Turnabout

  “No, no, let the man do the talking!” Mr. Johnson hollered.

  Dr. Jimson looked at Dr. Reed and shrugged. Dr. Reed cleared his throat.

  “This is a wonderful day for Trina and me,” he said. “But it’s also a momentous time for someone in the project: We are now able to celebrate the first birthday since you all came out of your comas. Amelia Hazelwood, would you mind . . . ?”

  He pushed Amelia’s chair around behind the cake table. Beside the three-story wedding cake someone had placed a large sheet cake. Amelia squinted, trying to read the upside-down words spelled out in pastel pink frosting: HAPPY 1-0—

  “Can you blow out the candle?” Dr. Reed urged before she’d had time to scan the whole phrase. She might be unaging, but she still thought young people hurried things too much. She puffed in the general direction of the cake and got lucky. The candle flame flickered and went out. Without the glare from the candle on her cataracts, she could read the whole cake: HAPPY 100TH BIRTHDAY, AMELIA!

  “Shouldn’t that be—,” she started to protest, but Dr. Reed was in the midst of urging everyone to sing “Happy Birthday.” They finally ended, “Happy birthday to you!” with Dr. Reed’s booming bass voice drowning out all the scratchy old voices and Dr. Jimson’s monotone alto. Everyone watched Amelia expectantly. She was supposed to say something nice, to thank the doctors for allowing her to reach this milestone.

  “I already turned one hundred before,” she said. “On my last birthday. I’m one hundred and one now.”

  Dr. Reed laughed merrily. “Yes and no. You were born one hundred and one years ago, true, but you have not aged another year since you turned one hundred. Rather, you’ve reversed the process. So my wife and I”—he paused to flash a loving glance at Dr. Jimson—“we decided it would be most useful to start counting back with each birthday our patients have. This is your hundredth birthday but it marks the end of being one hundred, not the beginning. You are ninety-nine now. And next year you will have your ninety-ninth birthday and become ninety-eight.”

  Once upon a time, years and years ago when she was a schoolgirl, Amelia had been good at math. So she understood what he meant. But it still made no sense. It bothered her. She liked counting forward. She wanted credit for the years she’d lived. This way, she felt like she’d lost something.

  “Does it have to be that way?” she asked, sounding sulkier than she meant to.

  Dr. Reed laughed again, but not nearly so merrily. “No. We’re breaking new ground. We’re setting the rules ourselves.” He exchanged a glance with Dr. Jimson that seemed to exclude everyone else in the room—as if by “we” he only meant him and her. Amelia told herself she was still upset about the conversation she’d overheard; all newlyweds exchanged exclusionary glances like that. Dr. Reed went on. “You can count your age any way you want. You can use binary numbers, for all I care. But when you’re walking around with the body of a twenty-five-year-old, it won’t be very meaningful to call yourself one hundred seventy-five.”

  Amelia frowned, thinking.

  “So if you freeze our ages at, say, twenty-five,” she said slowly, “we’ll turn twenty-five every year.”

  “Something like that,” Dr. Reed said with a grin. He gave Amelia a hearty pat on the back. “You’ll be like those birthday cards that joke about every birthday being the twenty-ninth. Except it won’t be a joke for you. You really won’t age!”

  Amelia’s frown deepened. She had never lied about her age, never fought the advances of gray hair or crow’s-feet or the march of time. She thought birthdays meant something: an additional year of life and, hopefully, wisdom gained. Yes, she’d regretted the losses that had come with age: the loss of sight and hearing and taste and smell, the loss of mobility, the loss of people she loved. But she’d still counted each year as a gain. Unaging should make each year even more of a gain. Why was she so hung up on a mere number?

  People were waiting for her to say something, to announce her joy at being only ninety-nine again. But she wasn’t one to think out loud, and she still had to think this through. The waiting silence began to weigh on her.

  Then, “Ain’t nobody going to cut that cake?” a voice called out. It was Mrs. Flick. Amelia shot her a grateful smile.

  Later Mrs. Flick rolled her wheelchair up to the table beside Amelia while she ate her cake. Mrs. Flick put her own cake plate beside Amelia’s and dug in. She chewed and swallowed, then looked over at Amelia.

  “We sure got a lot to think on around here, don’t we?” Mrs. Flick asked.

  Amelia nodded silently.

  Mrs. Flick gazed out at the center of the room, which had been cleared of chairs and turned into a dance floor. Amelia followed her friend’s gaze. Dr. Jimson and Dr. Reed were dancing together, their arms wrapped around each other’s waist. A few of the nurses and aides had led some of the patients out onto the dance floor as well, making mismatched couples. An aide who looked to be barely out of her teens bent down to hold Mr. Johnson’s hands as he swayed in his wheelchair. Another patient was trying to teach a nurse to do the Charleston. Big-band-era music swelled around all of them. Amelia wondered if the music was the doctors’ choice, or if it was what they assumed their patients would like.

  “So,” Mrs. Flick said. “Was it like this the last time you turned a hundred?”

  “It—,” Amelia started to answer, then something strange happened. She’d been thinking of her last birthday only a few moments ago, she knew, but suddenly the memory was like a fish that swam away just as she reached down to catch it. “I—,” she started again, but the memory was gone, disappeared without a trace. “I don’t know,” she said uncertainly.

  April 22, 2001

  Amelia saw Dr. Reed mouth the word to Dr. Jimson: “Alzheimer’s?” And she saw Dr. Jimson shake her head, ever so slightly. The puzzled frown deepened on Dr. Jimson’s face.

  “What’s the last thing you remember?” Dr. Jimson asked gently.

  “Seeing your husband whisper to you about whether or not I have Alzheimer’s,” Amelia replied tartly.

  Dr. Jimson had the grace to look chagrined. She exchanged a look with Dr. Reed.

  “No,” she said. “I mean the last thing you remember before you took PT-1 and came to the agency.”

  Amelia thought back, honestly trying. This memory loss upset her more than she wanted to let on. That’s why she had bothered to tell the doctors. It was the morning after her birthday now—she was ninety-nine again, she reminded herself—and she was absolutely certain she no longer remembered her first one hundredth birthday. Even the ghost of memory she’d thought she had, had slipped away.

  “What do you remember about the year 2000?” Dr. Jimson prompted.

  “There was a war in Africa,” Amelia said.

  “You remember that?” Dr. Jimson asked, a bit too eagerly. Both she and Dr. Reed leaned forward expectantly.

  “No,” Amelia said. “I read about it in the newspaper this morning. There was a time line in the story about the peace talks.”

  Dr. Jimson gave a disappointed glance to the paper stacked neatly on Amelia’s bedside table. “I mean, what do you remember that you knew then? What happened in your life? Where were you living?”

  “Well, I know I was at the Riverside Nursing Home then, because I moved in in 1995—”

  “Do you remember being there in 2000?”

  Amelia frowned. How had 2000 been any different from 1999 or 1998? Riverside had been so dull. Not like the agency, where there were always tests and studies and questions and curious researchers to occupy her time. And improvements. Just last week she’d regained the ability to swing her legs over the side of the bed. And today she’d done her own hair.

  At Riverside she’d only been waiting to die.

  “I think, at Easter that year, I went to my son’s family. George’s. And maybe that was the last time I left the nursing home,” Amelia said. She remembered because she’d heard one of her great-grandsons giggling at the dinner table, “Grea
t-granny wears diapers just like a baby!” His parents had shushed him quickly, and Amelia pretended not to hear. She felt like saying, “Hey, I doubt if your bladder would do any better after eight pregnancies and a hundred years!” But then she looked around at the worried faces of her descendants and their spouses and suddenly wondered if that was all she had become: a worry. Just another mouth to feed, just another diaper to change, just as dependent and needy as a baby, without the chance of ever contributing anything again. Why had God kept her alive so long if she was so worthless?

  “Someone can take me back now,” she’d mumbled, though she’d only half finished her dessert. “I’m tired.”

  Now she turned to Dr. Jimson and assured her earnestly, “I do remember that Easter.”

  “Good,” Dr. Jimson said. “But according to the nursing home records, that was Easter 1999, not 2000, that you went to your son’s. Do you remember anything after that?”

  “I don’t know,” Amelia said, suddenly irritated. “If you already know what happened from my records, why are you bothering to ask?”

  “Because we’re working on a hypothesis about your memory and Project Turnabout,” Dr. Jimson said with more gentleness than Amelia would have expected. It made Amelia think the hypothesis was something bad. “We need to ask the others some questions too. Can you think of anything else we should know about what you do or don’t remember?”

  “No,” Amelia mumbled, and lay back against her pillow.

  But after the doctors were gone, she couldn’t stop thinking about what she’d forgotten. She swung her legs over the side of the bed and back again, practicing while she thought. It made no sense. Her leg muscles were stronger, her hearing was better, even her appetite had improved. If everything else had got better with unaging, shouldn’t her brain be improving too?

  She swung her legs back and forth once more, thinking hard. She did feel like her brain had improved. She was sharper. She got more answers right on the crossword puzzle in the morning paper. Why should she be losing her memory about her own life? It was like a whole year had been erased when she hit her one hundredth birthday again.

  A whole year.

  Amelia turned with unaccustomed agility and slapped the nurse call button.

  “Yes?” the nurse answered lazily over the intercom.

  “Could Dr. Reed and Dr. Jimson come back, please?” Amelia said.

  By the time the doctors returned, the full horror of what Amelia was thinking had hit her. She was sitting with her head bowed, eyes closed in despair.

  “Mrs. Hazelwood?” Dr. Jimson said gently.

  Amelia didn’t raise her head.

  “When I turned one hundred again,” she began slowly, “I think I lost all my memories of the first time I was one hundred.”

  Nobody said anything, so she went on.

  “I remember everything since I came to the agency. I remember things from before I turned one hundred. But that one year of my life is gone. Are my memories being replaced? Is it that the longer I live, the more memories I’ll lose?”

  Her voice trembled. Amelia looked up in time to see the doctors exchange a glance. She could tell: They knew she was right.

  “You can fix it, can’t you?” Amelia asked.

  Neither of the doctors answered her.

  “That’s what I was afraid of,” Dr. Jimson said quietly, speaking to her husband, not Amelia.

  Dr. Reed slammed his hand against the doorway.

  “No! That can’t be right. The brain can’t work that way. There are thousands of unused neurons to store new memories in—why would new memories replace existing ones?”

  “Because the brain is unaging too, following the same patterns it followed the first time around,” Dr. Jimson said. “It’s like we hit the rewind and record buttons at the same time. So she’s recording over her old memories.”

  “Not if she forgot an entire year in one day,” Dr. Reed jeered.

  “She didn’t. I bet she’s been forgetting all along—all of them have. Remember how we thought they all had temporary amnesia about signing the waiver forms? But nobody missed any other old memories until her birthday came along. That was the first significant memory anyone lost,” Dr. Jimson said.

  It made sense to Amelia, even though she didn’t want it to.

  “You can fix it, can’t you?” she asked again. “I don’t want to forget everything.”

  Out of habit it was Dr. Reed she appealed to, not Dr. Jimson. He was the one who’d played God and begun her unaging. He was the one who was going to make her young again and keep her that way. Surely he knew how to fix a little thing like memory.

  But it was Dr. Jimson who answered first.

  “Honestly, I don’t know what we can do,” she said. “I’m sorry. There’s still so much humans don’t understand about the brain. But we’ll do the best we can.”

  Dr. Reed glared at his wife.

  “Don’t say it like that,” he said. He came to Amelia’s bedside and patted her hand. “I promise you, Mrs. Hazelwood, we’ll find a way to fix this problem. And maybe we can find a way to restore your memories. Maybe they’re not really gone, just . . . inaccessible.”

  Amelia peered back at him, her eyes locked on his.

  “I still remember this,” she said. “Something I always told my kids. Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”

  Dr. Reed stumbled backward.

  “I’m not,” he said. “I promise. I know we can fix this.”

  But Amelia saw Dr. Jimson, still standing by the door, shaking her head sadly. And she realized something for the first time. These were not gods who had saved her life and promised her all these extra years. They were fallible human beings, practically as confused as she was about what unaging meant. They might or might not be able to restore her lost memories. They might or might not be able to stop her from forgetting more. They would try to guide her and help her, but they were not experts in life, only science—and that had its limits.

  Amelia thought back almost ninety years to a day when her four-year-old cousin had fallen into a flood-swollen creek. Amelia and her mother and sisters and aunt and cousins were washing clothes on the rocks of the creek, and Corabelle had wandered upstream, picking wildflowers. Nobody knew she was in the water until they heard her screams. Amelia, who was only twelve, immediately shucked off her skirt and crouched to leap into the creek and grab Corabelle as the water pulled her past.

  “No!” Amelia’s mother screamed. “Amelia, no!”

  But Amelia was already in midair. The minute she landed in the water, it began tugging on her, pulling her downstream. Amelia was a strong swimmer, but her strokes were almost useless. Her head went under once, and then again, but each time she fought her way back to the surface. Blindly she reached out—and touched her cousin’s dress. She grabbed it and yanked her cousin’s body toward her own. She pushed Corabelle’s head above water, but that motion sent her own mouth and nose back down. She gulped in water and choked. With what might have been her last burst of strength, she thrust Corabelle toward the shore. Miraculously, someone caught her. Amelia tumbled in the current again, until her arm caught on a low-hanging tree limb. She held on for dear life, panting and coughing out water. After a long time someone reached out and pulled her back to solid ground. Amelia was too far gone to know if it was an aunt or a cousin or a sister. But she sat up and took notice when her mother ran to her side.

  “Mom—” Amelia moaned, reaching out for a hug.

  Her mother slapped her.

  “You fool! You could have drowned!” Her mother fell on her knees and wrapped her arms around Amelia’s shoulders. “How could you disobey like that?” She slapped her again.

  Amelia pulled back, confused. “But I saved Corabelle’s life.”

  Amelia’s mother sobbed. “But I didn’t want to lose you, too!”

  And then Amelia thought that she had got to Corabelle too late, that the little girl had died anyway. But that was wrong, because suddenly Am
elia’s aunt was there too, hugging Amelia and shrieking, “Thank you! Thank you!”

  Corabelle died the next spring of an unknown fever. But the memory of Corabelle’s near drowning haunted Amelia for years, most of all because of her mother’s reaction. Long after Corabelle had faded in Amelia’s mind to a faint memory of a laughing, dark-haired child, Amelia could still vividly recall the feel of her mother’s alternating slaps and hugs. Only when Amelia was a mother herself did Amelia understand how confused her mother had been, how proud she was of Amelia’s bravery, but how furious at her disobedience, how worried about her life. Thinking back, Amelia realized that that day was the first time that she had doubted either of her parents, that she began to realize that they didn’t know everything, weren’t perfect.

  And now the parents of her second life, Dr. Reed and Dr. Jimson, were confused too, though they were trying much harder than Amelia’s mother had to make her think they were still in control.

  Amelia looked straight at Dr. Reed and said, “You don’t know anything.”

  April 24, 2085

  “I always thought the next thing you said should have been, ‘Now leave me to my memories, what few I have left,’” Anny Beth said, laughing.

  “Thanks. You’re more than eighty years late supplying me with a comeback line,” Melly said, but she giggled anyway. “Dr. Reed looked stricken enough as it was.”

  They were reminiscing, something they rarely did. But it was morning now, and they were still in the anonymous hotel in an unknown place, facing an unknown future. Melly thought this was a way to remind themselves who they were and had been. She usually thought she was the only one who needed that reassurance, but Anny Beth had been the one to unleash the flood of memories this time.

  She’d been standing at the window, looking at the unfamiliar scenery outside: a few cacti, a narrow road, and sand as far as the eye could see.

  “Bill always wanted to live in the desert,” she said.

  Bill had been Anny Beth’s husband for a decade, until he was nearly fifty and Anny Beth was barely thirty. They’d been the same age when they got married. She had never told him about Project Turnabout, and he had never guessed. “But he was going to soon,” Anny Beth had explained to Melly the day she left him.