My Sister, My Love (31 page)

“How old are you, son?”

“N-Nine.”

“Nine! Are you sure? You’ve been nine a hell of a long time.”

Was this an accusation? Or just a fact? Skyler felt as if he’d been nine for most of his very long life. “I’ll be t-ten on my next birthday, Daddy. In March.”

“Might be, Skyler, you’re a brainy kid—brainy and neurotic as hell, unlike us Bus. Ad. majors—and you will go into science, and take the ‘high road’ others can only envy. I’m thinking that you might be lacking the Rampike blood-lust, more like you’ll be going for a brainy solution than for the jugular like your daddy. So one day, Univers, Inc. might be seeking you for one of our projects. This I can reveal to you, Skyler: Univers, Inc. is at the very forefront of the technology. Those windowless buildings on the far side of the geese, see?—those are some of our research laboratories. And we have others. And we fund others. For reasons not needing to be divulged, we have research labs in many outposts of the globe, China for instance, where pure science can flourish unfettered by ‘ethical issues’—that is the vision of the future! Mostly our scientists are foreign-born, and even those born here are non-Caucasians: Indians, Koreans. Jews.” Daddy paused as if expecting Skyler to reply but Skyler was stumped how to reply. Was he “Caucasian”?—he thought so.

“So, now. Whyn’t you go play, Skyler, until Daddy is through here.”

Daddy returned to his computer. Skyler felt a pang of loneliness. The plan had been, for this Sunday afternoon, that Daddy would take Skyler to the Thomas A. Edison Laboratory Museum in West Orange (“Many original inventions are displayed”) but somehow, Daddy had changed his mind. Now Daddy rose from his swivel chair and disappeared into an adjoining room, must’ve been a lavatory since he left the door ajar and Skyler began to hear the loud-sizzling sound of an adult man urinating, at length. If Mummy was here, Mummy would be offended:
Bix damn you shut that door! You are not living with your Ep Phi Pi brothers any longer!

Impulsively Skyler slipped behind Daddy’s massive desk to peer at his computer screen: nothing but long columns of numbers, symbols. Skyler struck the return key, daringly: yet more columns of numbers, symbols. Rashly then Skyler struck the key that took you backward, as if back in time, several times Skyler struck this key but the screen showed nothing but numbers, symbols, “percentiles” and “projections.” A chill came over him
This is Daddy’s true soul, unfathomable.
Skyler pulled open a desk
drawer: computer printouts. Another drawer—computer printouts. The lowermost drawer—computer printouts.

Skyler’s sparrow-heart was pounding in his narrow chest: what had he expected to find in that lowermost drawer?

Rumpled silk scarf. Handcuffs, masks. Chocolate Licker?

“Skyler! Don’t mess with Daddy’s work.”

Skyler steeled himself for a quick cuff to the side of the head—not hard! “instructive”—of the kind the Lion King gives to favorite/feisty male cub, but Daddy was only frowning at Skyler as if, in Daddy’s large opulently furnished office, Daddy wasn’t sure who he was.

“Daddy has said,
go play.
”

There was a door in the wall beside Daddy’s desk that led directly out into the corridor and so Skyler wandered about in the corridor limping past the locked doors of offices with frosted-glass windows and nameplates much smaller than the smart brass plate identifying
BRUCE RAMPIKE DEPUTY CHIEF OF RESEARCH DEVELOPMENT
; with but a vague concern that he might get lost, Skyler descended a flight of stairs, and another flight; carpeted corridors led off in all directions, as in an ant colony; here and there, lounge-areas beckoned to Skyler, flooded with late-afternoon sunshine. Through floor-to-ceiling plate-glass windows you could see other buildings on hillsides and a portion of the pond and the flock of stuffed-looking Canada geese visible from Daddy’s office on the higher floor. “‘Daddy has said,
go play.
’” Skyler paused, smiling strangely. “‘Daddy has said,
go kill yourself.
’”

Kids did sometime! Though you could never find out how.

With the intention of locating the fitness center, so that he could report to Daddy that he had, Skyler found himself limping along a corridor of smaller offices of which one appeared to be occupied for the door was open. A startled-looking young woman came to the doorway: “Excuse me? Little boy? Are you—real?”

Skyler blushed, and mumbled
yes.

Behind the young woman on a desk much smaller than Daddy’s was a computer. On the screen, what appeared to be columns of numbers, symbols. What a sinking sensation in Skyler’s stomach, to realize that this was the true adult-world, truer than the playful items in Daddy’s
underwear drawer at home! Computer screens, columns of numbers, symbols.

“I thought you were a ghost, little boy. You look almost—well, like a ghost.”

The young woman laughed. Though the young woman appeared to be nervous. She wore a pullover sweatshirt with faded letters
BRANDEIS
and rumpled jeans, her dark hair tied back in a scarf. Except she was a few years older, the young woman reminded Skyler of one of Bliss’s girl tutors.

“Are you lost? What are you doing here? Where are your parents?”

Skyler mumbled his daddy was in his office working.

“And who is your daddy?”

Skyler mumbled his daddy’s name was Rampike.

“Rampike! Oh.”

The effect was immediate. A look of wary respect came into the young woman’s face. “Your father is Mr. Rampike? Up on the fifth floor?”

“Do you know Daddy?”

The young woman bit at a thumbnail. Her eyes flashed like zinc. She was younger than Skyler’s mother but, Skyler thought, not nearly so pretty as Skyler’s mother, her angular, intelligent face plain without makeup. “I know your ‘daddy’—of course. Mr. Rampike is my supervisor.”

Skyler was too shy to ask the young woman where the fitness center was and so mumbled ’bye! and turned away. For the length of the corridor he felt the young woman watching him and at last she called after him: “Tell your daddy that ‘Alison’ is here—working hard on Sunday afternoon.”

There was a tremor in the young woman’s voice which Skyler did not wish to interpret: flirtatious reproach? angry reproach? yearning? hope? He hurried away without glancing back.

Abruptly the gray carpeting underfoot had changed to dark green. Without leaving the building Skyler had entered another wing:
DEPT. OF PERSONNEL MANAGEMENT.
Yet it was the third floor he was on—wasn’t it? The words
Alison is here—working hard on Sunday afternoon
echoed inside his head with a tone now mocking, accusatory. He was meant to be the bearer of a coded message but he would not cooperate. As when Mummy ques
tioned Skyler about what he and his father did on their outings together
Are you with Daddy every minute? Does Daddy slip away? Does Daddy “run into” anyone? Does Daddy talk about me?
He’d begun to feel the sensation of crawly numbness in his scalp, which made him want to dig his fingernails into his scalp and scratch, hard. As sometimes Bliss scratched with her nails in a similar way. These were very bad habits. Mummy despaired of such bad habits in her children. Skyler felt a tinge of pain in his left leg—which was his “good” leg—meaning that the pain wasn’t real but what Mummy called fantim pain; like Bliss’s fantim pain in her left ankle that had returned since she’d begun double practice sessions at the Halcyon rink in early January, in preparation for the Hershey’s Kisses competition which was to be televised on ABC-TV. Bliss’s fantim pain was a secret from Daddy for Mummy was afraid that, if Daddy knew, he would not want Bliss to be practicing so much; worse yet, he might not want Bliss to skate in the competition.

It doesn’t hurt! My ankle doesn’t hurt!
Bliss insisted wiping tears from her clenched little face.

Skyler understood that something bad had happened between Daddy and Mummy on New Year’s Eve. It was meant to be a happy time, for Daddy and Mummy had been invited to three New Year’s Eve parties including a party at the home of Si and Mimi Solomon which was a very special party to which other friends of the Rampikes had not been invited. In their glamorous “dress-up” clothes—Daddy in his tux, Mummy in a dazzling gold lamé gown with a very low, tight neckline—the elder Rampikes had been very happy kissing Skyler and Bliss good night but sometime past midnight Mummy had returned home alone stumbling and cursing and when Daddy returned, Skyler wasn’t sure for he’d fallen asleep, and was wakened groggy and confused hearing Mummy’s fierce voice
You are not starting this again, Bix. Please you are not, for Bliss’s sake you know what pressure we are under.
And Daddy’s voice pleaded
Betsey I am not. You have the wrong idea. Sweetheart I swear.

By accident Skyler found the Fitness Center! He was too short to peer through the window in the door to see if anyone was inside but when he pushed the door open, the cavernous space, only partly lighted, appeared to be empty.

Against the farther wall were several treadmill machines. There were stacked weights and the usual machines with leather seats and straps and the air was both chill and stale-smelling. Skyler smiled uncertainly. Daddy would be pleased that he’d managed to find the Fitness Center…As he stepped farther into the room he saw, floating in a long horizontal wall-mirror, a child’s small pale face floating as if cut off at the shoulders.

Skyler fled.

With a mounting sense of panic Skyler tried to retrace his steps back to his father’s office. Which floor was Daddy on?—the fifth floor? But Daddy’s office had been on the top floor of the building and now the fifth floor did not seem to be the top floor. And views from windows did not look familiar. And the sun was slanting in the sky. After ten, fifteen, twenty frantic minutes Skyler was drawn to a man’s voice and found himself at the end of an unfamiliar corridor staring into an office at a man, seen from the rear, leaning far back in a swivel chair cupping one hand to the nape of his neck and speaking in a low intimate incensed voice into a phone, “—can’t risk leaving—right now—she’s obsessed with our daughter—she’s made a
ding-’n’-such
out of this skating, and out of Bliss, no telling what the woman might do, if—”

The man was Daddy! Skyler backed away stricken to the heart.

Our daughter!
And not a word of
our son.

“THEY DON’T LOVE
ME.
NEITHER OF THEM.”

In this dazed/sulky-resentful/muttering-to-himself state at times approaching a kind of ambulatory catatonia, Skyler would make his way like a somnambulist (classy word for “sleepwalker”) through what remained of his life.

Wait. Not
his
life. His sister’s life.

“SKYLER! CONGRATULATIONS, SON.”

Was this a cruel joke? Headmaster Hannity’s moist meaty adult hand gripping Skyler’s moist-midget-hand in a
handshake
?

For—so strangely!—in these quick weeks leading to his sister’s brutal death in the early hours of January 29, 1997, at Fair Hills Day School Skyler Rampike evidently managed to appear no different than usual; no more “stressed”—“agitated”—“unstable”—than ever, among his high-strung classmates: it was in fact a sixth-grader who “went ballistic” in his homeroom, attacking another boy with a sharp-pointed geometry compass and, when their instructor tried to intervene, attacking him as well, and having to be overpowered and carried away. Another boy, and not Skyler Rampike!
*

Somehow—don’t ask me how!—Skyler managed stoically to disguise from his classmates as from the inscrutable adults surrounding that he
was
but a footnote
; managing, through sheer compulsive concentration, to score so high in the battery of tests known as “fifth-form sweeps” that he was designated H.I.P.—at last.

“Skyler, this is very good news. Clearly you have made a determined effort to improve your academic performance in a highly competitive series of tests. Your instructor has informed me that you are currently prescribed for several ‘meds’—and these ‘meds’ are working very well. So, it seems, diligent student, devoted instructor, and canny pediatric-neurologist are to be congratulated! We are sending an official letter to your parents to inform them of the good news that, next semester, you will be moved up into our advanced-placement curriculum. ‘Higher Ivy Potential’ is a designation you will carry with you through your school years, Skyler. For the Ivy League is itself a ‘hierarchy’—a ‘hegemony’—not a mere democracy. Not just any ‘Ivy League’ college should be our goal, but only the very highest: Harvard, Princeton, Yale. In the American meritocracy, Fair Hills Day is betting on students like you, Skyler, to go the distance for us.”

In the headmaster’s large meaty-moist hand was a small box embossed with the school’s coat of arms.

“Take it, son. You’ve earned it.”

In wonderment Skyler took the little box and opened it and—inside was a gold-gleaming little H.I.P. lapel pin for his Fair Hills Day School blazer!

THINKING
NOW WILL THEY LOVE ME BETTER? A LITTLE?