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

  Skyler stared disbelieving. His face smarted with shame. If anyone entered the lounge, how mortified he would be! Yet he didn’t switch off the TV, and he didn’t run from the room.

  “Mummy. Oh.”

  The irony was: Skyler no longer called his mother by that silly name, if he could stop himself in time.

  As Skyler never called his father “Daddy” any longer. Only, with a smirk (unseen by Bix: these were mostly phone conversations), “Dad.”

  Especially, Skyler hated “Mummy”—born of such weakness, childish longing. A shudder of revulsion passed over him, hairs stirred at the nape of his neck.

  He was no God-damned child now: he was thirteen.

  Not Mummy’s little man but his own damn self.

  “—the first year is the hardest of course—truly it is ‘the Valley of the Shadow of Death’—the strain of mourning is exhausting as a physical illness. And the terrible things that were said in the media about my husband and me—and even our nine-year-old son. When it was known—worldwide, it was known—that my poor Bliss was abducted and murdered by a convicted sex offender who’d been stalking her for years without our knowing—the man confessed, and killed himself. And yet, as you know, Zelda, in the media, it’s the most sensational ‘twist’ that sells.” Betsey paused, dabbing at her eyes with a tissue. Zelda, who was leafing through Betsey’s book, read a passage aloud about “closure” and asked Betsey to comment and Betsey said, recovering her composure, “I believe it was Freud, Zelda—Sigmund Freud the controversial pioneer of the Unconscious—who stated that we are ‘melancholy’ in mourning because we have taken the loved one into us and we have ‘become’ the lost loved one—” as Betsey hesitated, having become confused, Zelda Zachiarias winked at the audience to signal She’s losing me with these deep thoughts! which provoked titters of good-natured laughter, and so Betsey apologized for becoming upset: “Zelda, I have been in therapy. And this happens in therapy—you think too much! You think too much about how life has wounded you, and that can be ‘narcistic’—‘narcissitic’—for you have swallowed up the lost loved one, and you must surrender the loved one to a Higher Power, and move on. ‘Closure’ is the goal. My memoir ends with ‘Closure: Heaven Scent.’ For my line of beauty products and services is truly ‘heaven-sent’—it has saved my life. But such strain can spell the death of a marriage…” Here Betsey paused, momentarily stricken; Zelda Zachiarias took her hand, gently urging: “Will you share with our audience, Betsey, as you shared with me before the show, the newest development in your ‘marital life’ of fifteen years?” At first Betsey seemed incapable of speech then rallied, with a quivering little smile: “Yes. I will. My h-husband and I are filing for a divorce.”

  Divorce! Skyler listened, stunned.

  Comforting Betsey, Zelda could not resist inquiring, as the audience listened eagerly, whose decision this was; and Betsey, in a moment of tender rapport, as a woman will impulsively share her innermost secrets with another woman with whom she has bonded, “Ohhh Zelda! I am so—heartbroken. I am just devastated. You know how fervently I believe that marriage is forever—‘sickness unto death’—and so this has been a terrible blow to me. Since Bliss was taken from us, my husband has been what is called ‘compulsive’ in his pursuit of—other women. Younger women. A man’s virility is so determined by fantasy, Zelda, the slightest blow to the male ego, he will suffer”—embarrassed, Betsey lowered her voice, though the microphone picked up every syllable—“impotence; and will blame the wife every time.”

  At this dramatic juncture, the studio audience, comprised solely of women, burst into applause, and ribald laughter. Zelda Zachiarias clapped as well, leaned over to Betsey Rampike to kiss Betsey’s flushed cheek, saying that it was time for a brief break: “Please stay with us and we will continue this fantastic conversation with Betsey Rampike author of the new instant best seller ‘Pray for Mummy’: A Mother’s Pilgrimage from Grief to Joy.”

  There followed then a succession of advertisements during which time Skyler sat paralyzed a few inches in front of the TV screen, that exuded an ominous heat. He’d begun scratching at his face and scalp, his nails drawing blood. How his skin itched! How he’d like to have clawed his skin off! In his ears was a roaring as of a sanitation truck ingesting trash into its belly.

  Ending? The m-marriage? Mummy and Daddy? And no one had told Skyler? The panicked thought came to him Neither will want custody of me.

  Skyler knew: he should switch off the TV and quickly retreat to his room before Betsey Rampike returned, or someone stepped into the lounge. For where, in Hodge Hill School, as in any of the private boarding schools to which Skyler was/would be sent, is there more safety, more sanity, than in one’s room? To his room on the third floor of the residence Skyler frequently retreated, during even mealtimes, though he was one of the taller boys in eighth grade, and his teachers warily liked him, for amid so many misfits, losers, “mentally disabled,” Skyler Rampike could not fail to shine; his grades were mostly A’s, and he’d learned the knack of not-swallowing the most powerful of his meds; though he couldn’t lock his door from within, he could barricade the doorway with furniture. Yet: Skyler remained in the lounge. Like a rodent mesmerized by a cobra swaying before him, Skyler remained in front of the television set until the program resumed, and Zelda Zachiarias re-introduced Betsey Rampike; this time, Zelda wished to evoke for viewers her guest’s “tragic loss,” and so there came footage of the skating prodigy Bliss Rampike onto the screen, familiar footage of Skyler’s sister skating again on the ice, here was Bliss’s famed debut to “Over the Rainbow” at the Tots-on-Ice competition; here again, Bliss in the dazzling-white ballerina costume; and, with glamorous upswept hair, in Las Vegas-sexy bronze-orange costume skate-dancing to gallumping “Kiss of Fire” for it has all happened already, many times and there is no way out for Skyler had seen this footage many times, since Bliss’s death it was played, played and replayed on TV, by chance you might discover it at any time, day, night, on any TV channel, by sinister magic it had happened, and who knows how such things happen, that Skyler’s little sister had become since her death the most famous six-year-old in American history and what did that mean, that this six-year-old was dead? had been killed? yet Skyler could not bring himself to switch off the TV even now, nor could Skyler stagger from the room for to stagger from the room would be to leave Bliss, and abandon her; another time, Skyler would abandon her; he would abandon her to Mummy; he would not save her; though she called to him Skyler? help help me Skyler yet he would abandon her, it was the irrevocable fact of his life.

  “—Zelda, it has been so hard. It has been so very hard. Our son is a ‘troubled’ child. He has been in therapy for years for both neurological ‘deficits’ and ‘borderline personality’ issues. He receives the very best professional care but—believe me!—it has not been easy. Both my husband—formerly an all-American halfback, now a high-ranked executive—and my son—suffer from ‘deflected aggression.’ In Skyler’s case, it is believed that the horrible loathsome deviate who stalked and murdered my Bliss preyed upon him, too—in some way he will not divulge, for such trauma is locked inside the hippocampus—the ‘seat of memory’—in a state of denial. There are ‘passive-aggressive’ issues as well. A ‘communication abyss’ between us. Many in your audience, Zelda, may have had the identical experience—a trauma in the family, and the ‘masculine dynamic’ begins to disintegrate, even as the ‘feminine dynamic’ grows stronger of necessity. In this case, it was our troubled son Skyler who provided the ‘tipping point.’ Our marriage of fifteen years that might have withstood the trauma of our loss of Bliss was finally shattered by the post-traumatic-stress ‘Oedipal masochism’ of our son—”

  Reluctantly, mournfully, yet bravely Betsey Rampike spoke. It is not easy to bare your soul on national TV. Still more the souls of others. Tenderly the camera dwelled upon Betsey’s rosy flushed face. A flame erupted suddenly in Skyler’s brain. Might’ve been an aneuryism in the hippocampu
s except the poor kid didn’t pitch over dead but began to pant asthmatically and then to shout unintelligibly. Began to strike, punch, kick at the TV set stinging his hands. Bruising his weak hands. Shouted louder like a rising siren and someone came running into the room, one of the headmaster’s burly assistants grabbing at Skyler, cursing: “Damn you, Ranpick! Down on the floor.”

  But Skyler like a panicked squirrel managed to elude the burly man for TV-Mummy was still speaking, TV-Mummy would never cease speaking, though Skyler was outweighed by fifty pounds he managed to throw off the attendant’s grip and another time Skyler rushed the TV set now knocking it onto the floor and kicking savagely at it and at last the screen shattered and bits of TV-Mummy’s face flew in sharp shards and slivers about the room including Skyler’s hair, Skyler’s eyelashes, Skyler’s nostrils and inside Skyler’s collar. A uniformed security guard now rushed into the room, as burly as the headmaster’s assistant, grabbed the mutinous boy’s head and near-decapitated him flinging him onto the floor, in the struggle overturning chairs, a massive floor lamp, stacks of Hodge Hill School yearbooks, still Skyler managed to scramble free shrieking like a deranged bat until overcome by sheer brute force, a combined weight of beyond a thousand pounds mashing his face against the grimy carpet and breaking and bloodying his nose, cracking several teeth at the gum line, knocking the wind out of him as you’d wallop a dust-laden carpet flung over a clothesline with a “rug-beater,” and so the lurid tale would be told for years afterward how three husky attendants and two security guards with billy clubs had been required to subdue hundred-pound Skyler Rampike who’d not only fought them with fists, knees, and feet but with his bared teeth, “frothing and foaming” like a rabid creature forced finally into an inflatable “restraining jacket” and carried outside on a stretcher to be borne, via ambulance, with a shrieking siren, to the Doylestown Medical Center to be sedated and next morning transported to Allentown General Hospital for psychiatric evaluation.*

  The Rampike kid? The one who might’ve killed his little sister? Went ballistic. Finito!

  * Bliss: A Mother’s Story by Betsey Rampike as told to Linda LeFerve (Simon & Schuster, 1998), 208 pp., $26.95. Though I have seen this New York Times #1 best seller in bookstores, I have not been able to bring myself to read it.

  *“Pray for Mummy”: A Mother’s Pilgrimage from Grief to Joy by Betsey Rampike as told to Brooke Swann (Basic Books, 2000), 192 pp., $21.95. Rather would I douse myself with kerosene and light a match than read this one.

  * See “Brother of Slain Skate Champ Bliss Rampike Committed to PA Mental Hospital,” Celebrity Watch Weekly, October 4, 2000. A lurid cover story containing close-up photos of Skyler strapped to a stretcher, his face so contorted with rage it is unrecognizable.

  MISADVENTURES IN “MENTAL HEALTH”

  IN THE INTERESTS OF FULL AND SHAMELESS DISCLOSURE, FOR THE BENEFIT of readers with a morbid interest in psychotherapy, psychiatry, psychiatric psychopharmacology, etc., here is a partial list of the shrinks to which Skyler Rampike was sent in the years following his sister’s murder: Splint, Murdstone, Qualls, Schiskein, Roll. And here is a partial list of the diagnoses affixed to Skyler Rampike by these individuals: hyperactive anxiety disorder/narcissistic anality disorder/obsessive-compulsive disorder/dyslexia (chronic, progressive)/ADD + IEP/CAAD/amnesia/hyperamnesia/anorexia/agnosia/anosagnosia/aphasia/analgesia/CAAD + catatonia (intermittent)/ASD/PDD/bi-polar + “borderline personality”/echolalia/apotropaism/ASD + infantile aggression disorder/PMD + “phantom pain” disorder/hebrephrenia*/algolagnia/paranoia + SSD (schizoid spectrum disorder)/hysteria/anaclisia/hyperdependency + regressive disorder/infantile aggression disorder/Asperger’s disorder—and more!

  For each of these, a medical prescription of which some have already been listed in this document teeming with “sharply observed” details/facts like maggots in a decomposing corpse.

  There was Dr. Splint. Through a sepia haze of pain, Dr. Splint a pair of oversized eyeglasses jauntily perched upon a beaky nose. “Skyler? Speak to me. You can speak to me. You are not mute, Skyler. There is nothing medically wrong with your vocal cords or your throat, Skyler. You know this. It is an ‘hysterical’ muteness, Skyler. It is not ‘real.’ You do not speak to your mother or to your father, Skyler, and they are very worried about you but you may speak to me, Skyler: will you speak?”

  Six sessions with Dr. Splint. (Female, big-boned. Big teeth clenched in smiles. Or was that Dr. Roll, to come?) Given Play Clay to “shape your thoughts” in the stubborn absence of speech and these emerged as snakes, mostly.

  Except Doll-baby. At last emerged Doll-baby. After eight snakes of varying lengths and girths, ambition, and authenticity. Doll-baby was the size of a rat and fashioned of flesh-colored Play Clay, allowed to dry and then—so suddenly, Dr. Splint’s big plastic glasses nearly tumbled from her face—bang-bang-bang against the table. Doll-baby’s head bang-bang-bang against the table. And Dr. Splint lost her professional poise visibly flinching, drawing back behind her desk as if frightened of her raging ten-year-old patient, managing then to compose herself saying, “Skyler, you did not hurt your sister. You were not the one to hurt your sister,” and Skyler laughed wildly continuing to shatter what remained of Doll-baby, pellet-sized pieces scattered across the table and the floor and onto the top of Dr. Splint’s desk. For the first time speaking to the therapist, jeering: “I did! I killed her! I broke her head! I wanted to! I tied her arms, too! That was me.”

  This sixth and final session with Dr. Splint.

  “THAT WOMAN! WITH A DEGREE FROM JUST RUTGERS. I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN better, a ‘child trauma specialist’ who is herself childless. And so overpriced, you’d think she was a man.”

  THOUGHTS CAME SLOW NOW TO SKYLER. DR. MURDSTONE REGARDED SKYLER at a distance. To Dr. Murdstone Skyler had haltingly/falteringly/stammeringly/dim-brainedly confessed that his sister came up behind him sometimes and teased him and asked him to help her, laughing at him because he couldn’t see her, he could only hear her, but when he listened closely he could not hear her. Thoughts came slow to Skyler now in the sepia-drug-haze like those little stones you had to strain and squeeze and grunt and whimper in pain to expel from your hind-quarters (“hinder” was Mummy’s word which was a nicer word than Daddy’s word which was “asshole”) and the effort hurt so! and sometimes afterward there was blood to be flushed down the toilet with the hard little nasty stones.

  Dr. Murdstone was not a smiler like Dr. Splint. Dr. Murdstone sneered at Skyler for Dr. Murdstone possessed X-ray vision to see into the conniving little brat’s brain: “Skyler, you know that your little sister is not ‘there.’ You are not being ‘haunted.’ You know that ‘she’ is but an auditory hallucination, this has been explained to you many times.”

  Had it? Skyler was made ashamed, Skyler could not remember.

  In the mirror a little baldie boy with a bumpy scalp, enormous shadowed eyes, sallow and splotched skin. Could not keep from picking at his skin unless his medication was so increased, his hands were too heavy to lift to his face.

  “Skyler!”—was this Dr. Qualls? Somehow, Skyler was in Dr. Qualls’s office where someone must have brought him. Damp-sand-colored mustache, derisive flash of eyeglasses. Dr. Qualls advised: “Skyler, you are too old for such childish confabulations. You are ten years old and by that age fantasizing in children has about run its course and it has certainly exhausted the patience of adults in your vicinity.”

  And there was blunt pragmatic Dr. Schiskein (fattish male, psychiatric psychopharmacologist) who brushed aside Skyler’s weepy/whiny tales of being haunted by his little dead sister and handily prescribed the new Wonder Drug Zilich (F.D.A.-approved “revolutionary” psychotropic drug for children afflicted with IED + PSSD [Paranoid Schizoid Spectrum Disorder]) and Skyler learned, as the reader would learn, that, medicated with three hundred milligrams of Zilich twice daily you will no longer hear phantom voices in your head Skyler! there is something bad in my bed you will not hear your own thoughts
in your head for all that you can hear is the beat beat beat of pulses deep inside the brain stem.

  AT THE VERHANGEN TREATMENT CENTER FOR DOOMED CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS in Bleek Springs, New York (fifty miles north of Manhattan, “breathtaking views of the Hudson”) there was Hedda Roll, M.D., Ph.D., C.R.M.T. (Certified Recovered Memory Therapist) briskly urging Skyler to reveal to her the secret hurt he’d been made to endure through his prolonged and protracted, indeed interminable childhood, session following session in that confused backwater of time following Skyler Rampike’s luridly publicized departure from Hodge Hill School for it was an interlude when Skyler’s mother (whom Skyler would not call Mummy!) was “away, visiting” in Palm Beach, Florida, with her dear friend wealthy old Mrs. Poindexter who owned an oceanfront Spanish villa there, and Skyler’s father (whom Skyler would not call Daddy!) was “unavoidably unavailable, feel like hell letting you down, son” though so far as Skyler could determine, Bix Rampike was still a “top exec” at Univers, Inc. though living much of the time in Manhattan, in the condominium on Central Park South which Skyler had yet to visit, as Skyler had yet to be taken to a Knicks game at Madison Square Garden. It was unclear to Skyler from whose “shaky, precarious, paranoid-schizoid” self the starker dimensions of Reality had to be kept at a calculated distance, whether his parents were “divorced” by this time or only just “separated” or “trying damned hard to work things out” for even before TV-Mummy on WomenSpeakOut Skyler had more or less given up trying to call his elusive parents for the numbers he’d been given for Betsey were never answered or “no longer in service” and there was no Rampike home any longer, for the sprawling old white clapboard eighteenth-century Colonial at 93 Ravens Crest Drive had been emptied of the Rampikes and, so far as Skyler knew, strangers lived there and were happy. When once he’d been able to get through to Bix Rampike at Univers, Inc., his father had been frank in telling him he loved Skyler “like hell” but was “sickened and disgusted” by the hideous cover story in Celebrity Watch Weekly that had, unconscionably, been picked up by numerous other publications including the New York Post, The Star Spy, and, in three brief paragraphs on an interior page of the Metro section the New York Times. Skyler’s sessions with Dr. Roll were draining and exhausting, for Skyler seemed to be afflicted again with his old (hysterical, “reaction-formation”) muteness in the presence of this woman looming before him quivering and shape-changing as a giant squid urging him to reveal to her the secret hurt he’d almost certainly been made to endure as a very young child, possibly even an infant, for sexual abuse of children can start at very young ages, when Skyler had been too young to resist and too young to remember the trauma inflicted upon him by his abuser or abusers he could not protect himself against who were—who? Tell me Skyler who has abused you, who has molested you, who has interfered with your psychic growth stunting you as a result, what are you hiding from, Skyler? Why won’t you look at me, and tell me: WHO ARE YOU PROTECTING? On the table before the guiltily squirming fourteen-year-old there materialized an unclothed doll-baby of about the size of an adult Norwegian rat and at this object Skyler stared dry-mouthed and stricken with embarrassment for Skyler wasn’t a child any longer! Skyler wasn’t to be baited with such child-shrink props! Skyler was an adolescent however “under-developed” physically/socially/emotionally; yet here was a naked doll-baby, a boy-doll-baby, which is a very different matter from a girl-doll-baby; and its anatomical features were of unusual, indeed ominous frankness and clarity unlike any doll Skyler had ever had the misfortune to see, here was a boy-doll with a “penis” the size of a partially engorged slug, and here were accompanying “testicles” the size of Concord grapes, and, yet more alarming, here were realistic hind-quarters of a kind you would never see in an actual doll; in contrast, the boy-doll’s face was bland and blank and Caucasian; its mouth was open-able for its small jaws had hinges, and there was a rosy-pink cavity inside, and even a discernible tongue; how terrifying this seemed to Skyler, who stared and stared; how terrifying (Skyler was remembering now: an amnesia fog-patch lifted suddenly and there was revealed how at one or another of the “treatment centers” to which he’d been sentenced, that is, sent, by his “deeply concerned” parents he’d had to be “force-fed” by way of a tube thrust down his protesting mouth bruising his lips, tongue, mouth-interior, throat) and the boy-doll’s head mockily resembled Skyler’s baldie-head of several years before when the trauma of his sister’s death caused his hair to fall out in handfuls so that, accosted by other kids his age, blunt staring little boys, he was asked You got cancer? Taking chemo? Worse yet, beside the hapless boy-doll there now materialized two adult dolls, several times larger than the boy-doll, with bland blank Caucasian features and similarly hinged mouths, naked adult dolls with hideous adult genitalia, Skyler shielded his eyes not wishing to see, a glimpse of sizable female breasts complete with berry-sized nipples, a glimpse of a male semi-erect rosy-pink penis of a size, relative to the doll’s size, which Skyler’s former boy-classmates would have called awesome. These doll-adults Skyler shut his quivering eyes against which provoked Dr. Roll to nudge them suggestively closer to the boy-doll and to Skyler saying in a gentle caressing voice Skyler? Don’t be shy! Take your time Skyler using these dolls to demonstrate what was done to your body, you have repressed for years. Skyler? Will you look at me, dear? Why do you protect your abusers? You are safe with me now. Skyler shuddered. Skyler shivered. How badly Skyler wanted to please Dr. Roll, for always you want to please the adult in authority, yet Skyler could not bring himself to speak as Dr. Roll repeated her command leaning closer to him, quivering and shape-changing as a giant squid and Skyler dreaded the brush of her tentacles against his bare skin, Skyler dreaded the shock of being stung. In misery pressing both hands against his eyes, sending sparks into the interior of his head, underside of Skyler’s battered head, numbly his lips moved in a mumble telling Dr. Roll that he guessed he could not remember being hurt by anyone when he was little. Could not remember being hurt at all. Now in a sharp voice Dr. Roll said Skyler why are you protecting them, why are you refusing to cooperate, you will not begin to heal unless you cooperate with your therapist, you will remain stunted through your life, look at me, Skyler! and look at these dolls for Dr. Roll knew that her guilty-squirming young patient was lying to her, of course Dr. Roll knew from years of recovered-memory experience that this was a grievously wounded/abused/sick child before her, yet stubbornly Skyler shook his head no, stubbornly Skyler would not touch the naked dolls nor would Skyler meet the glare of Dr. Roll’s X-ray eyes for Skyler could not say yes it was my father, yes it was my mother. Could not say They killed me. They killed my sister, and they killed me. He could not. He could not. He could not.