Turnabout (18 page)

“You know,” A. J. said thoughtfully, “if you want me to take this seriously, if you want me to really do the best I can to take care of you, I’m going to have to confront the agency and get some more information from them. They’ve got to be hiding something.”

Melly remembered the accounts she’d written of her time in the nursing home, when she’d given up all power over her life. She had no intention of letting that happen again, even if she did want a mommy.

“Believe me, they’ve told us more than we want to know,” she said bitterly.

“But let me get this straight,” A. J. said. “They say after you work back to being a newborn baby, on your birthday you just die? And they can’t stop it?”

“That’s what Dr. Reed and Dr. Jimson hypothesized all those years ago when the Cure kept failing. Melly and I were the two oldest people to receive the Turnabout injection, so it’s probably happened to some of the others already. Nobody’s told us otherwise,” Anny Beth explained.

A. J. just looked from Anny Beth to Melly and back again.

“Okay, okay!” Melly relented. “Find out whatever you want.”

“Will you two go back to the agency with me?” A. J. asked. “I’ll need your help. I promise—I won’t let them keep you there.”

Melly waited for Anny Beth to come out with her usual, “Absolutely not! I’m not stepping foot in that place ever again!” It didn’t come. Melly was ready to give her own refusal, but then she stopped. Somehow, with A. J., it might be all right to go back
to the agency. It wouldn’t be like they belonged at the agency. They’d belong with A. J.

“You don’t have to answer right away,” A. J. said. “I think finding a long-lost descendant, facing the police, getting a commitment of parenthood, and telling your stories for the first time in eighty-four years is enough for one morning. Now that I’m a mommy,” she teased, “I have to insist we go have lunch.”

Her pronouncement coincided exactly with the donging of the big grandfather’s clock in the hall. They all laughed, and the tension dispelled. Melly decided she would like living with A. J. But they couldn’t hide out in Kentucky forever. They’d have to face the agency once more.

The long driveway curved ahead of them.

“Anything look familiar yet?” A. J. asked as she programmed the car to slow down.

“Don’t know,” Anny Beth replied tersely. “We mainly saw things from the inside.”

Trees and grass slid by the windows. They might as well be on another nature preserve, for all the greenery around them. And then the agency’s main building loomed ahead of them. Melly inhaled sharply.

“That’s it!” she hollered. “Right there.”

A. J. stopped the car, and they stepped out. All three of them stood still for a while. Melly recognized the fake Doric columns, the sturdy-looking brick, the green-shuttered windows. Everything seemed to be just as it’d been nearly eighty years earlier. Not that Melly remembered it that well. The day she left she’d never even looked back.

“Strange,” A. J. muttered, swiveling her head to take in the entire grounds.

“What?” Melly asked nervously.

“Didn’t you say you two were the oldest in Project Turnabout? Wouldn’t most of the others be little kids now? Four, five, six years old?” A. J. asked.

“Yeah. So?” Anny Beth asked.

“Where’s the playground? Why aren’t there any toys in sight?”

Melly shivered, feeling a sense of foreboding she didn’t understand.

“Believe me, the others would be the kind of geeky kids who stayed glued to the computer all day,” Anny Beth said. Melly wondered if she was really as unconcerned as she sounded.

A. J. rang the doorbell, and someone buzzed them in.

The entryway was empty and felt forbidding. The lights weren’t even turned on.

Anny Beth elbowed Melly. “Look.”

Melly turned and saw an old-fashioned pay phone still hanging on the wall by the door. As if a voice from the past were echoing in the hallway, she remembered the taunt Anny Beth had once flung at Mrs. Swanson: “There’s a pay phone in the hallway. Why don’t you use it?” She wondered why it was still there. Why did this feel more like a museum than an institution for kids?

“Hello?” A. J. called.

Agatha, the receptionist Melly, Anny Beth, and A. J. had spoken with before, appeared from around a corner.

“Sorry,” she said. “I was checking on some things in the back. Come right in. We’re so glad to see you. We were so worried when we lost touch with you, Anny Beth and Melly.”

To Melly’s surprise she found herself engulfed in
a tight hug. Then Agatha threw her arms around Anny Beth, too. Melly wondered if she and Anny Beth had been too hard on the agency people all these years. Maybe they did care, even if they were misguided.

But Anny Beth, never one to be distracted by emotion, blurted out, “Where is everyone?”

“Everyone?” Agatha echoed, looking puzzled.

“All the inmates,” Anny Beth said. When Agatha only looked at her blankly, she added, “I mean, the kids. The other Project Turnabout victims.”

“I hope you don’t think of yourself as victims,” Agatha said reprovingly. But Melly noticed she didn’t answer the question. Agatha’s expression was now as closed as if automatic doors had swung shut across her face. “Here. Let’s go into the conference room. The doctors are eager to talk to you.”

She paused at the reception desk, pressed a button, and announced, “They’re here.” Then she led them down the hall. The room they entered wasn’t the big conference room where they’d had meetings before—where Mr. Johnson had died, and Dr. Reed and Dr. Jimson had married, and Melly had realized she was forgetting the past. This room was small and nondescript, containing nothing more than a table and six chairs.

An elderly man and an elderly woman walked in, and Agatha introduced them. “Melly, Anny Beth,
A. J., I’d like you to meet Dr. Jimson-Reed-Lenoski-Yee and Dr. Jimson-Reed-Alvarez-Braun. Doctors, this is Amelia Hazelwood and Anny Beth Flick, as you know, and their great-great-great-granddaughter, A. J. Hazelwood.”

Everyone shook hands. Melly judged the two doctors to be in their late fifties or early sixties, clearly aging. So here was another set of doctors who had access to PT-1, but hadn’t used it.

“Well,” the female doctor said. “I never expected to see the two of you back here again.” There was a silence she hastened to fill. “I have to tell you how sorry we are for not doing a better job of protecting your phone numbers from public access. Because of the sensitive nature of our computer files, we’ve tried to handle all the data protection by ourselves. I guess this proves we’re not computer experts.”

“And after eighty-four years we weren’t as concerned as we used to be about tabloid snooping,” the male doctor added with an accusatory look at A. J. “Evidently we should have been.”

A. J. looked steadily back at him. Anny Beth glared. Melly decided she should play peacemaker.

“That’s all right,” Melly said. “As it turned out, it was a good thing that A. J. found us. And I’m sure you’ll be more careful now.”

She knew they were: A. J. had checked and said she couldn’t get any access to agency records at all
in the past few weeks. So Melly could afford to be forgiving.

Everyone fell silent again, and Melly wondered how long Anny Beth could stand the polite tension in the air around them before she broke through with a direct question. But it wasn’t Anny Beth who spoke next.

“All right,” A. J. said, leaning intently across the table. “Now that that’s out of the way—what else are you hiding from us that we need to know?”

The two doctors exchanged glances. Melly wondered if the hyphenated names meant that they were spouses or siblings. Regardless, that comparing look had remained in the gene pool, just as Anny Beth’s directness had somehow been passed down to A. J. intact.

“It’s a long story . . . ,” the female doctor demurred.

“We’ve got all the time in the world to listen,” A. J. said, undeterred.

Both doctors sighed.

“Some of it’s not very pleasant,” the male doctor added.

“We could have figured that out,” Anny Beth said. “Now, tell it. And don’t pretty it up any.”

The female doctor began. “After you left, our grandparents thought they’d have the Cure figured out in a matter of years. Or, at the very least, they
thought they could solve the memory problems. But both solutions eluded them, and that was . . . agonizing for the patients who remained here.”

She fell silent. Now it was Melly who found the suspense unbearable. “Look, we know some of them committed suicide. Your grandparents told me thirty years ago, so you don’t have to pussyfoot around that. What about the others?”

“They’re all dead,” the male doctor said harshly.

Melly gasped, stunned beyond words. She waited for some tide of grief to overwhelm her for the people she’d lived with eighty years ago—Mrs. Englewood, who’d sipped her tea so daintily; Mr. Wilde, who’d told stupid jokes; Mrs. Kretz, who’d always bragged about how she and her husband had been such wonderful dancers. But she’d known them all so long ago, and she’d known so clearly that she had to break with them. . . . In her mind they were already dead.

“Why?” A. J. asked softly.

The male doctor shook his head regretfully. “That’s what we’ve spent years trying to figure out. We’ve analyzed their psychological profiles—what we have, from the primitive records of the early part of this century—and studied their cellular structure. If you view premature requests for the Cure as essentially suicidal in nature, none of the other subjects had any desire to keep living much past the
accepted human life span of one hundred twenty years. We’ve concluded that humans are just not meant to live too long.”

“What about us?” Anny Beth asked, with more finesse than she usually bothered with.

The male doctor shrugged. “We’ve studied everything about you two, as well. As you know. We have enough theories to fill multiple computer databases. But we don’t know. Perhaps it would help if we could find the other two people who left and cut off all contact with the agency. We’ve searched for them as thoroughly as possible. Because we haven’t found them, we can only assume they died as well, probably decades ago, when it was easier to die in anonymity.”

“So,” the female doctor explained, “given the dismal failure of this experiment, we’ve found it necessary to switch the focus of the agency. As long as you two are alive, we will never make the full story available to the public. But we’ve been working behind the scenes to prevent other efforts to extend human life span.”

Melly gaped at her.

“But what about—,” Anny Beth started to protest.

“We thought you were working on the Cure—,” Melly said simultaneously.

Neither of the doctors would look Melly or Anny Beth in the eye.

“You have to understand,” the male doctor said. “The breakthrough that cured cancer in the early 2020s could have also enabled humans to live virtually forever. We didn’t have much time to stop it. And other researchers keep circling closer and closer to the solution—it’s a full-time job just trying to throw them off track.”

Melly’s head was reeling. She looked at A. J. across the table, hoping she would go into the same interviewing mode she’d exhibited with Anny Beth and Melly, and somehow pull enough information out of the doctors to make everything make sense. But A. J. sprang back from the table, her eyes flashing with outrage. Melly waited for her to yell at the doctors for trying to change the entire fate of humankind based on forty-six failures. But that wasn’t what she was mad about.

“So you abandoned them,” she said, pointing at Melly and Anny Beth. “You changed their lives and promised to help them, and then you abandoned them. How could you? They were counting on you.”

“No,” Melly said quietly. “We weren’t.”

A. J. turned her head and looked curiously at Melly.

“That was one of the reasons we left in the first place,” Melly said. “We couldn’t expect the doctors at the agency to be superhuman. They were playing God, yes, but—they weren’t God.”

A. J. wasn’t appeased. “But, having given you PT-1, they had an obligation to keep working in your interest. They should have kept working on the Cure, they should have—”

“
We
didn’t give them PT-1,” the male doctor interrupted. “Are we to be held responsible for our grandparents’ mistakes?”

“Yes,” Melly said. “And no. You apparently feel responsible enough that you’ve devoted yourself to their cause.” She thought it horribly sad, suddenly, these two old people working in this forgotten place. How much of their lives had they given to the agency?

A. J. had more immediate concerns.

“But when Melly and Anny Beth regress back to infancy, are you going to be there for them?” A. J. argued. “Are you going to be there to help them when they lose the ability to read, to walk, to talk?”

“We’re willing to, yes,” the female doctor said. “But they’ve been quite vocal in resisting our intervention up until now. In fact, I believe that’s the whole reason they’ve involved you in this, to avoid depending on us. Are you going to be there to help?”

A. J. looked from Anny Beth to Melly.

“Yes,” she said with the ringing certainty that Melly had heard in people’s voices at wedding ceremonies, at baptisms, in court. “I will.”

Anny Beth cleared her throat.

“Maybe I’m missing something,” she said with a touch of the Kentucky drawl that came back into her voice, it seemed, when Melly most needed to hear it. “But tell me if I’ve figured this right. If all the others are dead, then no one has unaged back to the beginning. So all this talk of us going back to being babies—it’s all just guesses, right? And even that notion of us dying when we hit zero—you don’t know for sure that’s going to happen, right?”

“Right,” the doctors said together.

“So we could die, we could stay infants forever, we could—who knows—start aging again?”

“Like touching base and turning around?” Melly offered.

“Maybe,” the female doctor said doubtfully. “All the lab subjects our grandparents used—before animal testing was outlawed, of course—all of them died at zero.”