My Sister, My Love Read online

  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.*

  * Classy Latin phrase for “in the middle”—“midst”—of action. In medias race is how most of us live our blinkered, stumbling, clueless lives not knowing where the hell we’re going, nor even where the hell we’ve been.

  * Hell, I know: I’m wincing, too. Such clumsily executed scenes are painful to read, yet more painful to write. And yet more painful to have lived…As an amateur writer who has lived a mostly amateur life, I wish that this document contained more elegantly turned passages, as I wish that it contained a more refined dramatis personie [sic?] but in confessional documents you must work with what you have.

  WHAT HAVE YOU DONE

  SKYLER WAKE UP

  Not his sister but his mother is pulling at him, in the confusion of that long-ago morning that was no morning but inky-black night as at the bottom of the sea.

  Mummy with disheveled hair, agitated eyes. Mummy in one of her silky nightgowns and Mummy’s large soft swaying breasts straining against the fabric, Skyler has glimpsed through a doorway Daddy gripping and kneading Mummy in playful-Daddy hands and now as then Skyler looks quickly away.

  Skyler? where is

  Near the floor of the sea such bizarre life-forms all mouth, sharp glittery teeth, fins, spiny backbones. Yet such a sweet-groggy sleep for a child to be wakened from, Skyler understands that something is very wrong for Mummy is not so angry, Mummy is upset and confused and Skyler tries to push Mummy away but Mummy is too strong for him, with a small exasperated-Mummy cry she pulls back the bedsheets where Skyler has been lying hunched in a pretzel-twist on his left side, both hands pressed between his knees and his knees drawn up toward his chest like a creature not yet hatched.

  Skyler is she in here hiding in here?

  Frantic Mummy checks the foot of Skyler’s bed as if Skyler’s six-year-old sister might be hiding there, somehow. With a sob/grunt Mummy kneels to check beneath the bed, stumbles then to Skyler’s closet, switches on the light and paws through Skyler’s hanging things, kneels and gropes about the floor. Muttering to herself Where! Where is and returning then stumbling like a drunken woman to Skyler standing beside his bed, dazed and frightened in pajamas, shivering barefoot, that look in Mummy’s eyes, the alarm in Mummy’s voice, briskly Mummy pulls Skyler out of the room, across the hall to Bliss’s room, obviously Mummy has already been in Bliss’s room looking for her, Bliss’s bed is empty, Mummy has been tearing at the bedspread and at the sheets and Mummy is murmuring to herself as often when he is alone Skyler murmurs to himself for Mummy’s thoughts are spilling out of Mummy’s head like skittering bats. Skyler wonders: Where is Daddy? Has Daddy taken Bliss away in the night? Is it Bliss’s birthday outing in New York City, where Daddy and Bliss have gone? Skyler is confused, Skyler will remember none of this clearly, the events of this night about which he will be questioned and will question himself though recalling how in Bliss’s room (formerly a nursery with a door in the wall like a magic door opening into Mummy and Daddy’s big bedroom) there is a lamp on Bliss’s bedside table in the shape of Mother Goose which had once been Skyler’s lamp when he’d been a baby, this is Bliss’s special lamp which has to be turned on at night or Bliss can’t sleep or, if she sleeps, she will h
ave nightmares of ugly-shaped things that hide beneath her bed as in the murky penumbra beyond the brightly lit ice rinks where the crowd erupts in spontaneous applause at the mere sight of Miss Tots-on-Ice Debutante, Tiny Miss StarSkate, Little Miss Jersey Ice Princess except it is a different time now, Mummy is not joining in the applause now but gripping Skyler’s arm as if somehow Skyler is to blame as Mummy stares at Bliss’s small bed with its white satin headboard, beautiful frosted-pink satin spread decorated with white ice-skate appliqués, now tangled on the floor with the bedclothes, and Bliss’s pillow looks as if it has been thrown down, hard. And there is the smell.

  Bad girl! Not again

  On purpose to spite me

  Both Mummy and Skyler see the stained mattress, and smell the sharp ammoniac smell of urine, and worse-than-urine, for there are dark mud-colored star-shaped smears on one of the white linen sheets. And Mummy is furious, or is Mummy frightened?—digging her nails into Skyler’s thin shoulders inside his flannel pajama top, Mummy pleads with him Skyler what have you done to Bliss? Where have you taken your little sister?

  II

  “Happiest Little Girl on Earth”

  IN THE BEGINNING

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

  There was Skyler, but not Bliss. Not yet Bliss!

  No one knows this. No one has recorded this. Of the tens of thousands of Bliss-cultists who have polluted cyberspace with their crazed factoids and perve-rantings not one of them knows this: that in the beginning it was Skyler who’d been meant to be the star. It was Skyler who’d been meant to be the figure-skating prodigy of Fair Hills, New Jersey. Or some sort of prodigy.

  “SKYLER! THIS WILL BE OUR SECRET.”

  A very cold morning in the second week of December 1991. Mummy was breathless, and Mummy was excited, and Mummy was wearing her long red quilted winter coat lined with goose-feather down so it weighed scarcely anything, and on Mummy’s head, pulled down snug over Mummy’s dark hair, was a knitted cap of vivid rainbow colors, a cap with a floppy eight-inch tassel like something a TV cartoon character or a clown might wear to make you smile. Unless I was mistaken, for Skyler was so frequently mistaken, peering up anxiously at the giant adults who surrounded him looming over him with their cryptic smiles, their frowns, their grimaces, their tics and twitches and mysterious signals you could not ever hope to decode, probably yes, four-year-old Skyler was wrong about Mummy’s new cap, the rainbow-knit cap with the floppy tassel was intended to be stylish, recently purchased at The Village Arctic Shoppe on Main Street where in the shoppe’s show window it was displayed on anorexic-adolescent-girl models with skis or ice-skates slung over their shoulders. Mummy’s new tassel-cap with its rainbow stripes was serious.

  “—our secret, Skyler, which you must never tell Daddy, you know what a cruel tease Daddy can be. Skyler, please?”

  Skyler’s eager little head nodded Yes! Yes Mummy.

  “—scolds me for ‘wasting gas’! ‘Never staying home’! Next thing, he’ll be checking the what-is-it on my car—‘odormeter.’ You know, tells how many miles you’ve driven? A little gauge, on the dash?”

  Skyler nodded, less certain now. Wasn’t sure he knew what an “odormeter” was but he knew what’s called a “dash.”

  “This little drive of ours, with a—destination. Which I think you will like, Skyler!”

  This little drive was a drive we’d begun to take frequently together, Mummy and me, ostensibly into town on errands of Mummy’s but by a leisurely, looping, circuitous route that took us miles into the “scenic” countryside north and east of the Historic Village of Fair Hills, New Jersey (to which we’d come to live only a few months ago, in September) and yes, often there was a destination to which Mummy headed as if helplessly, by these circuitous routes. “Daddy doesn’t need to know, Skyler. ‘What Daddy doesn’t know won’t hurt us.’” Mummy laughed, with a shivery shudder.

  “Skyler! Shove your stubby little arms into these sleeves.”

  Damn: I’ve forgotten to “set the scene.”

  We were in the garage. We’d “snuck out” into the garage through a back door opening off the kitchen and we were whispering. That is, Mummy was whispering. Often Mummy whispered, it had come to seem natural for Mummy to whisper which meant that you should whisper back or better yet just nod your head Yes Mummy! For there was some urgency here. The phone had been ringing much of the morning but not one of the calls was the call Mummy had been waiting for, only just tradesmen, telephone solicitors, Mummy wasn’t answering any more calls but would let the calls be picked up by the answering service which Mummy would check later which would be soon enough for Mummy, who didn’t want to sabotage this special day. In her cheery-jokey mood already zipped up into the quilted red coat that made Mummy look like—well, a bobbing red balloon, and with her gaily colored tassel flopping over her forehead, Mummy paused to kiss Skyler’s cute-kid snub-nose though the nose was probably leaking, as Daddy complained the poor damn kid seems always to have a cold. “Shhh! Don’t want Maria to hear us.” Hurriedly Mummy was bundling me into a fleece-lined little parka with a hood made tight and snug, almost too tight and too snug, by drawstrings at the neck manipulated by Mummy. And on my stubby four-year-old’s legs warm flannel sweatpants, and on my stubby feet waterproof boots. Both the parka and the sweatpants still had tags attached for they were new purchases from The Village Arctic Kids Shoppe.

  “Skyler, do you hear—? Is it—”

  Mummy’s eyes widened in an expression of guilty fear. We listened.

  Faintly in the distance, maybe: a wan, wailing sound. Could be a siren. Could be an airplane high overhead. Could be the wind in the 150-year-old brick chimney about which Mrs. Cuttlebone the perky/canny real estate agent who’d sold Mr. and Mrs. Rampike the overpriced house had nervously joked: “Ghosts! All our ‘historic’ Fair Hills houses have them.” But the danger passed, no one opened the door behind us. No one stared at Mummy with dark-quizzical eyes and inquired politely in heavily accented English when did Mrs. Rampike think she would be returning?

  “—will be all right. Doesn’t need me. Nobody needs me. I need me.”

  In our three-car garage only two vehicles remained that morning. For Daddy was away at Baddaxe Oil “corporate headquarters” and had taken his shiny black Lincoln Continental, that Mummy was not “encouraged” to drive. Left behind was Daddy’s even bigger and heavier steely-gray Land Rover that was so large and so “tricky to maneuver,” only Daddy could be trusted to drive it. But there was Mummy’s lime-green Chevrolet Impala (a ’94 model that Daddy bought for Mummy to “cheer my gal up” when we’d moved from Parsippany to Fair Hills where Mummy had not wanted to move) that Mummy drove into town at least once a day. It was in the backseat of the lime-green Impala that Mummy had placed, with no explanation, a bulky zip-up satchel. Sharp-eyed Skyler asked, “Mummy, what’s in there?”

  Was it Baby? Baby Sister? Puny little Edna Louise? That Mummy did not want, or anyway did not want so soon after Skyler? That Mummy is tired of, for crying all the time, for being colicky and keeping Mummy awake, a fretful baby, a homely baby, a blue-bug-eyed baby, a baldie baby with only a few blond hairs on her head, a silly girl-baby missing a real pee-pee like Skyler’s, an exasperating baby demanding always to be fed (chalky-milk formula prepared by Maria), demanding always to have her diaper changed, needing to be bathed and again fed, nappy-nap time and diaper changed, bath, towel-dry, new diaper, all babies do is sleep pee and poop and shriek like a cat being killed and babies try to win your heart by cooing and “smiling” and reaching their astonishing little baby-fingers at you but babies are SO BORING unable even to say their names or walk upright or go potty in the bathroom using the flush. Not like Skyler who is Mummy’s little man!

  Behind the wheel of the ’94 lime-green Chevy Impala, Mummy was humming. Here, you could see that Betsey Rampike was happy.

  “Let’s get buckled in, Skyler. ‘Safety first.’”

  Since Skyler was still
a little too small to sit comfortably in the passenger’s seat beside Mummy, Mummy had placed a cushion there for him. (Was this legal? The seat belt fit Skyler kind of loosely.) So proud to have graduated from the silly strap-in kiddy-car-seat in the back that, when homely Edna Louise had to be transported, was used now exclusively for her.

  Surreptitiously Skyler glanced into the backseat at the satchel. Was it stirring? Was there a living creature inside? Was it Baby?

  Skyler asked another time what was in the satchel and Mummy said with a mysterious smile he’d find out, soon.

  “Here we go!”

  The Chevy Impala emerged out of the garage rear-end-first like an explosion.

  THE WINTER AIR WAS BLINDING-BRIGHT. OVERHEAD THE SKY WAS A painted-looking robin’s-egg blue. On the ground snow lay in sculpted drifts and swirls vivid-white as detergent or Styrofoam. (Hey forgive me: this is how the memory is coming to me in a blinding rush like Dexedrine. And my heart is hammering, too: 260 beats a minute!) You had to conclude that, if there were airborne “toxins” in the idyllic hills of north-central New Jersey where the wealthy live, said toxins blown by mischievous winds from the “industrial corridor” fifty miles to the east, out of fire-rimmed smokestacks lining the New Jersey Hellpike, these toxins were magically transformed into the most dazzling-white snow. Mummy fumbled to put on stylish oversized gold-plastic-framed dark glasses, and Skyler blinked eager watery eyes. Each little drive with Mummy was an adventure!

  Serpentine Ravens Crest Drive! In my fevered brain, where I travel ceaselessly like an astronaut reeling about in space, there’s the dreamlike scroll of neighbors’ houses (“neighbors” who were utter strangers and their houses barely visible from the road) and the curves, turns and twists of the too-narrow drive where the imminent danger was oncoming traffic: distracted Fair Hills wives like Mummy careening in the middle of the road, as Mummy habitually did, in oversized vehicles like the Chevy Impala. It was Mummy’s custom to drive slowly along Pheasant Run, Hawksmoor Lane, Woodsmoke Drive and the Great Road (frequently traveled, in long-ago history books, by General George Washington and his aides in the 1770s), passing roadside mailboxes with such names as “Tyce”—“Hambruck”—“McGreety”—“Stubbe”—“Brugh.” This phase of the little drive had become so familiar to me, I had memorized the names and pronounced them, as Mummy did, in a tone of admiration, awe, wonderment—“Frass”—“Durkee”—“Bloomgren”—“Hudd.” Even as a young child I seemed to know that, hidden among this litany of names, were the names of Mummy’s and Daddy’s friends-to-be; as the Fair Hills Golf and Country Club (at Cross Tree Road and the Great Road), the Pebble Hill Tennis Club (on hilly Brookside Drive), the Sylvan Glen Golf Club (on labyrinthine Sylvan Glen Pass, heralded with PRIVATE ROAD NO WAY OUT signs which Mummy, gnawing at her lower lip, daringly ignored), and (in the heart of the cramped little “historic quarter” in the Village of Fair Hills, on Idle Place), the Fair Hills Women’s Club in its classy Italianate villa, were destinations-to-come. “The Sylvan Glen Golf Club is much more exclusive than the Fair Hills Golf and Country Club,” Mummy confided in Skyler, who was always interested in Mummy’s insider knowledge. “—Mrs. Cuttlebone assured us, if you are invited to join ‘The Sylvan’ as it’s called, you can join any other Fair Hills club you wish.” Of the Pebble Hill Tennis Club, Mummy said, “Mrs. Cuttlebone’s son is engaged to the daughter of the president of the club, she has promised to introduce your father and me sometime this holiday season. Daddy does play tennis, just as Daddy plays golf, and squash, and raquetball, but we could take tennis lessons together at the club, Skyler! You and me.”