Turnabout (2 page)

My sixteenth birthday. Sad, sad day. What I mind most—what I’ve been dreading most—is losing my license. I could still pass for being older for at least another year or two, but the agency won’t let me. Against the rules, they say. We know best, they say. How can they be so sure when this is all new territory?

At least Anny Beth can still drive, since she’s only eighteen. I don’t know what I’d do without Anny Beth. I don’t know what we’ll do when she hits sixteen. And beyond that . . .

The agency lady called this morning to make sure I was ready for her annual visit. She said, “You still seem to be holding up.”

I said, “I don’t like the other choices.”

She didn’t laugh, the way I meant her to.

I told her my Memory Book was done, and she said, “It’s not easy, is it?”

How do you answer a question like that?

My body feels good. Healthy. Teeming with life and possibility. I remember this feeling from the last time. I had such hope for the future then.

It’s not the same when my body feels hopeful and my mind knows that the future is only sixteen more years of loss.

“Do you want to be younger?” someone asked her.

Amelia Lenore Hazelwood roused herself from the half slumber she lived in most of the time. She squinted through cataract-covered eyes at the trio of white-coated people at the foot of her bed, and debated whether they were really there or just apparitions from one of her dreams. Even at this point, so near the end, she hated the thought of becoming one of those old ladies who talk to nothing. But most of her dreams were about Roy and the farm, or her children when they were babies and toddlers—instead of gray-haired grandparents she barely recognized. None of her dreams involved white coats. She adjusted her hearing aid.

“What’s that?” she said.

A man stepped forward, and she was glad, because men were easier to hear. Something about the pitch of their voices, the doctor had explained. She thought it was because she had spent her life listening to men. Roy had always wanted to tell her what to do, and now her sons and the doctors were in charge. . . .

“I said, would you like to be younger?” the man said, enunciating very carefully, as though she were witless as well as hard of hearing.

Or maybe he was witless. It was a mighty stupid
question to ask a woman who was almost a whole year past her one hundredth birthday.

“Sure,” she mumbled, because he seemed to expect an affirmative answer. It took too much energy to do things people didn’t expect. She started closing her eyes again, having lost interest in the conversation.

“No, wait,” he said, springing forward and taking her hand.

Few enough people touched her in the nursing home that she kept her eyes halfway open. But she stared unseeingly and didn’t bother telling him that she couldn’t hear what he said next. Then a woman stepped forward and droned on for a while, her voice as high-pitched and indecipherable as a mosquito’s buzz. When she finished, the other man spoke, his voice the rumble of thunder on a summer afternoon. At last the woman thrust a pen and a sheaf of papers at Amelia and pointed, clearly expecting her to sign.

Feebly, Amelia moved the papers closer and farther from her eyes until she could focus on a line at the bottom. The smudge of small print above the line would have been illegible to Amelia even a decade earlier. She looked up at the expectant faces around her. Then she took the pen and signed with a flourish, admiring the loops of the
A
and
L
and
H.
She’d lost just about every other skill—even the
basic ones, like being able to feed herself. But she was still capable of producing the copperplate signature she’d learned almost a century ago. It was the one thing she had left to be vain about.

The white-coated crew all grinned, and the two men did high fives off to the side, evidently not realizing that her vision was best out of the corners of her eyes. For a second she wondered if she’d just signed away all her savings, what little there were, or fallen for some other scam. But she was pretty sure her signature wasn’t binding anymore. She was too old. She was almost dead. Surely someone had mentioned something about one of her sons, Dick or George, having power of attorney for her, being her legal guardian, whatever it was called. Surely it didn’t matter what she had signed.

Melly placed her journal back on the shelf beside the others and all the Memory Books. It made quite an impressive display, a wallful of books, 168 altogether. But she rarely thought of them that way—they were 84 and 84, always separate. Anny Beth had no such system. She chucked everything into some cardboard box in the storage shed. That is, if she bothered to make a book at all. As she’d told one of the more persistent agency ladies, “Honey, if you’d lived a life like mine, you’d understand—some years you’re happy to forget.”

Impulsively, Melly pulled down one of the closest Memory Books and opened it at random:
Neddy had the croup all winter, seemed like. I spent so much time holding him over the steam that I felt like I would evaporate too. . . .

She skipped back a few pages:
The corn crop failed in September. . . .

Not long after came the words Melly knew were there:
Neddy died on November 18.

Melly felt no more pain than if she’d read of someone else’s tragedy. It was another lifetime. It might as well be someone else’s life. Maybe Anny Beth was right, and they were better off forgetting. But Melly, for one, found the Memory Books comforting. She slipped the book back into place and remembered a briefing
session on rituals that the agency had sponsored. Early on, the agency had been very big on briefings. At the session about rituals a peppy blond woman who looked to be all of twenty-two had stood in front of the rows of wheelchairs and practically cheered, “Rituals are good! They remind us we’re alive!”

Anny Beth had leaned over to Melly and muttered in a stage whisper everyone could hear, “I’m out of here.”

Then she’d wheeled herself away.

But Melly had stayed. Back then she’d still had happy memories of family meals and family holidays and family rituals that got six kids and a husband off to school and work each morning with minimal hassle. And back then she’d still been interested in what the agency had to say.

Now she heard the doorbell ring downstairs.

“Melly! Agency lady’s here!” Anny Beth shouted up.

They passed each other on the stairs.

“I may need your help later,” Melly murmured.

“Shame I don’t still have my papaw’s hunting rifle,” Anny Beth replied.

Melly shook her head. “You know what I mean,” she said.

“Yeah,” Anny Beth said, serious for once. “Call in the reinforcements whenever you want. I’ll be ready.”

Anny Beth went on up to her room, and Melly
got the door. She put on a smile for the matronly-looking woman with blunt-cut hair and sensible shoes. They always wore sensible shoes—which was strange, given how insensible the agency had been.

“Well,” the woman said pointlessly. “It’s that time again.”

“Yes,” Melly said.

She held the door open, and as the woman brushed past her Melly saw the contrast between the woman’s blocky, middle-aged form and Melly’s trim, blue-jeans-clad figure. Melly’s stomach showed, flat and perfect, in the three-inch gap between her cropped T-shirt and the hip-hugging jeans. It shouldn’t have mattered, but Melly still felt a shot of triumph,
I’m younger than you!
Actually, nothing could have been further from the truth, but sometimes even Melly forgot.

“Can I get you something to drink, Mrs. . . . er, Miss . . . er, Ms., uh—”

“Ms. Simmons,” the woman said with a look that made Melly feel like a kid playing house while her parents were away. There was no reason for that feeling, but Melly had been getting it more and more lately. “Nothing to drink, thanks.”

They sat in the living room, and Ms. Simmons started Melly through the usual routine. Touch your nose. Raise your hand when you hear a beep. Look up, look down, follow the light on the wall. Jump up and down, and then let’s check your heart rate. Just
one more vial of blood—and then could you urinate into a jar, please?

Melly went through the paces as stoically as a lab rat. After more than two hours the woman finally checked off the last box on her form.

“We won’t know for sure until the blood and urine tests are back, of course, but you certainly seem to be an absolutely normal, healthy sixteen-year-old,” the woman said.

Melly shrugged. This wasn’t news.

“Now, about puberty—,” the woman began.

“I’ll lose my period in about a year,” Melly started, because she’d rather say it herself than listen to Ms. Simmons stumble through. “My breasts will shrink. My pubic hair will disappear. I’ll stop having to shave under my arms. Anything else?”

“Your hips will, uh, you know. Smooth out.” The woman was clearly embarrassed. Melly decided Ms. Simmons had probably never had kids, never had to discuss the birds and bees with anyone under twenty. “You’ll shrink and lose weight. And then there are the emotional changes—”

Melly nodded. She decided to break one of Anny Beth’s cardinal rules: Never ask the agency anything. They can’t help.

“What have the others found?” Melly asked. “Are things pretty normal? I mean, I guess
normal
isn’t the right word. Is it like the first time?”

“Basically. I’m sure you can handle it,” the woman said, gathering up her papers. Once they were all in a neat stack, she looked directly at Melly again. “There’s one more thing. I believe the agency has been most understanding of your desire for independence. But surely you realize—you’re sixteen now. You can’t live on your own.”

Melly struggled to sound calm and reasonable. “I’m not on my own. Anny Beth and I—”

Ms. Simmons shook her head impatiently. When she answered, Melly could tell she wasn’t even trying to sound calm and reasonable. “You’re a couple of kids now. What are you going to do when some busybody neighbor decides to call the authorities? What would you say?”

“What we’ve been saying for the past two years. We’re orphans. That’s true enough, isn’t it? My big sister, Anny Beth, is taking care of me while she works and goes to school—”

Ms. Simmons was frowning and shaking her head. “That will work for another year, tops. Then you’ll have truant officers after you—”

“I’m home-schooled.”

Ms. Simmons raised an eyebrow in disgust. “Uhhuh. Right. Can’t you face facts? I’m truly sorry—I do admire what you’ve tried to do. But you’re going to have to come back.”

“Never,” Melly whispered.

They came in on stretchers, in wheelchairs, and on walkers. One or two of the heartier souls held only a cane. Amelia, who was back in a wheelchair for the first time in more than a year, noticed with a jolt that even the stretcher set looked lively. She folded her hands in her lap and waited.

A tall, gangly man bounded to the front of the unfamiliar conference room.

“All of you know me, I think—I’m Dr. Reed, and I have wonderful news for you all today. My partner, Dr. Jimson, will be showing the slides—”

On cue, the room lights dimmed and a screen beside Dr. Reed lit up. The picture reminded Amelia of a string of beads.

“This is a magnified sample from Mr. Royal, I believe, but all of you are showing the same results: Your telomeres are growing!”

Fifty pairs of eyes watched him blankly in the near dark. He shrugged apologetically. “I know, I know, that’s technicalese. Probably none of you even knew you had telomeres.”

“That’s true,” a man in the front grunted.

“Telomeres are, most simply, strings on the end of your chromosomes. You can think of them as a repeated sequence of beads on a necklace.” Amelia felt proud of herself for noticing the resemblance.
She listened a little more intently as Dr. Reed continued. “Scientists have known since the 1970s that each time a normal cell divides, the repeated sequences are reduced. It’s like the necklace shrinks. Until very recently it was believed that only abnormal cells, like cancer cells, were immortal and didn’t have shrinking telomeres.”

A woman gasped. “We have cancer!”

Dr. Reed looked impatient. “No, no, it’s not that. You’re all perfectly healthy. Better than perfectly healthy. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. A cancer cell’s telomeres don’t grow like this. The growing telomeres mean you’re all getting younger. You are, to coin a phrase, unaging!”

He stepped back with a triumphant glow on his face, waiting for his news to sink in. For a moment there was dead silence in the room, then everyone began to buzz: “What’s he mean?” “How can someone unage?” “Did he say what I thought he said?”

A woman two chairs down from Amelia raised her hand and asked in a querulous voice, “How come our families don’t visit us anymore?”

The triumphant look slipped from Dr. Reed’s face. “W-e-ell, that’s something I need to talk to all of you about. In fact, I’ve wanted to bring this up for a while. Dr. Jimson, could you join me?”

The lights came back on full strength, and everyone blinked at their harshness. Once Amelia’s pupils
had adjusted, she saw a slender woman in a white coat walking up the aisle. Amelia knew she’d seen her before. Dr. Jimson had small, wire-rimmed glasses and precisely clipped black hair—the perfect bob Amelia and all her friends had been scandalized by and secretly longed for back when they were young women.

Dr. Reed and Dr. Jimson looked at each other, both obviously waiting for the other to speak. Finally Dr. Jimson cleared her throat.

“The reason your families don’t visit you anymore,” she started in a surprisingly soft voice, “is that they think you’re dead.”

Dr. Reed held up his hand, as if anticipating protests. “We didn’t plan to do things this way, but it might help. Please—”

Everyone had begun to talk at once. Dr. Reed’s voice got louder. “Please hear me out. Your families all thought you were dead because, for a week or so, you appeared to be dead. You all went into—well, let’s call it a coma, for lack of a better word. Dr. Jimson and I have never seen anything like it, and we’re still doing computer searches to see if we can find any record of anything similar. You and your families signed documents to let us do extensive research on your bodies, because of the experiment, so we kept you all together—”