely alone.”

“But that’s not how your ancestors lived,” Melly protested. “People weren’t all alone in the past. They just had smaller communities that mattered to them, that”—she tried to use the word A. J. kept focusing on—“that affected them. They were perfectly happy within their own families—”

“Speak for yourself,” Anny Beth muttered.

A. J. peered at Melly with a puzzled expression. “What a novel idea,” she said thoughtfully. “I’ll have to think about that. Would it be possible just to focus on one small group of people?”

Anny Beth wasn’t concerned about helping A. J.’s understanding of the past. “So that explains what you’re doing here. But why were you looking for Amelia Hazelwood?” she asked.

“In the course of my research I found one woman who was uniquely unaffected by the events around her. My great-great-great-grandmother. All those wars in the twentieth century—but none of the men in her life went off to fight them.”

Melly remembered passages from her Memory Books:
Roy came home from Jackson and said his eyesight was too bad for the infantry. Thank God! But I couldn’t tell him that. He was upset. He acted like he couldn’t be a real man if he wasn’t going off to war . . .
And later:
Pearl Harbor Day came on Burrell’s birthday, when we were all together eating cake. I remember sitting around the table, the radio on, looking around and rejoicing that all my sons were too young. I kept praying, ‘Thank you, God, thank you, God, for sending us all daughters at first.’

A. J. was still ticking off the ways that Amelia Hazelwood had been unaffected by the times she’d
lived in. “I even looked at things like rural electrification—it’s hard to believe, but some people in this area of the country didn’t have electricity in their homes until the 1960s. And I thought that might have had an impact on Amelia Hazelwood’s life. What would it be like never to turn on a light until you were in your sixties? But it turns out her husband was something of an inventor, and he wired up their home with a portable generator years earlier.”

Melly was a little insulted. A. J. was making it sound like she’d lived her life in a bubble or something. Of course she’d been affected by the times she’d lived in. She didn’t remember directly, of course, but her Memory Book of the year she was forty-four was filled with the grief she’d felt for the people of Dry Gulch, whose sons were all wiped out in a single Japanese raid, half a world away. And even during World War I she remembered the hurtful gossip about the one German man in town. People had said he was a spy—though what he might have spied on in their part of the state was beyond her. And so what if she’d got electricity at a different time than her neighbors? She’d still made the same transition.

Melly bit the inside of her lip to refrain from telling A. J. her whole premise was crazy. A. J. obviously didn’t realize the woman she was talking about was sitting right in front of her.

“But I wanted to be absolutely sure of everything,” A. J. continued. “And I got bogged down on a very routine detail: her death.”

Melly felt her heartbeat quicken. Hadn’t the agency faked her death well enough?

“What was strange about that?” Anny Beth asked in an amazingly calm voice.

“Nothing about the death itself, as far as I knew then,” A. J. said. “She clearly died of old age. But the funeral notice that appeared in the local paper showed a different date than the death certificate.”

“Doesn’t sound too weird to me,” Anny Beth said. “People make mistakes all the time.”

Melly wondered if Anny Beth had picked up on the past tense in A. J.’s narration: “as far as I knew then.” Was Anny Beth having second thoughts about trusting A. J.? Did she already know too much anyhow? And if A. J. had found the discrepancy, would anyone else?

“I wanted to be accurate,” A. J. was insisting. “So I E-mailed every Hazelwood I could find to see if anyone in the world had the correct information.”

“That’s how I got the first E-mail,” Melly muttered. “So it was innocent.”

A. J. gave her a questioning look but went on. “I found one old-timer who remembered the funeral, and remembered the adults at the funeral talking about how their great-grandma had done something
really wacky and donated her body to science. Something called the Agency for Studying Aging. She remembered the name only because she thought it was ridiculous to be studying aging on someone who wasn’t aging anymore. I figured if this agency was anything important, I would have heard of it, but I tracked it down anyway and was stunned to discover it still existed. When I called, they stonewalled me on everything—”

“Which only made you more determined,” Anny Beth guessed.

“Yeah. It seemed like they had something to hide. I accessed their address files—”

“Isn’t that illegal?” Anny Beth interrupted.

“Not if they don’t have them protected,” A. J. defended herself. “And they didn’t.”

Anny Beth and Melly exchanged glances. Had the agency got sloppy? Or were the officials trying to destroy them?

“I found an Amelia Hazelwood listed as living in North Dakota. I knew it wasn’t the same one, of course, but I thought there had to be a connection. I was being cautious now. I started calling neighbors but didn’t get much information.”

Melly grinned to herself. Thank goodness A. J. had only reached Mrs. Rodney’s answering machine! And none of their other neighbors even knew them.

“But when I finally called this Amelia Hazelwood herself, I got the message that she’d moved without a forwarding address.”

Melly grimaced. Curses on computers that gave out information automatically.

“So I went back to the mysterious agency’s address list and found a new phone number, in New Mexico. It crossed my mind that this Amelia Hazelwood might be running from my calls, but I couldn’t see it. Nobody runs from reporters’ calls in this day and age. So I tried calling, with no answer. The next time I called the agency, Amelia Hazelwood was erased from their address list.”

Melly wondered what that meant.

“What did you think happened?” Anny Beth asked in the same voice a teacher might use to test a student. “What did you think the connection was between the Amelia Hazelwood you were studying and the one in the agency listing?”

A. J. squinted off into the distance, looking out the window as though the answer were hidden in the forsythia bush outside.

“I was thinking clones,” she finally said. “Cloning humans was illegal, even way back in the year 2000, but I thought maybe this mysterious agency had done it. People were experimenting with it then. And I’ve checked the agency out thoroughly since then—it mainly seems to exist in order
to sabotage other people’s scientific research and lobby for strange causes. That might fit in with having once dabbled in illegal science.”

Melly felt weak. “You think I’m a clone?” she asked incredulously.

“No,” A. J. said firmly. “Not you. You’re only—what’d the police officer say? Fifteen? There might have been cloning going on eighty-four years ago, but not since then. The Bureau to Prevent Illegal Scientific Procedures has too much power in this century.”

“So that makes us . . . ?” Anny Beth probed again.

A. J. shrugged. “I don’t know. Two teenagers, probably too smart for their own good, who maybe hacked into my phone records and figured they could play with my mind a little. And because I’ve been sitting out here for weeks with no one to talk to but my dog, I fell for your ruse and spilled my guts. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s just a coincidence that you’re named Amelia Hazelwood. Now, are you going to try to make something up, or should I just say thanks for listening?”

Melly stood up and began heading for the door. Anny Beth looked at her in amazement.

“Where are you going?” she called after her.

“I’ll be right back,” Melly said. “Don’t leave.”

It was a struggle carrying the heavy boxes down
the hill, but when she returned, Anny Beth and A. J. were still sitting there, waiting. Melly took a Memory Book off the top of the box and handed it to A. J.

A. J. opened it and started reading aloud: “‘The spring I turned sixteen I fell in love. I knew there was a war going on in Europe, and it seemed wrong, wrong, wrong that so many people were in pain and dying when I was so happy. . . .’” A. J. studied the old-fashioned script, touched the words as if doubting anything so ancient sounding could be so clear and unfaded. “Where did you find these?”

“I wrote them,” Melly said simply.

And then the whole story spilled out. Anny Beth and Melly alternated in the telling, sometimes getting ahead of themselves, sometimes having to pull out the books and point to a particular passage, as if that proved their tale. About halfway through A. J.’s journalistic instincts seemed to kick in, and she began interviewing them. It was what Melly had spent a lifetime dreading—having a journalist ask in that concerned tone, “And how did you feel when . . .” But A. J.’s concern seemed real. And there were no cameras rolling, no crowds slavering for the next detail, only the quiet house around them and, beyond, the mountains Melly had missed for an entire lifetime.

Finally they’d told all they could.

“So,” Anny Beth challenged, “do you believe us?”

A. J. wore a look of amazement—either at them or at herself.

“Yes,” she said. “I do.”

Melly gulped. “So what’s it going to be?” she asked. “Are you going to get that Pulitzer in the most prestigious category, the tabloid story of the century? Or will you be our mommy when we get young?”

As soon as she’d said them, Melly longed to take back her words. “Will you be our mommy. . . .” Pathetic. It made her sound like a little kid already. Why hadn’t she said “caretaker”? Or “guardian”? She knew—she didn’t want those things. She wanted a mommy. When she was eight and five and two and an infant, that was what she would need.

Anxiously Melly watched A. J.’s reaction. She didn’t speak right away. Melly wondered how she could have been so foolhardy. A. J. wasn’t a mommy. She was a journalist. But a transformation was working over A. J.’s face. At first she just looked stunned, as if it had never occurred to her that Melly and Anny Beth had had such a strong reason for telling her their tale. Then she looked thoughtful. She brought her hand up to her chin and rested it there. She turned her head slightly and stared out the window. “Your mommy,” she repeated softly, as if trying out the word. Melly prayed that A. J. understood what she meant.

“I think . . . ,” A. J. started. Melly froze, waiting. Beside her she heard Anny Beth catch her breath. A. J. continued, “I think that would be good for all of us.”

An expression crept over A. J.’s face that Melly hadn’t seen there before: She looked purposeful.
She wasn’t just wandering around in old records, trying to figure out how it related to her life and if it could become a book. She had a mission now. She had a reason to live for someone besides herself.

Melly heard Anny Beth exhale sharply.

“Really?” she said. “Hot dog!” She punched Melly in the arm. “There! Are you finally satisfied?”

Melly laughed, giddy all of a sudden. “Yes,” she said. “I am.”

And then none of them knew what to do.

“Do I start now?” A. J. asked. “Am I supposed to ask you questions like, ‘Did you wipe your feet when you came in?’ ‘Are you getting enough vegetables to eat?’”

“No,” Anny Beth said sharply. “You’re not raising us. It’s more like . . . lowering us.”

Melly wished Anny Beth had chosen a different word.
Lowering
reminded her of coffins being eased into a grave. She remembered all the gallows humor that had gone on in their early days at the agency—a carryover from the nursing home, when they all still assumed they were close to death. Were those kinds of jokes going to be part of her second childhood, as she slipped toward death?