My Sister, My Love (3 page)

MAKE ME A LITTLE RED HEART SKYLER? MAKE ME A LITTLE RED HEART
like yours Skyler? please

In two days Bliss would be seven years old. And I was nine years old. At bedtime of January 28, 1997.

Skyler please Mummy won’t know

Mummy frowned at the little red-ink tattoos that were my specialty at this time.
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It wasn’t unreasonable of Mummy, like any Mummy, especially any Fair Hills, New Jersey (where spotless surfaces, high-glisten polish, “understated” expense were the norm), Mummy to object to ink-tattoos on her children’s bodies that were “vulgar” and “messy” and “hard to scrub off.” So, inking a tiny red heart on the palm of Bliss’s left hand, to match one of my own, had to be done in secret, as in secret I tattooed tiny figures on my own hands, and in other less visible parts of my body (armpits, belly, pinched little belly button).

Secrets! So many.

Daddy was away. Ever more, Daddy was away: Singapore, Tokyo, Bangkok, Sydney—or maybe only just New York City where he had an
apartment. Or, so mysteriously, Daddy was somewhere closer, yet Daddy was
away.

We were not to speak about Daddy at such times, was the message in Mummy’s fierce eyes. We were not to ask about Daddy.

And yet: Daddy might suddenly arrive home. As in a Disney movie of fantastic transformations and reversals there might come Daddy bounding up the stairs just in time to “tuck” little Skyler and little Bliss in their beds; there might come rueful-Daddy, beaming-happy-Daddy, teary-eyed-with-love-Daddy, and (maybe! these were the happiest times) Daddy and Mummy clasping hands and Mummy bravely smiling as if Daddy had not ever been away; and Mummy had not ever locked herself in her bathroom sobbing and muttering to herself and refusing to answer the door upon which Skyler shyly knocked: “Mum-
my
?”

Skyler sometimes I feel so bad

Nobody loves me Skyler do you love me Skyler?

In the Rampike household in those crucial years there were two kinds of time: when Bliss was skating, and when Bliss was not-skating. When Bliss was skating there was excitement in the air like static electricity before a storm and when Bliss was not-skating—if she’d “hurt herself” for instance, or had been sidelined by “phantom pain”—there was a feeling of dread in the air like static electricity before a storm.

And so always there was: static electricity before a storm!

The red-ink heart would protect her, Bliss believed.

Sky-ler please? Mummy won’t know

Mummy had trained Bliss to open her cobalt-blue eyes wide and to smile in a certain way not to “grin”—not to “grimace”—but to smile shyly, prettily. Smile just enough to show her beautiful pearly teeth.
Make me a little red heart like yours Skyler please?

In our senior physics class at Basking Ridge we were wittily told by our instructor that Time is

The career began with Tots-on-Ice, Meadowlands, Valentine’s Day 1994. The career would end with Hershey’s Kisses Girls’ Ice-Skating Festival, Hershey, Pennsylvania, January 11, 1997.

Skyler please a red-ink heart
and so I grabbed my sister’s moist little hand and inked into her palm a little red heart to match my own

MORE OF
ME? YOU’D LIKE TO “SEE” ME?

I suppose I don’t blame you. Even the reader who hasn’t bought this book but is only skimming it—please, not too rapidly!—in a bookstore aisle has a right to “see” whoever the hell it is who’s addressing him/her. For obviously the advantage for most writers is that no one sees them. The writer is invisible, which confers power.

First thing you’d notice about Skyler Rampike, for instance limping along Livingstone Avenue, which intersects with Pitts Street, is he’s a freaky kid.

The hair, especially.

After Bliss’s death, my wavy “fawn-colored” hair began to fall out in clumps. Soon my hard little head was bald, my zombie-eyes were stark and staring. Cancer victim? Chemo? Kiddie-leukemia? After about a year hair began to grow back but it was the weird metallic-zinc color it is now that looks as if it might be radioactive, and glow in the dark; no longer wavy fine little-boy hair but coarse and thick like that perverse species of weed said to thrive in toxic soil. Often I’m mistaken for an older guy and/or the bearer of a particularly repulsive disease (leprosy, AIDS). Through school it was my teachers’ strategy to sort of not-see me in the classroom and more recently, now I’m an “older” adolescent grown scrawny-tall people are wary of me on the street.

This zinc-hair is so stiff and bristly, it’s like sprouting quills from my head. Mostly I wear it shaved close to the skull. (A bony, bumpy skull! And my scalp reddened from rashes provoked by scratching.) Sometimes I’ve worn the hair in a funky little pigtail at the nape of my neck with the
sides of my head shaved Nazi-style, and that gets people’s attention. So maybe, though I’m humble in spirit, yearning to be as a little child, at the same time I’m an arrogant son of a bitch not unlike my father Bruce “Bix” Rampike except not Daddy’s size and lacking Daddy’s so-called charisma.

(Do you hate the word “charisma” as much as I do? Yet to find a viable synonym isn’t easy.)

The most astonishing thing is, “Skyler Rampike” with his zinc-quill hair in or out of a funky pigtail has proved attractive to certain sicko individuals both female and male. Mummy had begged me to allow her to dye my hair back to its former color—“Skyler, if Bliss saw you now, so changed, so ravaged-looking, she wouldn’t recognize you”—but I told her
no.

For, if you believed in God, you could say that God has sent my zinc-hair to me as a sign.

Mummy stared at me not daring to touch me not daring to ask
A sign of what, Skyler?
—for fear that I would say
A sign that I am damned, Mummy. The mark of Satan on your little man’s head.

Another thing you’d notice is that freaky-Skyler walks with a limp, all that remains of his child-prodigy-gymnast days (of which more later, for those readers with a morbid interest in the just punishments of those who dare to “go for the gold”). Some days this limp is scarcely discernible to the naked eye but at other times there’s no disguising the limp, on bone-chilling winter days I walk with a cane dragging my stiff (right) leg throbbing with pain like old childhood memories. For years it was quite a risible sight—“risible” being a fancy word for “hilarious”—to the crude, cruel eyes of prepubescents, when, a runty prepubescent himself, Skyler Rampike limped along with a dwarf-cane, like an antic three-legged insect. (Now, you should see me limp along with a man-sized cane swiftly and belligerently and betraying little awareness of alarmed fellow pedestrians forced to leap out of my way; though, conversely, or perversely, when crossing a street with or against traffic, if I’m walking with my cane I take my own damned sweet time to cross, you bet.
Dare to run me over, you bastards!
)

As anxious Mummy foresaw, by the time I was eleven I’d more or less
obliterated the “cute”—“adorable”—little-boy-face of the nine-year-old Skyler, by compulsively grinning/grimacing and making what Mummy called “pain faces.” By tenth grade, in prep school, my face had become a boy’s face bizarrely overlaid with a mask of snarls like tree roots. Pastor Bob has said
Skyler your soul shines in your eyes, you can never hide your soul
but is this true?

Yet—to my astonishment!—and disgust!—there are plenty of sickos out there in cyberspace who claim to find Skyler Rampike attractive—“sexy”—“seductive”—“mysterious”—and who feature him on lurid Web sites in which images of my ravaged face and Nazi-zinc hair are featured above such captions as

SKYLER RAMPIKE “SURVIVING” OLDER BROTHER OF MURDERED ICE PRINCESS BLISS RAMPIKE

SKYLER HELP ME SOMETHING BAD IS IN MY BED

IN THE INTERESTS OF FULL DISCLOSURE IT MUST BE REVEALED: SKYLER HAS
broken his Sobriety Pledge.

That’s to say, Skyler’s most recent Sobriety Pledge.

After writing the preceding chapter, I caved. Sure it was a measly little chapter and sure, any one of you could have tossed it off in a few hours, yet, for Skyler, it was gut-twisting/nerve-wracking/sick-making and so Skyler caved, on Day 59. Having endured fifty-nine miserable days, in the very early hours of the sixtieth day, Skyler “relapsed” with some suspicious-looking hydrocodone (generic for Vicodin) scored from some hip-hop black guys of my acquaintance.

As Daddy used to say with sheepish-shit-eating-Daddy smile
Forgive me my foe paws as you’d wish to be forgiven yours, hey?

A VERY LONG TIME SINCE I WAS NINE YEARS OLD. AND THEY SENT ME AWAY
when Bliss was found, and I never saw my sister again, and my hair fell out in handfuls, and when it grew back in, it grew in wrong. And something in my brain is wrong.

IN THE BEGINNING—LONG AGO!—THERE WASN’T BLISS.

This is my (proposed) beginning. I have written this sentence numerous times. I have written this sentence on several sheets of paper hoping to “jump-start” a second sentence, and, in time, a third, but so far, so far only this single sentence has emerged. But I am Sober again now, and I will remain Sober. I swear.

Though Pastor Bob has suggested that it might be easier to begin
in medias race
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and not at the beginning since there is something terrifying about beginnings as about the numeral (if it is a numeral, strictly speaking) zero.

A child can’t comprehend zero. As a child can’t comprehend the vast Dumpster of time before he/she was born.

I am Sober again, did I record this fact? Six capsules of hydrocodone (“Warning: May cause dizziness, heart palpitations, liver failure”) in a gesture of bravado I flushed down the toilet like a character on TV!

(Except, the damn toilet, shared by several of us up here on the third floor, doesn’t truly flush. The capsules swirled ’round and ’round teasingly but did not go down and for all I know, and believe me, dear reader, you don’t want to know either, one of my fellow tenants fished them out for his own purposes.)

Just chance, a lone newspaper page blown underfoot, in the damp-gritty
grass up the block. A vacant lot gone to rubble and weeds and every kind of litter including a section of page twenty-two of the Newark
Star-Ledger
, December 2, 2006, squinting up at me with a ghoulish smile was Dr. Virgil Elyse.

Not that I knew what the longtime medical examiner of Morris County (which is where we lived, in Fair Hills; New Brunswick is in Middlesex County) looked like. I never did.

Dr. Elyse had dissected, as affably he remarked to an interviewer on the occasion of his retirement (at age sixty-eight), “somewhere in the neighborhood of twelve thousand, six hundred corpses” in his forty-three-year career. Quickly I scanned the blurred columns of newsprint to see the name
Rampike
leap out at me as I knew it would, and the name
Bliss
, and quickly I kicked the newspaper away.

But not before seeing
most famous case. Most controversial.

Though I had not ever seen Dr. Elyse with his glittery pinch-ney (?) eyeglasses before yet it seemed to me in that instant that yes I had seen him. In that confused interlude after my sister’s death when little Skyler was heavily medicated and slept much of the day waking only agitatedly at night between the hours of 1
A.M.
and 4
A.M.
lying paralyzed in his bed seeing Dr. Elyse approach Skyler’s bed which had become a gurney as the air in his bedroom had become the chill formaldehyde air of the Morris County Morgue. There came Dr. Elyse (at the elder Rampikes’ bidding?) in rubber-soled shoes with a squeak, in soiled white butcher’s apron tied over a civilian suit, wearing those rimless pinch-ney glasses that magnified his eyes like a fly’s as horribly he lifted lifted a hacksaw to saw open Skyler’s skull with the intention of deftly running a soldering iron through his brain (at the elder Rampikes’ bidding?). Which is why ever after Skyler has trouble remembering.

And trouble with math! Where previously, though dyslexic as hell, he had not.

In rehab the meth-heads said: Nothing like crystal meth! Crystal meth is the high every other drug is trying to achieve but can’t.

So why are you here, Skyler wanted to ask. If the high is that terrific. If the high is worth dying for, why’d anyone want to live?

Skyler has no choice, Skyler has to live. One day, Skyler has to reveal
all he knows of his sister Bliss’s life/death. It is Skyler Rampike’s responsibility.

(Did I note that, when Skyler was busted and sent into rehab, he weighed 139 pounds, five-feet-eleven in his bare feet? His hair was shaved close to his skull and zinc-quills had begun to grow back in rash-like clusters. Even the meth-heads tattooed in flaming skulls and black-widow spiders steered clear of Skyler Rampike.)

Truth is: I’m scared of crystal meth. It’s a class thing.

Fair Hills, New Jersey, is a long way from Jersey City, New Jersey.

Mostly, we don’t snort, sniff, inject. Needles scare the hell out of us. We “take pills” just like our moms do.

Just “legal” drugs in the suburbs: the brands you can buy in drugstores.

Even if you acquire them on the street, still these are “legal” drugs. Some doctor, somewhere, licensed M.D., he’d have prescribed them for you, or she. It’s a higher class of criminal.

Pastor Bob said: Drugs are a crutch, son. You know that.

Told Pastor Bob: Why’d I need a crutch, I use a cane.

Told Pastor Bob none of his business, was it?

Told Pastor Bob you don’t know me. Stop looking at me.

Told Pastor Bob go away, man.

Pastor Bob paid no heed. Pastor Bob said: That suffering in your face, son. Immediately I saw. Know what I saw, son? In your face?

Told Pastor Bob noooo. Told Pastor Bob don’t want to know.

Pastor Bob said: In your face is Christly suffering, son. In one young as you.

Told Pastor Bob: Bullshit.

Pastor Bob said: Hear your voice, son? The fear in it.

Told Pastor Bob: Fear and trembling? Sickness unto death?

Told Pastor Bob: It’s old. It’s been done. Nobody believes that bullshit.

Pastor Bob said: You must unburden your soul, son. You must tell your story.

Told Pastor Bob hell I’m dyslexic. Or something.

Pastor Bob said: Dictate your story to me, son. The story of your lost sister Bliss. In your living voice, son. We can begin today.

Told Pastor Bob there is no “your story.” Noooo.

Told Pastor Bob he had to be crazy. A religious lunatic like who’s it—“Kirky-gard.” Bullshit nobody believes except pathetic assholes with I.Q.’s drooping around their ankles. You fat fuck Pastor Bob, I said. Don’t touch me.

Calmly Pastor Bob said: Your sister Bliss is in heaven, son. Yet even in heaven our loved ones suffer, sometimes. If we are unhappy, they suffer. You must put your sister’s soul at rest, son. You know that.

Told Pastor Bob he wasn’t hearing me, nobody can ask such things of me, nobody in all the world has dared ask such things of me,
nobody not ever
!—and Pastor Bob winced at the sick-Christ fury in my face but clasped me in his beefy big arms till I quieted saying: Son, you are mistaken. Trust me.
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