My Sister, My Love (34 page)

“SKYLER, WAKE UP!”

Mummy was shaking him, for Skyler could not wake up.

Mummy was agitated, and seemed to be blaming him, and Skyler tried to wake up but could not for his head was heavy and leaden and his eyelashes were stuck together like glue.

“Skyler, please! I can’t find Bliss.”

In the night, Bliss had pushed open Skyler’s door. This was the third time that Bliss had wakened Skyler that week and Skyler resented his sister and pulled a pillow over his head pretending not to hear her stricken voice
Skyler! Something happened in my bed a bad accident in my bed
but peevish Skyler refused to respond this time, in disgust muttering
Go away Bliss! I’m not getting up clean your bed yourself
afterward unable to recall if this had truly happened or if it had been a dream for earlier that night when Skyler had just gone to bed (at about 9
P.M.
) Mummy came into his room bringing Skyler his bedtime pills which (Skyler was sure) he’d already taken from Lila as he did every night, with warm milk and cookies or Lila’s special warm applesauce sprinkled with cinammon which both Skyler and Bliss loved. Yet there came Mummy teasing: “Skyler, I know your tricks! You and your sister both, you hide your pills in the side of your mouth and when no one is watching you spit them out, you and your devious sister both, you must be watched.” Mummy laughed, Mummy’s eyes were lustrous as reflections in glass. “But you can’t help it, you’re his children. And you are his son.
He
named you.” And so Skyler had taken the pills (again) except it seemed to him that there was one extra pill, a large white capsule he didn’t recognize for it was easier to take these pills than to rouse Mummy’s anger
at this time of night. And later wakened by a sharp pressure on his bladder, a terrible need to pee, he’d managed to stumble from bed and into the hall and into the bathroom and on the way back to his room he saw a light beneath the door of Mummy’s private room and like a boy in a dream not wholly his own he went to the door that was ajar pushing it open hesitantly seeing Mummy in her silky champagne-colored nightgown and over it the warm white terry cloth bathrobe Mummy wore when Daddy was not home for this bathrobe made Mummy look fat and Mummy did not want Daddy to see her in it. Mummy was at her desk leaning on her elbows frowning and muttering to herself, bent over a sheet of paper, gripping a pen as Bliss gripped a pen in her right fist printing in block letters Skyler glimpsed upside down from several feet away. Mummy glanced up with a startled smile: “Why, Skyler! What are you doing up? What time is it? You little—owl.” Mummy spoke playfully though Skyler could see that she was annoyed by the interruption; and Mummy did not like to be spied upon by her children, not ever. On the desk beside Mummy’s sprawled arms was a dark amber bottle with a bright green parrot label and a small container of white pills. “As long as you’re up, sweetie—how d’you spell ‘theaten’?”

“‘Theaten’?”

“Yes. ‘Theaten.’”

“Do you mean ‘threaten,’ Mummy?”

Slowly Mummy blinked as if confused then said, shrugging: “Oh, never mind! You male Rampikes are so smart, aren’t you. ‘Y’ chromosome up your ass.” Mummy splashed amber liquid into a glass, and drank, and laughed, and waved Skyler with a negligent gesture.

Next morning Daddy was coming to take Bliss away—“A special birthday outing, just Daddy and his bestest-best li’l gal”—to which Mummy had reluctantly agreed, since Mummy had a “real birthday party” planned for Bliss on the actual date of her birthday to which Daddy had not been invited. Bliss had been speaking of nothing else for days: Daddy would be taking her to New York City to the Plaza Hotel for lunch and then to see a matinee of the Broadway musical
The Princess Bride
; and afterward, Daddy would show Bliss the new apartment where Daddy stayed when Daddy “had business” in the city: not the company-owned condominium but, it seemed, Daddy’s own apartment on Central Park South overlooking the
park. Skyler had no reason to be jealous of Bliss for (1) It was Bliss’s birthday, not Skyler’s; and (2) Daddy had promised to take Skyler to see the Knicks play in the city, at which time Daddy would show Skyler the new apartment, too. Now Mummy was shaking Skyler to wake him, for Skyler was so very sleepy, and Mummy was pulling up his pajama sleeves saying, “Skyler, let me see your arms,” before Skyler could stop her forcing him into the light so that smudged little rows of black daggers/red hearts were revealed on the inside of Skyler’s left elbow. “There must be a devil in you! This is ugly. This is pagan. Hasn’t Mummy warned you.”

Ashamed, guilty, Skyler wished he could hide. But where?

Mummy pulled back the bedclothes on Skyler’s bed—as if somehow Bliss might be hiding beneath them, curled up at the foot of the bed. “Where is she? Where is Bliss!”—Mummy had become frantic, unreasonable, kneeling to peer beneath the bed, stumbling then to Skyler’s closet where she pawed through Skyler’s hanging things, knelt and groped about on the floor amid Skyler’s shoes like a blind woman. As if Bliss might be hiding in Skyler’s closet, on the floor. Skyler asked Mummy if she’d looked downstairs and Mummy said Yes! of course she’d looked downstairs, she had looked everywhere but Bliss was gone. Mummy pulled Skyler with her across the hall and into the nursery where the Mother Goose lamp beside Bliss’s torn-apart bed gave off a warm soft mild glow lost in the brighter light of the ceiling fixture, Skyler saw that Bliss’s sheets and mattress were stained, an unmistakable sour smell made his nostrils pinch. Mummy was striking her thighs with her fists half-sobbing, “Bad girl! Again! On purpose to spite me!” as Skyler stood irresolute as if he was to blame and yes he will be blamed for Mummy turned upon him as if seeing him suddenly in a new, terrible light staring at him pleading, “Skyler? What have you done with Bliss? You’ve taken her, haven’t you?—where?”
*

THESE CONFUSED EVENTS OCCURRED BETWEEN APPROXIMATELY
6:20
A.M.
and 6:37
A.M.
of January 29, 1997. I have tried to be faithful—the impatient reader might complain, only too faithful—to nine-year-old Skyler’s impressionistic experience. Not for another three hours would his sister’s body be discovered, by their
*
distraught father Bix Rampike, in a shadowy corner of the furnace room of the Rampikes’ house, already stiff with rigor mortis.

AND THEY ALL LIVED HORRIBLY EVER AFTER.

NOT A TEAR DID HE SHED.

Cried continuously!

Traces of his DNA would one day be identified on the crimson silk scarf used to bind his sister’s wrists together above her head, in a “seductive” pose on the smutty floor of the furnace room.

HAIR FELL OUT. BOY’S WAVY “FAWN-COLORED” HAIR, IN CLUMPS
.

Within weeks of the sister’s death, the brother’s bumpy/scaly/scratched-at scalp resembled that of a child cancer patient undergoing chemotherapy.

And the eyes: “haunted” “zombie” “ghost” eyes.

MUTE. (EXCEPT WHEN ALONE, OR IMAGINING HIMSELF ALONE: WHINING/
whimpering/sobbing/laughing/muttering/“conversing”)

BECAUSE HE IS A NERVOUS CHILD.

Because he is a dyslexic child.

Because he is afflicted with Attention Deficit Disorder.

Because his neurologist believes that he may have an impairment of the hippocampus.

(
Hippocampus
? “
Higher brain
,”
in which memory is stored.
)

Because he is but nine years old.

Because he has been nine years old for a very long time.

Because, though soon to be ten years old, forever yet he will remain nine years old.

Because he knows nothing about what happened to his sister.

Because he has told us, his parents, all that he knows. He knows nothing.

Because what he may have known, he cannot remember.

Because we know our rights as parents.

Because our attorneys have advised us.

Because we are a devout Christian family.

Because we place our faith in God.

Because he loved his little sister very much.

Because he is innocent. We know that he is innocent.

Because our daughter has been sacrificed, we will not lose our son, too.

IN ANCIENT EGYPTIAN TOMBS OF THE KIND PATRONIZED BY RICH AMERICAN
tourists there are said to be “unfinished murals” on the walls. And hieroglyphs thousands of years old telling fragments of histories of long-ago pharaohs and gods.
*
Must’ve been a belief of their religion that such murals/histories should be left unfinished as the ancient dead are not dead exactly but in a suspended state; and so I’m thinking that this
damned document/“confession” of mine sucking at my soul like a vampire bat fixed to my carotid artery is going to be unfinished—“tantalizingly incomplete”—“unconscionably fragmented”—no matter how hard, how long, how obsessively and with what anguish I work at it.
Forgive me reader I can’t help it.

MUMMY PROMISED. MUMMY PROTECTED. MUMMY LIED FOR HER LITTLE MAN’S
sake
That little red heart on the palm of our daughter’s left hand?—Bliss drew it on, herself. It was meant to be a good-luck charm.

“JESUS! CAN’T BREATHE.”

Sixteen hours. Without a break. The room smelled gassy like bowels, organic rot.

Panic came over me,
had to get out.

The day after Bliss’s birthday. An eerie January twilight. Something felt wrong. Not just she was dead—she’d been dead for ten years, and I knew this—but 8
P.M.
should be dark, dark-as-night, not daylight.

Maybe the Turnpike had caught fire? Reflections of lurid flames in the massed clouds overhead, I could see by kneeling on the floor of my room and peering up anxiously slantwise through the fissures in the blind. A fiery sun was wrong for 8
P.M.
in late January, in New Jersey.

Grabbed the jacket with the drawstring hood and stumbled down the stairs. The look in my face, you’d have to know that I was crazy and you’d want to keep your distance and yet: “Hey there, bro’. How’s it goin’?”

Evasively I mumbled okay. Goin’ okay.

A fellow tenant to avoid, since I’d run into him last month at the Middlesex County Probation Dept.

“You in 3C, eh? Looks like you got mail.”

It was so. In the row of dented tarnished-brass mailboxes in the vestibule, in the dented mailbox 3C, there was a single envelope just visible, amid anonymous junk mail.

“Jesus! Not now.”

Fortunately no one is tracking Skyler Rampike who seems to have been transformed into a sweaty mouth-breather muttering
Jesus!
every few minutes and clawing at his scratchy unshaven face.

Mail addressed to Skyler Rampike was rare. He’d had friends, a few, in school, of which more later, but none of these friends knew where he was and he’d been estranged from his family for some time. The only mail that came to him at regular intervals like clockwork, every four weeks on the first Monday of the month, came in business envelopes from the Pittsburgh law firm Crunk, Swidell, Hamm & Silverstein
*
but the size, shape, color (smallish, squarish, pale-apricot) of the envelope just visible inside the dented box was a kick in the gut signaling that this letter wasn’t from the single person from his old/former life who knew where he lived now.

“Hey bro’: something wrong?”

“No! Nothing is wrong.”

Had to escape. Running/limping along Pitts Street not knowing where the hell I was headed.

Bro’!
Whose
bro’
is Skyler Rampike!

Damn knee is hurting. Forgot my cane.

Sixteen hours! And all I’d managed to write were those terse—enigmatically terse?—chapters “Ever After” (will someone out there take note of this precisely honed single declarative sentence?)—“Nine-Year-Old Suspect in Sister’s Death” (originally, this was twenty-seven pages of halting prose)—“Necropolis” (Morris Kruk’s abrasive voice ringing in my ears)—“Promise!” (Mummy’s terrifying voice that has burrowed into the marrow of my bones) and—beyond this—utter mental/spiritual collapse.

What you are trying to speak, is unspeakable.

To look upon Death. The very face of Death. Unspeakable.

Through hundreds—thousands?—of pages I’d believed that the sheer rush of writing, the momentum of language would bring me to Bliss’s death which this time I would see. Unflinching, unshrinking and courageous I would see whose hands seized the sleeping child in her bed and taped her mouth before she could scream and taped together her wrists and her ankles and bore her downstairs to the basement and into the furnace room, and what happened there, what was caused to happen, by someone known to Bliss and to me or by an outsider who’d entered the house in the night with the intention of abducting (?)/raping (?)/murdering (?) my sister; I would see at last how over the tightly wrapped duct tape the (badly wrinkled) crimson silk scarf was tied, binding Bliss’s wrists above her head as in a “seductive” pose; I would see whose hands struggled with Bliss to force her down onto the smutty floor behind the furnace (to be precise, behind the furnace to the left as you entered the furnace room: for two furnaces were required to heat the Rampikes’ large, sprawling house and it was behind the farther of the two that Bliss’s body would be discovered); I would see whose hands seized Bliss’s unprotected head, struck her head against the concrete wall, once, twice, three times heedless of the child’s terror, and yet another time, and another (as Dr. Elyse would estimate, Bliss’s head had been struck against the concrete wall no less than five times and perhaps as many as seven times) though almost at once the child’s fragile skull had been fractured, the very bone shattered, bloody clumps of brain leaking into her hair. All this I was meant to see, and so I would know. But I didn’t know.

Skyler! what have you done to your sister

Where have you taken Bliss? Skyler you must tell Mummy

Crossing Pitts at Livingstone, and onto Livingstone where in the excavation pit men in hard hats were working, how strange was this? Past 8
P.M.
? And when had it snowed? Blinding-white snow phony-looking as Styrofoam.

Something was wrong. Must’ve been in Skyler’s head.

No one must know Skyler

Mummy and Daddy will protect you

HUBCAP-SIZED GLOWING DISC OF A CLOCK ON THE WALL ABOVE THE FRONT
entrance of the 7-Eleven store. I was staring trying to comprehend the time: long black hand poised at one, short stubby hand at eight.

This was a neighborhood store where the Indian clerk had come to recognize me. He was a youngish gentlemanly India-born individual wary-eyed, prim-mouthed, unfailingly courteous. He had no idea of my name but he had some idea of my face. For it is not possible to totally hide your face in public, in the United States. And seeing something more than usually gnarled and frantic in my face had made the clerk alert, though still smiling.

“Is it—night? Or morning?”

My question was too urgent to be playful. The Indian clerk smiled uncertainly.

“Morning.”

Morning! Somehow I’d lost a day. (Or, I’d lost a night.)

This 7-Eleven store had been hit by young guys with weapons, kids as young as fourteen. Another clerk, very likely a relative of this man, had been assaulted a few weeks ago, hospitalized. Now came Skyler Rampike limping into the store, panting and agitated-seeming in a grungy jacket with its hood hiding much of his freaky Caucasian face. And his hands are shaky.

No way for this Indian gentleman (should’ve been a dentist, doctor, engineer but instead he managed a 7-Eleven in a run-down neighborhood of New Brunswick working twelve-hour shifts to assure that his children will graduate from Princeton summa cum laude) to know if this shaky Caucasian kid is high on drugs (has to be crystal meth) or more generally a mental case confusing morning for night, night for morning. Or maybe I’m an eccentric individual, could be a grad student, dropout, or genius, of the kind that exist at the margins of a university like lone rogue elephants at a distance from the elephant herd.

Meaning to be friendly here’s Skyler embarked upon a nervous riff: “Excuse me but I hope, sir, you are more protected than you appear to be, I see the surveillance camera aimed at me but I hope you’ve got a baseball bat—at least!—hidden beneath the counter. Like, if somebody tries to rob
you again. And it will probably happen, the hours you keep, late-night or morning, and the drug users out there, of which please don’t think that I am one, I am not. You—I assume this is a family-owned business?—or are these 7-Elevens ‘franchises’?—you people deserve better than…A hell of a lot better than…” But Skyler isn’t sure what he is saying. Or why he has become so emotional suddenly. Embarrassing and upsetting the gentlemanly Indian clerk who has no idea how to reply.

And then, I wasn’t sure if I had actually spoken these words aloud or whether like a text-message the words had come into my head in silence and had passed out of my head in silence.

And you must never speak of this Skyler

Not even to Jesus

By this time, I’d located what I had come into the store to buy. Brought the items to the counter where the clerk waited with his wary polite smile. “Anything else, sir? Cigarettes?”

Sir!
Yet the clerk meant no mockery, it seemed.

“Thanks, no.”

It has to be registered as strange: the twitchy-freaky Caucasian kid with insomniac eyes and charmless beard-stubble wasn’t purchasing his usual bargain junk food and six-pack of diet soda laced with caffeine like strychnine but a five-ounce can of Hercules Lighter Fluid and a single (small-sized) box of Five Star Kitchen Matches.

WHICH PURCHASES BY THE YOUNG MAN TO BE IDENTIFIED AS SKYLER RAMPIKE,
nineteen, of Pitts Street, New Brunswick, would acquire what a philosopher defines as
significant meaning
only if said young man uses them to some significant purpose, that very morning.

THIS SCRUBBY PARK WHERE THE PREVIOUS SPRING SKYLER RAMPIKE WAS
taken rudely, by force, into New Brunswick police custody in what the media call a “drug sweep.” Junkies (scruffy-Caucasian, black), dealers (black), hookers (mixed-race), pimps (black). And Skyler Rampike formerly of Fair Hills, New Jersey.

Yet Raritan Park was my park. Had to be. And now that I understood that it wasn’t twilight but morning, I was feeling much more hopeful. The episode in the 7-Eleven had been a good thing.

If your life is a movie—or even if it isn’t—you can “deconstruct” it into episodes: “scenes.” And you can analyze these “scenes” in retrospect, deriving
meaning
from them that was not apparent when you lived them;
meaning
that, a philosopher of mind might contend, does not exist until you analyze it, in coherent language.

“Hey man: you lookin’ to score?”

No! Not me.

A few yards farther on the muddy path: “Man you lookin’ to score?”—more belligerent this time.

No! Not right now.

Has to be a sick-yearning look in my eyes, my clenched mouth, anyone can see that I’ve come to this place desperate to score. But
no.

“I’ll kill myself first. That’s a promise.”

Walking/limping away. Damned hard to retreat with dignity when you fucking
limp.
On the cracked-concrete walkway beside the Raritan River in this somber New Jersey light, looking like molten lead. Snow has begun to fall, soft damp clots like miniature blossoms. Snow melting on the concrete, and in the river. The wind is raw and gusty and tastes of metal and yet “rot”—can’t escape “rot,” this is northern New Jersey.

In Skyler’s most recent school—“private”—“prep”—“high-security”—in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, the taboo subject, the most thrilling subject, darker/deeper/more delicious than sex, was suicide.

Killing your
self.
Taking
your own
life.

A challenge! Any loser can play.

For casual browsers leafing through these pages, is your attention fleetingly captured by
The Suicide’s Handbook: 22 Tips for a Safe Way Out
? Or, better yet
How to Die Without Fucking up Yet Again: A Handbook for the Burnt-Out Generation.

Reasoning in Skyler’s case it might not “hurt” too much: as soon as the match is struck, assuming the (wooden, clumsy) match doesn’t break, as soon as the tiny flame leaps onto the lighter-fluid-soaked clothing you’ll
be in shock, right? Shock means plummeting blood pressure, oxygen cut off from the brain, mind gone, no turning back. As Dad would say
Fin-it-o.

Or as Mummy would say
No one will know Skyler not ever

Walking/limping above the ravine of enormous misshapen rocks glistening with melting snow, melting ice, litter of broken glass, junkies’ discarded needles. There, the graffiti-covered rock-ledge from which a few months ago a sixteen-year-old girl (Caucasian, runaway from Summit, New Jersey) smoking crystal meth with her boyfriend somehow—“accidentally”—slipped and fell and died on the rocks thirty feet below. The ravine, a place of sordid romance by night when young and still good-looking junkies hang out together and so, an appropriate site for “self-incineration”—“immolation.”

Overhead, a gigantic cumulus cloud. Massive, misshapen. In earth science at Hodge Hill, Skyler had learned the names of clouds. Skyler had drawn and labeled cloud-shapes, and Skyler had earned a grade of A. At mid-term.

What you don’t usually notice, the beauty of clouds. Even ugly-beauty. All that you fail to see. Yet, it’s there. Not the litter or the graffiti or the overturned/mangled park benches but the trees. Damn tall beautiful trees. Might be oaks, with thick trunks. Skeletal branches in this cold season, no leaves but clumps of damp snow like blossoms. The cruelty in such beauty: it stands outside and beyond you.

My right leg was throbbing with pain. But it was the old comfort-pain. Fantim pain Mummy called it. Yet Skyler Rampike’s pain has always made him special. As Bliss’s pain made her special.

“Bliss had to die. Because she was special.”

I was walking now with a makeshift crutch, a broken tree limb. If you are “challenged” by pain often all you require is a slight correction in your walk, a redistributation of your weight. We’d passed the fantim pain back and forth between us and now Bliss is gone, the fantim pain remains with Skyler.

Loud voices, shouts. “Hey man!”—“Fuck man!”—boys playing basketball in the lightly falling snow. Only a backboard and a rim lacking a net but the high-school-age boys (black, big) were managing to sink baskets,
leaping and shouting with feverish intensity, Skyler couldn’t help watching, and admiring. Skyler has never been, as the reader knows, an athlete; nor even an admirer of athletes; what’s the physical body but something to, essentially,
let you down when you need it
, is Skyler’s belief.

Also close by, approaching Skyler on the path was a stock-bodied young black woman pushing a baby in a stroller and beside her a little girl of three or four, chattering and laughing and so alive and as I passed the little family couldn’t help smiling at the young mother, at the baby in the stroller, and at the little girl whose shiny dark eyes lifted to mine guardedly, the little girl’s forefinger was in her mouth, a beautiful child with widened eyes of alarm and interest and the thought came to me Maybe this isn’t the time to punish yourself, maybe this isn’t the place. More audacity is required to live. I felt a thrill of elation: I could return to my squalid rented room, I could return to my task, no hope of “completing” it for the story of Bliss Rampike must be a story that will never be completed. I smiled to think if I hadn’t seen the face of my sister’s murderer at least I had not seen my own face.