By Amy Scheiner
It happened like this.
I was sitting in my kitchen stirring grainy almond milk into my coffee one early morning, when I had the strongest memory I ever had in my life. I’m not even sure the word memory properly encapsulates what happened.
The morning birds hummed outside. Even though we’d recently put in AC units, the humidity seeped into the cracks around the windowpanes and doorways. The house was old, but that was part of its appeal. It had character. I’d lived in this house for over two decades now, been through three births, one miscarriage, Christmases and Easters and Halloweens and birthdays. The red paint stain near the baseboard in the living room from when the kids had a color war would never fade, no matter how much I scrubbed it. The mid-century atomic Jetsons wall clock hung crookedly above the fridge; its blue eye unblinking as it ticked. I always wore slippers in the house after one too many splinters from the old, wooden floors. And I still felt nervous going into the basement at night, even though I told my kids for years that it wasn’t haunted, just dirty.
I heard my husband upstairs cuss loudly, probably because he stubbed his toe on the edge of the bed frame. He stubbed his toe every morning on that thing and yet refused to buy a new one.
My mouth soured as I took a sip of the bland-not-milk in my bitter coffee. My doctor had said I was lactose intolerant, so I had to drive 30 miles to a health food store in Toms River to buy this fake, sandy milk.
Maybe it was the July heat that suddenly sparked my memory of that summer in 1963. The weather was just as muggy and blazing as today would be. My best friend, Roberta, and I spent that summer following my brother Jimmy and his friends around town. Roberta and I had been friends since first grade when we both entered Mrs. Peruzzi’s class in our penny loafers and Peter Pan collars. Our assigned desks were next to each other (Flynn and Fitzpatrick) and it felt inevitable that we’d get along. We spent our lives growing beside each other, but now she lived in Arizona, and we only talked on our birthdays (April 21st and October 3rd) and at Christmastime.
But it wasn’t a memory, exactly. It was more like I was there. 1963. Eleven years old. All freckles and legs. My hair shaped like a bowl. My wide eyes tracking my father. But even that doesn’t accurately describe what I felt. It was like I jumped back through time, took my whole present and future with me. But I didn’t believe in that stuff anymore.
Maybe I was having a midlife crisis, like my husband said. My youngest, Johnny, was going to college in the fall and my husband and I would be empty nesters. I hated that term, mostly because it was accurate in how I was feeling: empty.
I had to shake my head a few times to make sure I was here, in the present. Not in 1963, the summer that was the end of something. Or maybe the beginning.
***
I had turned eleven the day after school ended. It was already a scorching June and I had two months ahead of me to do whatever I wanted: listen to records, watch TV, lay out in the backyard covered in baby oil sucking on orange popsicles. My mother, however, had other plans for me.
“Maybe we should send you to Grandma’s.” My mother was, by all means, a classy lady. We didn’t have much money for fine things, but she had found a way to always keep her dresses wrinkle-free and her hair in a cemented bouffant.
“Ma, no,” I whined. Grandma lived a couple of streets over and would smoke her Pall Malls and watch As the World Turns. She’d make me bring her glass after glass of iced tea— sweetened with Sweet N’ Low— while she vowed there’d be no other president as great as FDR, even Kennedy. “Although I like that Jackie,” she’d say.
“I can’t watch you now that both Dad and I are working,” Mom said. She got a job at the phone company and would come home with a crick in her neck every night and ask my father to massage it. He would, half-heartedly, until Mom grew impatient and yelled, “Forget it!” and went to the kitchen to fix herself a drink. Mom had been fighting with Dad more and more. She felt that she was picking up the slack, increasing her work hours, caring for the house and for me and Jimmy.
Dad worked at the factory but as soon as he clocked out, he parked himself on the couch to watch The Twilight Zone on our Phillips set and count the days to the premiere of the next new episode. His favorite was “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?” and he’d watch that episode so intently that his eyeballs would be streaked with red from not blinking. “Take note of this, kids,” he said. “Soon this will be happening right here, in our town.”
Dad was obsessed with aliens and space travel. He kept up with the Space Race, called in sick from work to watch The Cuban Missile Crisis, collected newspapers from The New York Times and The Washington Post whenever NASA was mentioned. He knew the 1938 HG Wells’ Martian Landing in Grover’s Mill wasn’t a hoax. It was a government cover-up.
“And that wasn’t that far from here,” he said, waving his finger. “Who knows what extraterrestrial life is walking among us?” His pupils got really wide when he talked about aliens, the irises radiating blue. Mom would tell him he was embarrassing this family with his nutty beliefs and to “cut the crap,” and my older brother, Jimmy, would roll his eyes and go back to counting his baseball cards. But I believed him.
I’d sit next to him on the couch and watch all the episodes of The Twilight Zone. “Third from the Sun,” with the hidden spacecraft. “The Invaders,” the dialogue-less episode of humanoids attacking a lonely woman living in the middle of nowhere, and my favorite, “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street.” I could watch that episode forever. The pleasant town with its pleasant neighbors, turning on each other in a witch hunt, aliens watching from above as disaster unfolds. I loved watching TV with Dad, but I also felt like he needed me there, needed someone there.
“You’re not sitting in front of the TV this summer,” Mom said, applying her Mary Kay lipstick to her puckered lips.
“Can’t I join Jimmy and his friends?” Jimmy and I were Irish twins, born eleven months apart. He was twelve but seemed worlds away. Jimmy was allowed to do whatever he wanted. He rode his bike around town, hung out in empty parking lots, and even played in the forest.
“It’s dangerous, Jimmy!” I’d tell him when he returned home, dirt-crusted and branches in his hair. “You know who lives there.”
“Jimmy, I wish you’d be more careful,” Mom said when she saw his legs and arms scratched from the brush.
“He’s a Piney,” Dad said. “It’s in his blood.” Dad was a Piney, too. Our whole family was, in fact. They met at a bowling alley in town. Dad had just returned from the War, seeing only a year in action, but “enough to last a lifetime,” he said. Mom said it was his eyes that drew her in. They were wild and he was wild. Going on about the places he’d seen, the people he met. The furthest Mom ever went was Delaware.
Dad worked for Campbell’s Soup in Camden. He’d bring home cans of it every week: Chicken Noodle, Chunky Vegetable, Beefsteak tomato. When Andy Warhol’s famous “Campbell’s Soup Cans” painting came out, Dad bragged that he had been the inspiration. “I saw old Andy sneaking around the factory,” he said to our neighbors. “I said to him, ‘Andy, you gonna rob us or paint something?’”
This always got a laugh along with an eye roll. Dad had plenty of stories like this.
Mom said Dad was lucky to have the job, mostly because his older brother, my Uncle Mickey, was his boss. This helped Dad when he was late to work or mixed the Clam Chowder label with the Beef Broth. Dad was prone to mistakes and had lost a lot of jobs up until this one. It wasn’t him, he said. It was that no one took him seriously. Mom said Uncle Mickey was a lifesaver, and that he was the only one who could put up with his alien nonsense. Dad said that was what family was for. To protect each other.
“Our family had lived in the Pine Barrens for generations, ever since Mother Leeds,” I said, quoting my father. He patted my head.
“You believe that bull crap?” Jimmy said, although it sounded like Joo behee aht bah cwap? since he had a mouth full of potato chips.
“Watch your mouth,” Mom said.
Jimmy didn’t believe in anything since he found out Santa Claus was our mother when he was nine and assumed that Mother Leeds and her 13th baby were fake.
“It’s true,” I said. Every Piney kid since the dawn of time learned about the Jersey Devil, and some had sworn they’d seen him.
We learned about the Jersey Devil in first grade and every year after, usually around Halloween. The story goes like this: the Jersey Devil was born during the Revolutionary War when all the Americans were fighting the British. Mother Leeds lived near the Pine Barrens in a small, one-room log cabin. Her husband was a drinker, they said. They said he even hung out with some of the Red Coats, if they bought him a beer, that was. The Brits thought they could use him as a spy, but they quickly learned that he was a buffoon and so no one told Father Leeds anything. He’d just bumble around talking nonsense through the muddy streets.
Mother Leeds wasn’t happy about her husband’s drinking, but she had twelve children and was too busy caring for them to think of anything else. When she found out she was pregnant with her thirteenth, she ran out of her cabin and shook her fist and roared to the sky. “Goddamn, you! Goddamn, this baby to the Devil!”
It is said at that moment a bolt of lightning struck the earth and a curse was born. Mother Leeds suffered a terrible pregnancy, the worst she ever had. Her stomach cramped as if something was trying to claw its way out. Her legs grew weak and she couldn’t lift her arms. She broke out in boils, and some even said she was speaking in tongues because of the pain.
When the baby finally came on a dark and stormy October night, the midwife fainted at the sight of it. Sharp claws, long tail, and hooves. When he cried, it sounded like cats screeching.
“He tore her open,” Patty Niconi told me one day in fifth grade. Patty was held back a year and got her period and wore a bra before any of us did.
“Tore what open?” I said.
Mother Leeds couldn’t stand the sight of him, so she snuck out deep in the Pine Barrens and left him there. Generations upon generations said he still lived there, haunting the trees and scaring away whoever intruded on his land.
“Oh, he’s alive all right,” said Patty one day in school the past year. “I saw him.”
There were rumors that Patty snuck out with a high schooler named Jesse O’Kelly to get felt up in the forest.
“What’d he look like?” Roberta asked, leaning into me.
“Teeth,” Patty said. “Huge teeth and horns growing out of his head. Like he was part animal or something. Maybe a dog or horse. And he had big, black wings. He growled at me and stared with his large, red eyes. I almost pissed myself.”
“What’d you do?” I asked, my knuckles turning white from grasping my desk.
“What do you think I did, dummy? I ran. Ran for my life and survived by the skin of my teeth.” Patty crossed her arms and smacked her gum loudly.
“My gang and I ride our bikes in the Barrens all the time and I never seen him,” said Jimmy, pulling a chip out of the Lays bag and crunching it loudly.
“Just because you never saw it doesn’t mean it’s not there.” Dad was invested now. He felt it was important to be a part of his son’s upbringing. I leaned in closer to his body, the smell of his cologne enveloping me.
Mom finally caved and made me swear that I wouldn’t leave Jimmy’s sight.
Jimmy groaned. “Ma, this isn’t fair! I don’t want to babysit this twerp all summer.”
I stuck out my tongue.
And so it was done. Roberta and I would spend the humid, long summer days with Jimmy and his friends riding our bikes into the Pine Barrens.
***
It was clear that Jimmy didn’t want us with him. He and Billy and Chris would pump their long legs on their Schwinns so fast that Roberta and I couldn’t keep up.
“If you girls can’t keep up then go on and hang out at Grandma’s,” Jimmy taunted. Chris laughed, his buckteeth showing like a woodchuck.
“Shut up, Jimmy,” I said, pausing to catch my breath. We had ridden for miles in the heat, only stopping to rest for lunch at Billy’s house (then his mom would kick us out so she could play cards) and at the end of the day when it was time for dinner. It was always the same route: Jimmy and I would meet at Chris’ house and then we’d ride over to Billy’s and then to Roberta’s. Roberta insisted on doing her hair up every day, although she’d end up with it sticking out in all directions by the afternoon.
We’d ride down Main Street and buy penny candy from Mr. O’Connor’s or fountain sodas from the drugstore. Sometimes, we’d head over to the elementary school and play on the playground or go down to the park and jump into the pond until the park ranger yelled at us to skedaddle. Most days though, we’d ride all the way to the Pine Barrens, away from it all, and Roberta and I would trail after the boys as they tore down branches and scouted for snakes. I thought about my dad revering in our Piney history.
“I better not get any ticks,” Roberta whispered to me as we veered off the path. We all got ticks and when we got home our moms would peel them off us and scold us for being so dirty.
I was determined not to whine or complain that summer. I wanted the boys to respect me, so I tried to be like them. I begged my mom to buy me shorts instead of skirts, I climbed and ran as hard and fast as they did, and I didn’t cry when I fell and scraped my knees. I knew from all The Twilight Zone episodes I watched that it was the men who dropped into an alternate universe, who spotted the aliens from a distance, who figured out the mystery. I wanted to figure out the mystery, whatever it was. To run home to my dad and show him the proof of an alien landing, of some secret government plot. I wanted him to put his hand on my shoulder and tell me how proud he was to have a daughter like me.
“Don’t be such a baby, Roberta,” I said throwing my bike on the ground next to the boys once we got to our spot in the woods.
“Hey, girls! How about a game?” Jimmy called out, jumping on an old tree trunk so that he loomed above us. Billy and Chris were already snickering. “Truth or Dare.”
“That’s a dumb game,” I said. I felt uneasy and I looked over at Roberta and I could tell she did too.
“Are you chickenshit?” Jimmy raised his eyebrows.
I hated when Jimmy called me that. Whenever I was afraid of the dark, or big roller coasters, or when I cried when Mom and Dad fought, Jimmy would call me that word and I immediately felt weak. He was always the oldest, never scared of anything or anyone. He always seemed so cool and confident, unfazed by it all.
“Get off it, Jimmy. We’ll play,” I answered and felt Roberta’s angry stare hot on my skin.
Jimmy strutted around us as if a tiger surveying his prey. “Chris, truth or dare?”
“Truth,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest.
“Okay.” Jimmy stopped pacing and put a finger to his chin. I knew this was for dramatic effect. “Have you ever seen a naked lady?” The boys giggled and me and Roberta stood frozen, sneakers stuck to the ground.
“Course I have,” Chris snarked. “My dad’s got girlie magazines hidden under his mattress. I’ve seen it all.” He made a crude gesture with his hands, and I wanted to disappear. The boys started hooting and hollering and I felt Roberta nudge me in the ribs.
“Let’s get out of here,” she said. I wouldn’t budge though, and Roberta knew it. We would never be able to show our faces again if we left now.
“Connie,” Chris said with a wolf-like grin. He kicked his foot against a rock. “Truth or dare?”
I didn’t want to reveal any of my secrets—the time I shoplifted lipstick from the drugstore, that I was the one who started the rumor about Patty Niconi going with Jesse O’Kelly into the forest, and that I would kiss the poster of Troy Donoghue on my wall every night before I went to sleep. I couldn’t pick “truth.”
“Dare,” I said.
“I dare you to go deep, deep in the forest all by yourself.”
Everyone was silent for a moment. We all knew that a girl shouldn’t go deep, deep in the Pine Barrens by herself, especially after what happened to that girl a few years ago who went missing and was eventually found buried beneath the dirt.
“That’s a lame dare!” Jimmy said. “Make her do a bike jump over the mud pile or dingdong-ditch old Mr. Esposito’s house.” His face looked the same as the time I floated in the deep end at the town pool and I thrashed around, too afraid to yell for help. Jimmy was always a stronger swimmer than I was, and he flew through the water, grabbing my waist and pulling me to the shallow end. “Don’t ever do that again!” he yelled, still holding onto me. When we returned home that day, my dad lectured both of us on always being prepared. That there was no guarantee that someone would be there to save us.
I didn’t say anything. I knew I had an out. I could just as easily say the dare was lame and tell Chris to pick another one. But I knew everyone would think that I was chickenshit, just like Jimmy said before, and I had too much pride to turn it down.
“I’ll do it.” I marched away from the group toward the darker part of the forest.
“Connie, don’t,” Jimmy said. “Ma will kill me.”
“You’re the one who said there’s nothing out there.”
Jimmy kicked the dirt and glared at Chris.
“It’s just the woods,” I said. My heart raced but no one stopped me. I thought if someone had called out, grabbed my arm, or said the game was over, I would turn back, follow them back into town and pretend like this never happened. I was terrified, but I couldn’t show it.
I walked, my back straight, knowing they were watching me. After a few minutes, I turned around and couldn’t see them anymore. I was completely alone. A rustling noise came from the ground around me. Probably a squirrel or bird. Insects buzzed and the wind picked up. I kept marching, reciting one two three one two three in my head. I was on a mission, but I wasn’t sure exactly what it was. Only that I needed to keep going.
I realized early on I was lost and that I didn’t know how deep the forest went. What if I had died like the woman in “The Hitchhiker” episode and didn’t know it? What if I walked into the fourth dimension? What if I was never going to see my family again?
I imagined Dad was with me. Be brave, he’d say.
I heard a twitch behind me and I spun around. The air stilled and all I could hear was my heartbeat. I decided to turn back, but I didn’t know which way to go. I didn’t have a watch, but I knew it was getting late and we needed to be home for dinner soon. I had promised Mom I’d be responsible.
I heard my dad’s voice in my head: It’s different out there for girls. I’ve seen it. I didn’t know what he had seen, but I knew people wouldn’t believe him, anyway.
I imagined Jimmy coming home without me, proclaiming that I was lost in the Pine Barrens. Mom’s hand would cover her mouth and she’d scream an awful scream. Dad would say he was sure it was the aliens who finally came down and kidnapped a human. He would grab his flashlight, walkie-talkie, and hunting gun and drive into the forest and save me. He would be a hero among men, honored by our town for taking out the extraterrestrials. He would finally show that he was right about all of it—the aliens, the government, the conspiracies. And he would have earned his keep in our town and our family. The One Who Was Right.
I was quickly drawn out of my thoughts when I heard the rustling grow louder. Something was approaching. I froze; not a hair on my body moved. I saw the something come closer. It was running now, a three-foot being hunched over, covered in fur and claws, two horns sticking out of its head, the sharpest teeth I’d ever seen. It growled and spit and moaned in some unintelligible language and I swear where its irises were supposed to be were twin flames. I had never been so terrified in my life. It felt like both my heart and brain were electrocuted. I didn’t scream. I ran. My body ran on its own, a primal urge for survival. I ran faster than I ever had before and didn’t stop, even after I found Jimmy, who tackled me to the ground, screaming my name.
***
The phone rang and my breath caught in my throat. I got up to answer it but there was no one there. I stood in my bathrobe, hand clutching the receiver. I hung up the phone and poured my lukewarm coffee down the sink, staring at Jimmy’s family portrait hanging on the wall. He was posed with his wife and two children. His hairline had receded, but he looked happy. He was a good husband and a good father to my nieces. We got closer over the years, the two of us with our own families now.
I cleared the dial tone to call Jimmy when it came to me: The summer of ’63. Exactly forty years ago. Dad was forty then. It was the last summer I had with him.
In the fall, after Kennedy was killed, things got worse. Dad talked more and more about plots and life outside of Earth. He was convinced something was going on, that the human race was in some sort of grave danger. He went to some kind of hospital, and they put wires on his head and shocked him. He said it was the aliens who did it, the same ones who killed the president. They were trying to steal his brain.
When he came out, he was tired. So tired he barely could talk. But he still watched The Twilight Zone, read the newspapers for alien activity, scanned the skies for UFOs.
He lost his job and not even Uncle Mickey could help him. He stopped showering and sat on the couch, days turning into nights turning into days.
Mom said she couldn’t take it anymore. Jimmy spent all his time in his room, but I stayed on the couch with him, watching episode after episode, caught in the fourth dimension. “Tell me again,” he’d say.
Not long after I disappeared into the forest, Jimmy ran after me. He called my name but couldn’t find me and grew worried. He said he searched all over but didn’t see where I went until I came crashing into him, as if possessed. “You looked like you saw a ghost,” he told me later. “But you kept saying ‘It’s him! It’s him!’”
When we got back to town, no one said anything about what I saw. I don’t think anyone knew what to make of it. We stopped hanging out in the Pine Barrens after that. Roberta and I continued to follow the boys around town that summer, but Jimmy stopped calling me chickenshit.
“Never ever tell Mom,” Jimmy told me, still holding onto me. I knew I couldn’t, not just because we’d both get in trouble, but because she’d never understand. But after Dad came back from the hospital the first time, I told him what happened that day. I wanted to prove to him he wasn’t crazy, that it was true. There were things out there beyond our understanding.
“Fire in his eyes,” I said. “A true devil.”
Dad nodded. He believed me. “You survived, Connie.” He said, eyes still glued to the TV. “You’re my survivor.”
After Dad went into the hospital the second time, he never came back. We’d visit him, sometimes, but he didn’t see us. He wasn’t really there. Eventually, he checked himself out. He knew what was out there and he swore he would find it. He would save us all.
They found him in an alleyway in Philadelphia a couple of months later. We had a small funeral, just Grandma, Mom, Jimmy, Roberta, and me. Roberta didn’t know what to say but she threaded her arm through mine as I cried. Jimmy stood alone.
Everything changed after that. Mom worked more and Grandma moved in with us and I sat with her watching her soaps as she smoked her Pall Malls. “None of that crazy stuff,” she said when I turned the channel to watch the new episode of The Twilight Zone. I didn’t see Jimmy much, and he moved in with some friends when he was sixteen. His whole body drooped, and he never looked me in the eye. We never talked about Dad.
I dialed Jimmy’s number, my breath spewing from my nose. I needed to speak to him. I heard his voice and the words sprinted from my mouth, as if I couldn’t get the story out fast enough. Jimmy was silent, and I realized I had broken an unspoken rule: we didn’t discuss Dad. But I needed to tell him. I needed to know if he believed me.
“Connie, things were different back then. No one knew about things like that.” Jimmy’s voice was soft but weary. He seemed to have made peace with our father’s death.
“But you believe me, don’t you?” I didn’t care how I sounded. I knew I saw what I saw.
“I believe you saw something,” he said. “Something that scared the living daylight out of you.”
That wasn’t enough. At that moment, forty years later, I would have given anything to sit on the couch with my dad, talking about aliens and government conspiracies and the Jersey Devil. I missed his knowing smile, the secrets of the universe hidden behind his eyes.
“You know what, Connie,” he had said one of the last times we sat together at home. “Some people, they’ll just never understand. They’ll never see things past their own nose. But people like us—” he swung his index finger in the dead air between our bodies “—we know there’s something else out there. Something we don’t even know yet.”
“It’s different, now,” Jimmy said. “For both of us. We’re not like him.”
I told Jimmy I wasn’t so sure. He had my dad’s eyes, his receding hairline, his crooked smile. And what did I have?
I nodded into the phone. He seemed so certain, like how my dad was always so certain. Certain about another dimension running parallel to ours. Certain that there were experiences we couldn’t explain, couldn’t even name. Like how I could be in two places at once—the present, in my bathrobe on the phone with Jimmy, and that summer with my dad. At a crossroads between two worlds. One of fact and one of belief. One of reality and one of a dream. Both of memory.
I assured Jimmy I was fine, that he didn’t have to worry about me. He said he’d call and check on me tomorrow.
The phone clicked and I stood there for a minute, waiting to see if something would disturb the silence. I dried my hands and went outside; the humidity dampened my skin and I knew it was going to be a scorching day. But that’s about all I knew. Time would tell the rest.
Amy Scheiner‘s writing has been featured in Slate, HuffPost, The Southampton Review, and Longreads, among others. She is the co-editor of Moonlighting by Lit Pub and has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes.