My Sister, My Love (59 page)

Skyler pushed out of the wood-plank booth. Had to leave! Now he had what he’d come for, both items in hand, he was damn sorry to disappoint his dad, sorry not to be meeting the “new wife,” stammered thanks, thanks
Dad, shaking Dad’s iron-grip hand, and when clumsy-drunk-Dad lurched partway out of the booth to hug him, and leave a snail-scum-trail of spittle on his left cheek, Skyler gritted his teeth allowing himself to be kissed, allowed himself to be hugged, one final time: “Son, remember your old dad loves you like hell.”

“Dad, I know that. And I love you, too.”

IN THE MURKY PART-TIMBERED LOBBY OF THE WASHINGTON IRVING INN LIMPING
at a trot toward a cave of elevators Skyler was distracted by the sight of—was it Mrs. Klaus? Skyler’s best-friend Calvin Klaus’s coldly beautiful blond mother? But a closer look at the woman in the ankle-length sable coat dissuaded him, for Morgan Klaus was Skyler’s mother’s age, in her mid-forties; and this woman was considerably younger. She was on her way into the Old Dutch Tavern and her gaze—steely-blue, opaque—passed through Skyler like a laser ray. In the elevator ascending to his room on the fifth floor clutching the perfumy peach-colored envelope and the water-stained videotape to his chest he thought
Must be Danielle
.

As for the mysterious videotape—battered, badly water-stained, near-ruined: this would turn out to be the “lost” camcorder tape of seventy-two murky seconds Skyler’s mother had taken of him shortly after Bliss’s death, and later played for him, as it would be played for Skyler’s father who would remove it from the Rampike house before police were summoned.

What a shock to Skyler, to see this old nightmare tape, he’d long assumed had been destroyed by his father! To see again, in sick fascination, the blurred figure of the child—“Skyler”—with his small pale sleep-stunned face, innocent tousled light-brown hair and flannel p.j.’s; to hear again the distraught, accusing, near-inaudible off-camera voice
Skyler tell where sister did you
as the stricken child-face began to break into particles, as Mummy’s voice was breaking
Skyler please tell this house? hide and seek? where is will not be punished Mummy promises
and in the grainy underwater tape the guilty child is weeping as if his little demon-heart has been broken.

NOT GUILTY!
IN A STREAM OF GLITTERING HEADLIGHTS CROSSING THE GREAT
bridge above the Hudson River deceptively placid, near-invisible in darkness below and into New Jersey wiping hot stinging tears from his eyes. Thinking
I was not the one. I was not
astonished and stunned as if he’d been struck a blow over the head with a mallet, yet smiling to indicate he was not injured, he was in fact very happy. And he was blessed. Had to be blessed. For his miserable gnarled life had been handed back to him, transformed. Bearing left amid a confusion of traffic into the lane indicating
NEW JERSEY TURNPIKE SOUTH.
He was driving with more confidence now. Thinking
It was not me! I was never the one.
Approaching garlands of lights at Newark International Airport staring at aircraft descending out of the sky, unerring in their descent out of the sky and onto invisible runways behind the gigantic terminals and Skyler swallowed hard thinking
But it could be otherwise, that plane could crash in an instant.
Thinking
Any of these planes, at any time.
And yet, he’d been spared. So long he had believed himself damned, yet he’d been spared. He had not injured his sister. He had not struck his sister’s head against a concrete wall and left her to die in the darkness of the airless furnace room.
Not me! never me
smiling, shaking his head as he drove, his night-vision blotched by tears. He’d had to check out of that hotel. Couldn’t bear to remain in that room another minute. Knowing that his drunken father would want to see him, would come knocking at his door. And he could not bear to see Bix Rampike. Nor could he bear to be introduced to the “new” wife/“stepmother” unnervingly like a younger sister of Calvin Klaus’s mother. He could not risk the tremulous flame of his new happiness threatened by the presence of others. For no
one could know how powerfully
Not guilty! Not my sister’s murderer!
pulsed through him.

In his impatience pressing down hard on the gas pedal. Not heeding that the station wagon was beginning to quake at sixty-six miles an hour for he was desperate to get back to New Brunswick, to his family there. For it was Pastor Bob whom Skyler loved, and not Bix Rampike. It was Pastor Bob whom Skyler trusted, and not Bix Rampike. How could his father have believed, these long years of Skyler’s exile, ten long years banished from the family, that he, Skyler, was a murderer! Of his own sister he’d loved, a murderer! Never would he forgive Bix Rampike. Never would he see Bix Rampike again, if he could avoid him. He had a new family now, the old curse of the Rampikes had lifted. Why had Bix Rampike believed
her
, and not Skyler? Why’d he have faith in
her
, and not in Skyler? Such relief Skyler felt as if released from the death-grip of the giant serpents rearing out of the Greek sea with nightmare logic to clasp the priest Laocoön and his innocent young sons in their coils
O help us, God help us
is the terrible cry that breaks from the throat at such times but there is no help, there is no hope for it is by God’s decree that the giant serpents have struck. On the day Skyler had set out on his pilgrimage to Hell he’d prayed aloud; “‘I believe: help thou my unbelief’” and this prayer had been answered. Though Skyler did not believe in a God who answered prayers yet it seemed to him, yes this prayer had been answered. Skyler’s miserable mangled dwarf-life had been handed back to him, whole and transformed.
Not-guilty
he’d been designated.
Not-guilty
he’d been all along.

Now passing
ELIZABETH
in an eerie miasma of chemical smells pungent as rotted eggs. Outside the station wagon was a nighttime industrial landscape of wild winking lights, smokestacks rimmed in lurid red flames like tongues. Skyler’s nostrils constricted, Skyler felt a tinge of nausea. And at the
RAHWAY
exit made to think
But the
“prevert”
died, died by her hand
and in that instant Skyler nearly lost control of his speeding vehicle, drifting out of the right-hand lane and almost struck from behind by an eighteen-wheeler bearing down upon him, panicked Skyler steered the station wagon back into the right-hand lane, chastened by a jeering horn, swallowing hard thinking
But I can’t be cheated of my happiness, I have waited so long
. A flash of the weeping child-face in the ruined video, the skinny
shoulders, narrow chest and utter helplessness in that body and yet: she had not taken pity on him, had she? She had sacrificed him, to save herself: his mother. A leaden sensation had begun to pass over him. A heavy booted foot on the nape of his neck for the fact was
Ten years of my life taken from me, and my sister taken from me
.

Just before the exit for New Brunswick, traffic was being routed through a single, very slow lane. Near the median there had been a spectacular accident involving several vehicles and here were flares and emergency vehicles, squad cars with flashing red lights, broken glass spread across the pavement through which Skyler had no choice but to drive wincing as if barefoot. Skyler tried not to look to the side not wanting to see the injured, if there were injured. Not wanting to see mangled corpses. He did see a grotesquely smashed and upended vehicle not unlike one of Bix Rampike’s super-military S.U.V.s and for a delirious moment Skyler worried his father might have been driving that vehicle. And exiting for
NEW BRUNSWICK
he felt a stronger conviction, he had failed someone, he had not helped someone needing his help. Thinking
But all this time I have been alive, and Bliss has been dead
. It was not a new realization for Skyler was prone to such thoughts at any and all times and yet it struck him now with a fresh horror. By this time, the euphoria Skyler had felt on the earlier half of the drive had faded. Like dirty water draining from a tub, Skyler’s happiness had drained away. He could not comprehend now why he’d been so happy…Gloating in the discovery that he hadn’t killed his sister when he’d done nothing to prevent her being killed by their drunken mother. Pilgrimage to Hell this journey had been and Skyler had believed he was escaping Hell not understanding that Hell would be dragged after him for Hell was Skyler Rampike’s natural habitation.
Demonic despair is the most intense form of despair: in despair the will to be oneself…In hatred toward existence, it wills to be oneself, wills to be itself in accordance with its misery.

In his hoarse raw voice speaking aloud inside the rattling and (who knows? on the Jersey Turnpike, few have died in “spectacular” pile-ups who’d expected, taking a ticket at the toll booth, that such would be their fate) possibly death-bound vehicle: “I’m not strong enough for happiness. Despair is my only strength.”