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Jersey in December is a ghost town. This is especially true for the Pines twins, who have been gone so long that only the spirit of their past lives remains. The boardwalk stands like a graveyard, buildings like tombstones engraved with names they no longer recognize.
“Wasn’t that an ice cream shop?” Stan points to a shuttered windowfront that now boasts fried fish for $15. They used to buy cones for five cents.
Ford adjusts his glasses. “Hot dogs, I think.”
Neither of them have been back here since they first left – Ford by choice, Stan by circumstance – and if it weren’t for their brother, Shermie, the twins probably would have continued the leave of absence. Unlike his younger brothers, Sherm had barely managed to leave this town, much less New Jersey. His grand escape was two and a half decades spent an hour inland.
Then Ma got sick. And with Ford presumed busy and Stan presumed dead, well. Shermie didn’t have much of a choice.
He’s really made the best of it. Set up a successful cabinet-making business, started a local birding group, and by all accounts, cared for Ma right up until the end. Heaven knows Shermie even managed to make the family apartment his own – the place looks so nice that it’s nearly as unrecognizable as the ice cream/hot dog/seafood shop.
Still, there are moments in that home where familiarity lingers like cigar smoke stains. As though Ma will be perched in the window seat with a cigarette dangling from her fingers (it’s just Shermie’s wife, Lenora), or Filbrick will turn out to be the one pounding up the stairs in his heavy shoes (it’s just a neighbor checking in.) The sensation makes this a particularly disquieting detour on the Pines twins’ sea voyage.
Honestly, if it weren’t for Shermie, neither of the brothers would be back in Jersey at all. Bet it’s all ghosts, and none of the fun kind, Stan had described it, and Ford had been in firm agreement. But when Sherm took a hard fall (trying to string up Christmas lights, of all things) there had really been no choice but to stay for the holidays. We’re not monsters, Ford had muttered, and Stan couldn’t bring himself to disagree.
Still, there’s only so long a person can wander the hall of their childhood abode before it wraps around them, misguided nostalgia tightening like a snake. A sensation that, judging by the look in Shermie’s eyes as the twins promised to be back by nightfall, their brother understood all too well. Maybe his inland life didn’t seem adventurous, but any distance was distance all the same.
Now the twins walk in silence, biding time until sunset. It doesn’t matter how long they’ve been at sea, watching the sun dip below the ocean is the sort of experience to make them forget any woes.
“Is it just me, or is it warm out?” Stan’s never been one to settle into quiet. He tugs on his wool scarf – courtesy of Mabel – until it hangs around his neck like a wedding reception tie.
“Hard to say,” Ford admits, “I lost track of typical Earth seasons while on my adventures. But it’s not raining shrimp made of light rays, so…at least we’re on the right track?”
“I think it’s warm out,” Stan grumbles, toying with the fringe of his scarf, “Goddamn global warming or whatever.”
Yet another thing that’s changed.
Ford doesn’t say anything. They’ve traveled together long enough that he’s started to pick up on his brother’s cues. Stan’s complaints about nothing tend to be a preamble to something more. And since the last time they were both together in this tourist trap of a town, Ford was watching his teenage brother get kicked out of their familial home, well. It might just mean there’s something more to talk about beyond the weather.
“You sure you ain’t getting hot?” Stan gestures to Ford’s outfit, which comprises his usual sweater/trench coat combination.
Ford just shrugs apologetically. Travel through the multiverse really has thrown off his ability to accurately manage Earth’s climate. Sometimes, no matter what he wears or what the weather is, the temperature can only be described as uncomfortable. But Ford doesn’t want to talk about that now. He wants to know Stan’s angle.
The symphony of Jersey fills the gap — cries of seabirds, crash of waves, creak of boards. This, at least, is the same as their youth.
“I just…how are we supposed to feel?” Stan finally yanks the scarf off his neck, shoving it into his coat pocket.
“About the temperature?”
“About here! About the boardwalk that ain’t our boardwalk. About the apartment that ain’t our apartment. About how Ma and Dad aren’t here, but they’re here, in some…in that crumbling…” Stan waves a weak hand in the direction of town.
They’d visited earlier. Shermie’s wife guiding them through rows of worn rocks emblazoned with an uncomfortable amount of recognizable names. But stone slabs are poor receptacles for emotion, love and fury bouncing off them in equal measure. Anything that could have been said to Filbrick or Caryn has since grown stagnant, as meaningless and impassive as the pebbles Stan and Ford placed on the graves.
Ford reaches a hand out for his brother, but stops short. “I wish I’d been able to say goodbye.”
Technically, he had said goodbye. Full of youthful zeal and hubris, Ford had hugged his mother goodbye after graduation, promising to see her once the research took off. He’d shared a firm handshake with Filbrick, basking in the rare glint of pride in the man’s eyes.
But it hadn’t been that way for Stanley, had it? Just people shouting, tires squealing. Any heartfelt goodbye burned away in a horrible burst of exhaust smoke.
“Sorry,” Ford amends, “I know you didn’t–”
“I did, actually. Sorta.” Stan stops in his walk, staring out at the cold sea. “I said goodbye as you.”
The sky is already starting to darken – soon the ocean horizon will be aglow in brilliance – but for now the water churns in a cavalcade of greys. Ford’s breath catches like a wave on rocks. “What?”
“When you disappeared–”
“When you sabotaged my machine–” Ford corrects.
Stanley pauses, gaze flicking to his brother before settling back onto the Atlantic. “Someone had to take over the Mystery Shack–”
“Take over my life–”
“So I faked my death,” Stanley grimaces. “Threw a funeral and everything. Mostly to get Rico’s goons off my back, but somewhere in the police report and funeral planning, they– I– I don’t know who managed to call home but Ma–”
“She came,” Ford finishes. “She came to your fake funeral–” a laugh bubbles in his throat, “–because it wasn’t enough you took my life, was it? Took my house and my research and my…my name, but you had to take that too, didn’t you? Had to take my last moment with our mother.”
The accusation lingers in the humid air. Ford knows, after everything, he’s not supposed to be upset at his brother, the man who sacrificed everything to clean up Ford’s mistake. But there’s something about the indignity of this transgression that cuts right to the quick. Of everything his brother could sully, Ford had never considered one of them would be their mother’s memory of him. He clenches his jaw.
They lock eyes.
And Stan hops off the boardwalk.
It’s only a couple foot drop, the sort of move they used to do without blinking at ten and now results in a groan and a wheeze at sixty. Ford stares in disbelief, listening to the familiar chuff, chuff, chuff of footsteps in the sand as Stan turns his back on him and starts making his way to the water.
Caught between How stupid! and How infuriating!, Ford manages to exclaim, “What are you doing?”
“Leaving.”
Infuriation it is. Ford makes the jump with relative ease (perk of an adulthood traversing the multiverse) and follows after his stupid, stubborn brother. “And go where, into the sea? Get back and face me.”
“And say what?” Stanley, refusing to accept his narrowing lead, continues his beeline to the water.
There was a time they both used to accept that he was the faster one. Ford can practically see it, a vision as real as the salt-spray on his tongue of a sun-burned, gap-toothed Stanley racing along the sand. Of everything from home that’s long gone, this lost intimacy might be the hardest pill to swallow. At least Ford can leave a stone on his parents’ grave.
“I dunno, Stanley,” Ford can feel the fight leeching out of him. He slows to match his brother’s pace, letting Stan remain two steps ahead, “Maybe I’m sorry?”
“I’m so. Sorry,” Stan exaggerates the words between puffs of breath. “That Ma’s last moment with me, she thought I was you. I’m so sorry that after not seeing her for a decade, I never got to tell her how much I missed her. I’m so sorry that the last time we were together she told me how proud she was of you. Told me how much she loved you.”
He stops now, just short of the foam dividing dry sand from wet. “So sorry you never got to wonder, all those decades later, if it was better or worse that she didn’t realize I was you.”
A wave rolls in, water crashing at the rim of Stan’s boot. He doesn’t move, letting the water spill into his shoes as his chest heaves.
Ford waits for the wave to recede before bridging the distance. “C’mon, Stanley,” his voice is gentler now, “You’re a twin who’s good at a con.”
“Sure, I’m good,” Stan barks a laugh. Tears sparkle on red-rimmed eyes as he holds up a hand, fingers splayed, “But I’m not that good, Sixer.”
Oh.
Oh.
A myriad of possibilities swarm, the moniker Glass Shard beach never feeling so on-the-nose as they slice into him. Had they drifted so far their own Ma couldn’t tell them apart? Or had she realized and…and done what? Chosen to mourn them both and hoped one goodbye could cover two absences? Or simply hadn’t cared about one or both of them enough to do anything but swallow Stanley’s lie like medicine?
Did she leave one stone on the grave?
Or two?
“And…Dad?” Ford can’t bring himself to tug on the snarled thread of his feelings about Ma any longer. As though hearing himself admit any of the horrible possibilities aloud will make them true.
“Didja forget who was in the casket?” Stan snorts, “Pretty sure the old man cracked open the good stuff when he got the phone call and didn’t leave the armchair till Ma got home.”
There’s a strange twinge of hurt that Ford can’t quite place. “What about me?”
“What about you?”
“Wouldn’t I have been,” Ford waves a hand, “I dunno. In mourning or something?”
“Would you have been?” Stan’s low voice is nearly drowned out by the rush of the ocean.
“What sort of question is that?”
“The first thing I did after ruining your life and not speaking to you for a decade was ruin your plans with your journal,” the sun has dipped by now, casting Stan’s profile in an inscrutable shadow, “I’d say it’s a pretty reasonable question.”
Ford’s words of protest jam in his throat.
“Don’t worry. I’d expected as much.” Stan begins a staccato sort of wheeze, somewhere between coughing and laughter. “Always figured when they put me in the ground, nobody would give a fuck.”
When he finally turns to face his brother, Stan’s face is cut with tear tracks. “Wanna know the stupidest part of all?” he opens his arms wide, showcasing the great Atlantic ocean like it’s an exhibit in the Mystery Shack, same insincere grin plastered across his cheeks, “I just remembered the sun doesn’t even set over the ocean here.”
How could they both forget something so simple?
If Jersey in December is a ghost town, Stanley Pines must be one of its ghosts. How many years of his life has he spent haunting? Wandering a house that wasn’t his, wearing a name that didn’t quite fit. No wonder he was so willing to burn his mind down alongside it. An exorcism of sorts, complete with demons and deals and some kind of dying.
But Stanley, for all his haunting, isn’t gone yet. He’s creaking the wood of the boardwalk and leaving divots in the sand as they wander the wrong direction in search of a sunset and carrying memories of ice cream stands where a fish and chips now stands and Ford’s lost too much time with him already, goddamn it.
“Then turn around!” Ford takes his brother by the shoulder and whirls him away from that endless, churning void of saltwater and despair. “The sun’s not down yet!”
And maybe it’s just luck, or maybe Jersey has a certain fondness for two of her wayward boys, but the sun sets their beloved beachtown aglow. And the specifics might have changed but oh, is the general horizon the same – the curve and rise of homes, the meandering boardwalk, the flickering neon lights. The beach is made timeless, the Pines twins too, walking back as children, as teenagers, as men.
Not ghosts.