My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Mummy pulled Skyler from his bed, that he and Mummy might kneel together. “We will pray for that terrible man’s soul, Skyler. Jesus forgives him, he knew not what he did.”

  * “I am ‘The Eye That Sees’” is a belated claim to have written the ransom note prompting investigators to wonder: had Ruscha only just heard about the ransom note; or had Ruscha, in fact, written the ransom note? Informed commentators on the subject are divided: 52 percent believe that Ruscha wrote the note, with materials (paper, pen) found in the Rampike house; 37 percent believe that Betsey Rampike wrote it; 9 percent, that Bix Rampike wrote it; 2 percent, “other.”

  * Do you believe this? Mrs. Ruscha never did: “They killed my boy. They made him ‘confess’ then they killed him.” Soon after Ruscha’s death it began to be said that he’d hanged himself in this awkward way “with an assist” from a guard or two; and that this “assist” had been a populist expression of the righteous loathing felt by the New Jersey community for the pedophile; in time, it would begin to be hinted that the “assist” might have been purchased by an agent of an agent of an associate of the canny M. Kruk. (Hey I know: I shouldn’t be promulgating such rumors in this objective document, and yet: what if the rumors are true?)

  * Poor Lila! I hope that, returned to her native island, a comforting distance from Fair Hills, New Jersey, this lovely woman has no awareness of how, in the most lurid recesses of cyberspace, the more lunatic Bliss Rampike Web sites entertain the possibility that, amid those who had “opportunity” and “motive” to have killed Bliss Rampike, the Rampikes’ nanny/housekeeper remains, if not a prime suspect, a “suspect.”

  V

  And After

  “THE MURDER HOUSE”

  NO ONE LIVED IN IT. “GHOST LIGHTS” BURNED INSIDE. A CARETAKER IN A pickup appeared from time to time. A FOR SALE sign appeared at the end of the long graveled driveway. A NO TRESPASSING sign appeared. After a sudden blizzard, snow drifted over the driveway and no private snowplow came to clear it. In time, movers came in an enormous Mayflower van, and took away the furnishings. Months passed. More months passed. There were no buyers for the beautiful old sprawling eighteenth-century Colonial at 93 Ravens Crest Drive in which a six-year-old girl had been murdered. Most “potential buyers” were but morbid-minded curiosity-seekers. Worse yet, journalists/photographers with a “new angle” on the Rampike story. Mrs. Cuttlebone did her darndest to weed these out! Mrs. Cuttlebone was a “personal friend” of the Rampikes and yes, she’d known beautiful little Bliss Rampike the “prodigy ice-skater” who had been murdered in her bed by a sex maniac/pedophile-psychopath dwelling in the very heart of Fair Hills: a sex-offender parolee who had served less than two years of a ten-year sentence for child molestation. The over-liberal judges of this Democrat-controlled corrupt state of New Jersey! It was enough to make you cry.

  Sometimes, Mrs. Cuttlebone did cry. Startled clients stared as the handsome forty-year-old powdered face crinkled like a paper mask to reveal the grieving fifty-nine-year-old face beneath.

  “We don’t call it ‘The Murder House.’ Of course not!”

  Realtors listed the house at 93 Ravens Crest Drive as a breathtakingly beautiful part-restored 18th century Colonial. Price: negotiable.

  Skyler never saw the house again. Skyler would come to “forget” the house. Skyler would come to “forget” his room. Skyler would “forget” much that happened in the house. For Mummy did not speak of the house, and Daddy did not speak of the house. For a while, Skyler was an outpatient at Cedar Hills Children’s Neuropsychiatric Treatment Center in Summit, New Jersey. And then, as his condition was said to be “progressing,” Skyler was an inpatient at the Cedar Woods Children’s Neuropsychiatric Treatment Center in Summit, New Jersey. In this way, time passed.

  When was it, the house, at 93 Ravens Crest Drive was finally sold? Skyler never saw the house again.

  Except so frequently, in dreams.

  AMATEUR TAXIDERMY

  DID SOME OF YOU SMILE, IN HAUGHTY DISDAIN, AT GUNTHER RUSCHA’S AMATEUR taxidermy? Mangled and misshapen creatures, lumpy fur, ill-fitting glass eyes and most shameful of all, that smell. For all Ruscha’s effort at taxidermy (bloodletting, evisceration, “embalming” and “mummifying”) his stuffed animals were but unconvincing “real” creatures set beside stuffed toy animals. Melancholy creatures that, in death, were cheated of death’s dignity because their taxidermist was an amateur.

  How I wish, for my sister Bliss Rampike, that she might be “memorialized” by a Homer, a Dante, a Shakespeare instead of me. And yet: Skyler is all that Bliss has.

  Will you help me Skyler Never leave me Skyler

  Last night, writing “The Murder House,” in a white-hot rush of inspiration and exhilaration, it came to me that, for all my good intentions, and my fervor, My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Bliss Rampike* is a kind of taxidermy, and much of it is botched in the way that Ruscha botched his. Reasons are:

  —Both G.R. and S.R. are amateurs, and amateurs care too much.

  —Both G.R. and S.R. are confounded by the “real.”

  —Both G.R. and S.R. “came too close to the flame.”†

  And in the quicksand of my despair there appeared to me the man who asks to be known—unabashedly, and without irony—as Pastor Bob, urging me Son speak what is in your heart love and not hate must guide you know that truth is beauty, son do not labor to create mere beauty. How badly I want to believe Pastor Bob of the New Canaan Evangelical Church of Christ Risen!

  It is irony I must give up. It is my own woundedness I must surrender. The smell of my own suppurating wounds. Pastor Bob is right. So what if this document into which I have spilled my guts isn’t a work of beauty but a kind of fucked-up taxidermy? It is the best I can do.

  As Gunther Ruscha’s pathetic specimens were the best that poor bastard could do.

  As in the most stylish of contemporary films let’s just quick-cut to a poignant/enigmatic scene in a room in the dark-browed English Tudor home of wealthy-widow Adelaide Metz, one of the clucking sisterhood of elderly church ladies who’d competed with one another to help the Rampikes in their hour of need and who claimed to have loved Bliss “like a granddaughter.” Here is Mummy charging into the room with the glowing/stunned face of one who has just won the New Jersey lottery with a purloined ticket, lifting Skyler so hard his ribs creak, next thing Skyler knows his mother has pulled him to the floor beside her and the two of them are praying together for the soul of Gunther Ruscha who—unknown to Skyler—had only just “committed suicide” in the men’s detention center a few hours before in the most ingenious of ways, hanging himself from a height of less than thirty-six inches.

  Why pray for the soul of the very man who’d hurt his sister? Skyler wondered. Yet Mummy insisted.

  “Jesus hates the sin but loves the sinner. Only think, if Jesus can love that terrible man, how Jesus will love us.”

  AND SO IT WOULD BE TOLD TO SKYLER EVER AFTER THAT THE “BAD MAN” who’d hurt his sister would “never hurt anyone again” and yet perversely it seemed, Skyler took little comfort from the fact, who knows why?

  These weeks, months, and years to come when Skyler would be medicated “for his own good.”

  In February 1997 Skyler was treated for PDD (Premature Depression Disorder) and for CAS (Chronic Anxiety Syndrome). Needless to say Skyler continued to be treated for such ongoing conditions as dyslexia, attention deficit disorder, et al., but soon after Skyler’s tenth birthday in March the moody brat would be diagnosed by Dr. Vandeman as suffering from a disorder so new, yet so “epidemic” in the United States, that child mental health experts were only beginning to grasp the scope and breadth of its prevalence and pharmaceutical companies were only beginning to manufacture the (costly) psychotropic monoamine oxidase inhibitors required to combat it: ASD.*

  Abruptly, Skyler had been withdrawn from school.

  Headmaster Hannity concurred with the Rampikes, that the “traumatized boy” would be a distraction to
his classmates and should avoid “stressful situations” for the next several months. (Yet in secret Skyler wore his hunter-green school blazer with his precious little gold H.I.P. pin in the lapel, of which he’d been so pathetically proud. In secret, Skyler smiled wanly at himself in the mirror recalling Headmaster’s thrilling words: “‘Skyler! Congratulations, son’”—“‘In the American meritocracy, Fair Hills Day is betting on you to go the distance for us.’”)

  (Embarrassing! The reader, who has never smiled at him/herself in any mirror, still less murmured such piteous words of self-praise, is asked to pass by such revelations in silence.)

  One good thing that followed from Bliss’s murder: all Skyler’s playdates ceased. Permanently.

  A single card from an ex-playdate found its way to Skyler Rampike:

  DEAR SKYLER,

  PLEASE ACCEPT MY CONDOLENCES FOR THE LOSS OF YOUR SISTER. I WOULD LIKE TO SEE YOU AGAIN BUT IT WOULD BE TOO SAD YOUR MOTHER SAYS.

  SINCERELY,

  ELYOT GRUBBE

  Sometimes Skyler would recall his Fair Hills Day friends with a pang of nostalgia. Cool boys like Calvin Klaus and Billy Durkee who’d been his close buddies; and brainy Mildred Marrow who’d expressed the wish that Skyler might be her brother. But much of the time, in his dreamy medicated state, Skyler scarcely missed his sister.

  Overhearing Mummy speaking with visitors in Mrs. Metz’s house, from a stairway landing: “My son is adjusting. My son has suffered a terrible trauma as if that terrible man had laid his evil hands on him. We never speak of it.”

  In all, Mummy and Skyler would stay for several weeks as houseguests of the devoutly religious Mrs. Metz, and the house on Ravens Crest Drive was unoccupied, with but “ghost lights” kept burning in scattered rooms, to deter burglars. It was never entirely clear to Skyler where Daddy was for often Daddy was staying in a hotel—or a condominium—in Quaker Heights, which was a short commuting distance to Univers, Inc.; but Daddy also stayed at his apartment on Central Park South sometimes, where, it was promised, Skyler might visit Daddy soon, and Skyler and Daddy could attend a Knicks game; better yet, Skyler might “spend quality time with Daddy” in the city; then again, as both Daddy and Mummy agreed, with Skyler in such a “fragile mental state,” how much more sensible for him to remain in Fair Hills with his mother; how much more sensible for him to continue treatment with Vandeman, Splint, and his new pediatric pain-management physiologist Yu Kwon who was always so cheerful and hopeful about Skyler’s “healing.”

  Daddy had been badly shaken by it. Daddy was never to speak of it to Skyler. (Or to anyone? Skyler wondered.) Though Daddy had been granted an emergency leave from Univers, Inc. at the time of the tragedy, Daddy had returned to work on the morning following Bliss’s funeral for Daddy had needed to throw himself into work at once: “More work, the better! Sick transit mundi.”

  Of course, Daddy tried to spend weekends in Fair Hills with the remnant of his little family. How Daddy’s eyes brimmed with warm-Daddy tears when he greeted Mummy and Skyler: grabbing Skyler around the ribs, lifting him and kiss-nuzzling Skyler’s sensitive face. “Skyler! Love ya, son.” But Daddy’s voice was hoarse as a frog’s croak and the big-Daddy smile had less wattage. Daddy did not even loom so tall any longer for there was a stoop to Daddy’s right shoulder as if he’d caught the weight of a falling object. At such times, Skyler thought it was strange that Daddy chose to stay with Fair Hills friends, usually Mr. Kruk, for always there was “legal business” to discuss with Mr. Kruk, and not with Mummy and Skyler in their rooms in Mrs. Metz’s English Tudor mansion on the Great Road; but Daddy explained that he could not risk sleeping overnight in that house where the mothball smell was so strong, Daddy worried he might become “embalmed.”

  Was this a Daddy-joke—“embalmed”? Were you supposed to laugh? There were so few Daddy-jokes now, Skyler had forgotten how to respond.*

  * Must’ve typed this by mistake. But let it stand.

  † What’s this mean? Some kind of mystical bullshit? Yet, how otherwise to express the inexpressible? For the fact is, both G.R. and S.R. remain “suspects” in the yet-unsolved police investigation into my sister’s death. While it’s commonly believed that Ruscha was the killer, no physical evidence was ever found by police linking Ruscha to the crime or even to the interior of the Rampikes’ house; and no witness ever claimed to have seen him in or near the house at the time of Bliss’s death. A small but strident cult has grown in cyberspace, like poisonous mold inside damp walls, insisting that Bliss’s brother Skyler was her killer, which makes me sick to acknowledge, but I should acknowledge it, I know. (The last time I checked into cybercesspoolspace, about two years ago, I was high on trippy dextromethorphan [drugstore cough medicine] and only just laughed. Now, I am off drugs and so sensitive, it’s like the outermost layer of my skin has been peeled off. And the exhilaration of last night’s “white-hot rush of inspiration” has totally worn off. And worse yet—well no. I will save “worse yet” for another chapter.)

  * “Autism Spectrum Disorder”: Defined by the American Association of Child Neuropsychotherapists as “significant impairments in social interaction and communication and the presence of perverse behaviors, speech patterns, and interests.” In 1997, a federal study revealed that one out of every three hundred American children was afflicted with ASD; now, it’s one out of every one hundred-fifty. If the reader has persevered so far in this flagrantly “perverse” book, very likely the reader is afflicted, like the author, with ASD and should be taking, as the author no longer does, five hundred milligrams of Claritan thrice daily.

  * What a melancholy little chapter this is! I guess it must be because its kiddie-protagonist Skyler is “embalmed.”

  RED SILK

  WHOSE RED SILK SCARF WAS IT?

  Tied around my sister’s wrists that were tightly bound together by duct tape. And her thin arms forced up over her head, arranged in a “seductive pose.”

  And her bare legs, that were not so thin but slender and hard with muscle, an unexpected sight in a child so young, outspread, the stained flannel nightie bunched up beneath her hips.

  The canny reader will recall the crimson silk scarf from my ground-breaking chapter “Sex Toys?”—I hope. Yet, as Mr. Kruk informed investigators, it was likely that the intruder had found the scarf inside the house, to use for his own purposes.

  “He was wearing gloves. He came prepared. The roll of duct tape he took away with him. He left no sign of himself behind.”

  New Jersey Sentinel, Star Eye Weekly, National Inquirer, Up Close & Personal would publish countless “interviews” with “anonymous sources” close to the Rampikes alleging that Bliss Rampike had been sexually molested; and that this sexual molestation was the reason the child had been murdered. (For why otherwise would anyone kill a six-year-old?)

  And yet: Morris County Medical Examiner Virgil Elyse reported finding no sign of sexual trauma on the child-victim’s body. No semen on the body or in the furnace room.

  And so the murder of Bliss Rampike had not been a sex crime—had it?

  Yet: why had Bliss been positioned in such a “seductive” way, arms flung above her head and legs provocatively outspread, in the stained little-girl nightie…