My Sister, My Love

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Waiting for the kidnappers’ call. Waiting waiting!

  And praying: on their knees, even the stiff-jointed elderly Mrs. Poindexter and Mrs. Hind, even Dr. Stadtskruller who’d confessed in a blurting apology to Reverend Higley and the Rampikes that she wasn’t a “believer”—“more of a rationalist-agnostic actually”—on their knees, on the Bolivian goatskin rug, and gripping hands tightly as “Archie” Higley led the earnest childlike chanting prayer Our Father Who art in Heaven hallowed be Thy name Thy Kingdom come Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven bring Bliss back safely to us hear us in our appeal Heavenly Father and Jesus His Only Begotten Son have mercy!

  Overhearing, Lila whispered Amen! and quickly crossed herself.

  In secret offering a prayer to the Virgin Mary: in Whom, so far as Lila knew, Protestants did not believe.

  Imagine! What folly! Not to “believe” in the Mother of God who was the true worker of miracles amid mankind if you but prayed in the simplest of ways as you are taught as a child before you learn to read Hail Mary full of grace the Lord is with Thee, blessed art Thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of Thy womb Jesus. Now repeat ten times.

  Edgy and anxious staring at the clock—9:48 A.M.—10:07 A.M.—(there had been calls in fact, from Evita’s Beauty Emporium confirming Mrs. Rampike’s 10 A.M. appointment on Monday, which was to be cancelled, and from Penelope Dressler who was chair of the Gala Spring Frolick [fund-raiser for Charity Hill Volunteers of which Betsey Rampike was a member], a somewhat mysterious call from a shrill-sounding female inviting “both Rampikes” to a Valentine’s Day cocktail party at “the Klaffs” of whom neither Betsey nor Bix seemed to have heard)—and now 10:29 A.M. and Betsey “too restless” to remain in the family room led Mattie Higley, and Frannie Squires, and Dale McKee, and Dr. Stadtskruller on yet another search through the house—a search not for Bliss (who’d been kidnapped) but for “signs”—“clues”—that Betsey might have overlooked previously: these women climbing to the second floor, and into the attic, and again downstairs to the second floor and into all of the rooms (excluding Skyler’s room, where Skyler had been sequestered with the housekeeper to spare him as much trauma as possible); and returning to the first floor, where Archie Higley yet waited for the phone to ring, and Bix was hovering nearby sweaty and ashen-faced opening and closing his fists like a man under sentence of death yet uncertain from which direction death will sweep upon him, or what face death will wear; and as the nervously chattering women made their way as in a procession of pilgrims through the first-floor rooms Betsey called to Bix almost gaily saying please would he join them?—it would be best for at least one man to accompany them; and so like a large clumsy dog roused from sleep, yet still groggy, with slow-blinking-stunned eyes, Bix joined the women, following in their wake unnaturally still, stumbling at times as if losing his balance, as Betsey eagerly led her friends through the kitchen—and such a well-kept kitchen, the women would be impressed—and, again, outside and into the garage, where there was nothing to see, though you expected to see something, as in a suspense film; and beyond the garage, into the cold, still air, to circle the Rampike house that was so sprawling and attractive, alert as watch-dogs the women made their way, and Bix stumbling behind them, on the lookout for “strange footprints” in the snow; except, unfortunately, the snow had been trampled from previous searches. This time, however, as Betsey led the little search party around the back of the house, sharp-eyed Dale McKee cried, “Oh! Oh look.”

  A broken basement window, partly hidden by a dense evergreen shrub. How had this window been overlooked, previously?

  Quickly now, the searchers returned to the house, and hurried downstairs to the basement, and into the storage room which was the room with the broken window. “The most hidden-away room in the house,” Betsey said breathlessly.

  Here, someone might have entered the house. Slivers of glass lay glittering underfoot.

  Excitedly the women conferred: had someone crawled through the broken window, that was partly hidden by stacked cartons? (Which would explain why the Rampikes hadn’t seen the broken window earlier.) You could see how, beneath the window, which was large enough for a “smallish man” to crawl through, there was a carton positioned like a step. (Which the intruder would have used, when he left.)

  In a flurry of excitement, alarm, commingled dread and elation the women pressed near. If there were cobwebs, quickly the women brushed them away. Betsey was saying, “This is it! Oh God, this is how the kidnapper entered our house! And the security alarm wasn’t on—Bix kept promising to have it repaired, so it wouldn’t go off for no reason, and it never got repaired…And whoever this was, this kidnapper, somehow he knew where Bliss’s room was, and he overpowered her in her sleep, and took her away. And I never knew. I was sleeping, I was so trusting, Jesus have mercy on me, I never knew.” Betsey was weeping now, and trembling violently, as the women comforted her. Bix neither looked at her nor seemed to be listening to her but was examining the broken window, and the area around the window; grunting with the effort of hoisting himself up, elbows and forearms on the windowsill, panting now, gasping: “So it’s here! Here! The son of a bitch! Here’s where he came in.”

  Quickly Betsey chided, “Bix, please. Don’t be profane.”

  QUICK CUT TO: TWO FLOORS UP WHERE SKYLER WAS ASKING LILA WAS IT HIS fault? what happened to Bliss, his fault? for Mummy seemed to be angry with him now. Mummy did not seem to love him now.

  Lila assured him no. Mummy could not be angry with him. Mummy loved him.

  “Lila, did I do it?”

  Lila would have hugged Skyler except, needing badly to pee, Skyler pushed away from her, hurried into the bathroom and shut the door and tried to pee, tried very hard to pee, but only a pathetic little dribble emerged from his bruised little pecker. And Skyler began to cry, and Lila entered the bathroom and led him back into his room, brushed his damp hair from his feverish forehead, Lila would have kissed the anxious child except Skyler was not her son to kiss; Skyler was another woman’s son; and Lila knew her place, by instinct Lila understood that Betsey Rampike would not want the Filipina housekeeper Lila Laong kissing and coddling her son.

  Earnestly Lila assured Skyler one more time that his mother loved him. His father loved him. Everyone who knew him loved him. Soon they would find his sister, and the terrible time would be over. “Why don’t you sit here and read your comic books, Skyler? Or—would you like to draw? I promise, I will stay with you.”

  In the confusion of that morning Skyler would not later recall the sequence of events. For possibly it had been earlier, that Lila had brought him breakfast on a tray, as if he was sick and staying home from school in his room: Count Chocula (chocolate-coated cereal) with sliced bananas, raisin bread toast with grape jelly, a tall glass of hyper-sweetened orange juice, a tall glass of vitamin-enriched milk. How Skyler loved Count Chocula cereal!—yet, lifting a spoonful to his mouth, he chewed but couldn’t swallow, spat out the mouthful into the cereal bowl which had to be, as anyone in Skyler’s class at Fair Hills Day would say with a sneer, gross.

  That morning seeming to know how he would never again return to the “prestigious”—“exclusive”—private school where among his classmates Skyler Rampike had acquired—at last!—a reputation for being, if not “normal,” no longer hopelessly “weird”: for the lustre of Skyler’s local-celebrity sister had cast upon him a flattering lunar glow, and it had become common for Skyler to be approached by the most popular girls, including sixth-grade girls, with eager questions about Bliss. And there was the additional lustre of the H.I.P. designation, now to be surrendered forever.

  In fact, Skyler Rampike would never again attend any school in Fair Hills. This melancholy fact he seemed to know, on the morning of the first day of his new life.

  BY 11:05 A.M. THERE HAD BEEN NO CALL FROM THE KIDNAPPER/KIDNAPPERS. Downstairs, the pleading/begging prayers of the faithful had passed beyond abject, fawning, desperate to fatigued.

&nb
sp; Another time the ransom note was read aloud, by Reverend Higley. “‘The Eye That “Sees.” ’ Maybe it—he—is watching this house?”

  This was a new thought. This was a profound thought. This was a disturbing thought. Bix Rampike lurched to his feet declaring that he would go outside, and investigate. He would drive along Ravens Crest Drive on the lookout for “suspicious vehicles.” And so Bix Rampike left the house, driving away in the sleek new Jaguar coupe, and was gone from the prayer/phone vigil for approximately forty minutes.*

  Returning to report he had seen no one “suspicious.” The usual delivery vans, the mailman. If the kidnapper/kidnappers were watching the house, there appeared to be no way any private citizen could locate them.

  “It may be that we have to call the police, after all,” Reverend Higley said. “It may be that the ‘Eye That “Watches” ’ has no serious intention of contacting us, only of torturing us.”

  Just then, the phone rang.

  Quickly Reverend Higley lifted the phone receiver, even as Betsey Rampike staggered to her feet, pressing a hand against her breast. Higley, hand cupped over the receiver, said in a whisper: “Betsey? It’s a friend of yours—Mrs. Chaplin.”

  Mrs. Chaplin? Trix?

  After so many months of not calling? Trix Chaplin, at such a time? For a moment Betsey hesitated as if about to take the call, then drew back, frowning; saying, with dignity, though her mouth trembled: “Please tell Mrs. Chaplin that I will call her another time. This is not a good time.”

  Now it was, Bix Rampike stood. Mumbled something inaudible and without a backward glance at his surprised companions made his way out of the room like a man in a dream determined to wake from the dream. “Bix? Where are you going? Bix—” Betsey called after him, unheard.

  The time: 12:06 P.M. Reverend Higley would recall.

  In the old butler’s pantry off the kitchen where Bix kept reserves of liquor he paused to pour two inches of Dewar’s into a shot glass to be downed in a single swallow. So fortified, he made his way then to the back stairs, and down the stairs to the basement—why? Bix would never be able to explain—a hunch, a premonition, a sensation like a hulking predator bird flapping its wings over his head—unerring he made his way through the ghost-Rampike-family room (never used by the Rampike family! never to be used and to be totally dismantled by the next tenants of the house) and past the (rarely used) “family fitness room” with somber stationary bicycle, treadmill, “Stair Master” and weights scattered on the floor like giant, discontinued coins, past the laundry room (in which, at this very moment, fresh-laundered bed linens and articles of Rampike clothing were tumbling gaily about in the oversized drier), past the drafty storage room (where the just-discovered broken window had been temporarily “mended”—a piece of cardboard wedged against it), and at the door to the furnace room he paused for a moment before pushing the door open and switching on the overhead light, stepping inside and this time advancing farther into the low-ceilinged room entered mostly by Valley Oil repairmen, and there, in the smutty corner behind the first-floor furnace, lay the small broken body.

  “Bliss? My God.”

  (Hiding from Daddy? All these hours? When they’d thought she was kidnapped? How was this possible?)

  He stooped over her, where she was wedged between the furnace and the concrete wall. He saw, or must have seen, the blood smears on the wall, and the blood, coagulated, yet still glistening, on the matted blond hair. Must’ve seen the stiffened arms awkwardly forced back behind the child’s head, bound with duct tape and the badly wrinkled and stained crimson silk scarf. Must’ve seen the waxy face, the part-open opaque eyes and the duct tape over her mouth. The torn and stained nightgown, and the naked legs like stilts. Must’ve known that the child was dead but the cry erupted from him: “Bliss! Darling!” He ripped the duct tape from her mouth. He leaned close, he knelt on the sticky floor, he lifted her in his arms grunting with the effort, how strangely heavy his daughter had become, how unresponsive to his pleas, he staggered from the furnace room carrying her, staggered/stumbled/made his frantic way up the stairs and back into the family room where the others awaited him having heard his cries, and thinking he would revive her, even as the others were screaming in horror, tenderly he lay her on the floor, not on the sofa but on the floor, on the white Bolivian goatskin carpet, and why?—haltingly he would explain She would need artificial respiration, a floor is more practical while upstairs in his room hearing the adults’ cries Skyler knew at once: his sister had been found.

  Whatever he’d been preoccupied with, comic books, sketch pad, went flying. Lila, alarmed, tried to stop him: “Skyler, no! You must stay up here, with me. Your mother…” but already Skyler was running along the corridor, and Skyler was taking the stairs two at a time, risking another broken leg, or a replay of the original (twice) broken leg, and Skyler was panting running into the family room seeing his father crouched over something on the white fur rug, his mother wailing like a stricken cat throwing herself on whatever it was, on the white fur rug, and rudely Skyler pushed past the adults who were in his way, a sharp punch to the fat thigh of one of the white-haired church grannies who was always cooing over him, but no cooing now, no stopping Skyler now, Skyler was grabbing at his father’s shoulder, trying to see, trying to see what it was his mother was lying on as if she’d fallen from a great height delirious and moaning and now Skyler saw, it was Bliss, of course it was Bliss, had to be Bliss, and Skyler shouted, “There’s nothing wrong with her! It’s what she always does, to get attention!”

  * Sicko aficionados (there are no other kind) of R. Crumb will want to know exactly which Zap s these were, that had been given to Skyler by Bliss’s tutor Rob Feldman who was to cannily quit the Rampikes employ before being fired. These Zap s were early publications, must’ve been 1970s, in fact one of the comics wasn’t a Zap but something called Dirty Laundry, typical early Crumb in which there was a weird-goofy Crumb family with a foul-mouthed little kid, possibly named Adam. You would want to know what happened to these cherished comics of Skyler’s and what became of Skyler’s crude but impassioned attempts at drawing cartoons. Well, what do you think happened to such sicko “evidence”? In the aftermath of my sister’s death—i.e., my sister’s murder—it was in the best interests of the Rampikes to take away any and all “incriminating” materials in the household, before the first of the Fair Hills police officers were summoned.

  * Forty minutes! Imagine all that Bix Rampike could accomplish in forty minutes, that no one investigating Bliss Rampike’s death would ever know.

  POSTMORTEM II

  WHEN WAS THIS? A LONG TIME AGO.

  If viewed through a telescope, but through the wrong end of a telescope, it would be even more distant in time. And all who’d survived would now be vanished, like Bliss.

  OUR PEDOPHILE I

  “IT’S HIM. HAS TO BE.”

  In the waning years of the twentieth century in much of affluent rural-suburban New Jersey there was perceived to be, among professionals trained in such matters, a scarcity of known sex offenders: and so, in Morris County, the townships of Basking Ridge, Bernardsville, and Fair Hills were obliged to share thirty-four-year-old Gunther Ruscha, currently unemployed elementary school teacher/resident of 29 Piper’s Lane, Fair Hills.

  “Who else but Ruscha? Sad sicko pervert.”

  Poor Gunther Ruscha! Each time a Sex Incident was reported to local police, no matter that Gunther’s cherished specialty was Pedophilia, a rarified sub-category of sex perversion, and no matter how greatly descriptions of the (alleged) offender differed from the description of Gunther Ruscha in police files, little time was lost before a squad car equipped with deafening siren, flashing blue light on its roof, BASKING RIDGE POLICE, BERNARDSVILLE POLICE, or FAIR HILLS POLICE emblazoned on its sides, and manned by husky police officers, shook the quiet of Piper’s Lane to pull aggressively into the Ruschas’ narrow cracked-asphalt driveway.

  “Rusch-a! Gun-ther Rusch-a! Police.”
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br />   That Gestapo pounding on the door, poor Gunther recognized like an old, familiar kick to the scrotum.

  And there was Mrs. Ruscha screaming at him: “Gunther, what have you done now? For shame!”

  Even those neighbors on Piper’s Lane who were mostly sympathetic with, or pitying of, sixty-three-year-old Gertrude Ruscha the pedophile’s mother, longtime resident of Piper’s Lane and newly retired from her minimum-wage job in food services at the Fair Hills Medical Center where she’d worked since the abrupt and inexplicable departure of Gunther’s father when the budding pedophile was but a toddler, could not resist a shiver of Schadenfreude* while peering through their venetian blinds as the squad car pulled up to 29 Piper’s Lane another time, with increasing frequency it seemed, as Sex Incidents were being more frequently reported to local police, at the clapboard Cape Cod invariably described in the Fair Hills Beacon as a “modest dwelling”; observing the lanky, red-haired, incongruously boyish-looking Gunther being forcibly walked, between grim-faced police officers, to the waiting squad car where he was made to stoop as he slid into the rear of the vehicle, a police officer’s (gloved) hand pushing down on Gunther’s head in a gesture you might almost mistake as friendly, to prevent the terrified pedophile from striking his head against the car.

  “That Gunther! What has he done now!”

  It was observed that our pedophile’s face, unnaturally pale, with rubbery lips in a frightened smile, and stark staring glassy eyes, that more than one (female) observer believed to be “poetic”—often glistened with tears at such times. If police came for him without warning, as usually they did, Gunther was likely to be wearing nondescript clothes (khaki trousers, sweatshirt, baggy sweater) like any Fair Hills adult male, and not the “spiffy”—“show-offy”—“fag”—clothes (faux-suede, black leather, brightly colored scarf tied at his throat) in which he dressed when he left the house to drive away in his mother’s weatherworn old Datsun or pedal away on his bicycle (with what destination: public park, children’s playground, kiddie matinee, skating rink?); if police came for him in the night, a favored time, for it involved blinding spotlights illuminating the front of the Cape Cod, as on a movie set, Gunther was likely to be hauled outside in pajamas, without shoes; on the most humiliating occasion, Gunther was taken into police custody bare-chested and in white Jockey shorts: his legs were revealed as spindly and lacking muscle, like an ostrich’s legs; his white Jockey shorts might have fit the groin area of a prepubescent boy; his narrow, concave chest was hairless as a young boy’s, with berry-like nipples distinct against the sickly pallor of his skin. For you had only to glance at our pedophile, the pariah of Morris County, all knowledge of Gunther Ruscha’s lurid past but a tabbouleh rosa, and a primitive warning signal would detonate in the frontal lobe of your reptile brain: “Sex deviate!”