“She has an artist’s soul,” our father would say, a red flag in and of itself. He blamed his own “artist’s soul” for the behaviors that infuriated our mother and wreaked havoc on our family: He’d leave home for a week, saying he was “following the muse,” going on a vision quest and returning after having drained their savings account or crashed the car; once, my mother had to get him out of jail for drunk and disorderly conduct down in Maryland.

The big warning came when Lexie turned sixteen. Lexie, always a straight-A student, started failing all her classes junior year. Gram bought her a car for her birthday. Not a shitty beater, but a brand-new Volvo. Our grandmother was an all-or-nothing kind of person.

Lexie was supposed to pick me up from school to drive to Sparrow Crest for the weekend. I’d brought an extra backpack to school full of clothes and some of our favorite road-trip snacks for the three-hour drive—Fritos, root beer, and M&Ms. But she didn’t show. All the school buses had left. Half an hour passed. She was often late, but this was crazy. We’d promised Gram we’d be there by six thirty; she was making Lexie’s favorite dinner, meatloaf. And now we were going to be late.

I stood out front, pacing around. Girls from the field hockey team were warming up out on the field. They watched me, snickering. “Someone forget you, Metcalf?” Zoey Landover called. She was captain of the team, my long-ago best friend who now thought I was a total freak. I did what I always did, my method of middle school survival: I ignored her. Pretended she was invisible. Pretended they all were.

I called home, knowing my dad was there. He was doing overnight shifts at the 7-Eleven and sleeping during the day. Lexie picked up. There was music blasting in the background—Joan Jett & the Blackhearts.

“Um, did you forget me?”

“Hello? Who is this?” she’d yelled into the phone.

“Don’t be an asshole, Lex. Come get me.”

The music got louder.

Joan Jett singing “Cherry Bomb.”

“Who?”

“Jackie! The sister you totally left stranded in the school parking lot!”

“W-R-O-N-G spells wrong number,” she’d said, laughing as she hung up.

I called back. She didn’t answer, so I called Mom at work. Mom agreed to swing by and pick me up. “The high school called me,” she said. “Apparently your sister took it upon herself to leave school after second period without permission.”

I could tell from Mom’s tone that Lexie was in big trouble. I was sure my sister would talk herself out of it—give Mom some plausible reason for ditching, and we’d pack our bags into the Volvo and be off to Sparrow Crest for the weekend. But that’s not what happened.

Mom and I got home to an absolute disaster. We pulled into the driveway to see Ted’s little Mercury parked neatly against the garage. My sister’s Volvo was half in the driveway, half on our scraggly brown lawn. The front door to our little green ranch house was open, and we could hear the living room stereo blasting. I followed Mom up the cracked cement front steps and through the front door. The stereo and TV were on full blast, as was the radio in the kitchen. I looked to the left at the kitchen—the water in the sink was running and had overflowed onto the floor. In the living room, furniture was overturned, the cushions were off our ugly plaid couch. Lexie was pushing the vacuum cleaner frantically across the frayed living room carpet. Her movements seemed so jerky, puppet-like. The house smelled like bleach and lemons.

“Are you high?” Mom asked after she’d shut off the music. I’d turned off the kitchen faucet, my sneakers sloshing through the water on the floor.

My father came staggering out of the master bedroom in his boxer shorts and a rumpled T-shirt. “What’s going on?”

Lexie laughed, a loud hyena laugh. “I’m cleaning! Cleaning, keening, keening and cleaning! Do you have any idea how filthy the average house is? We talked about it this morning in science. And about dust. Did you know that a huge percentage of dust is made up of human skin? There’s probably sloughed-off skin cells from some dude who lived here fifty years ago hiding in the cracks in the floor. Just imagine it, Mama! When you’re taking a bath or sitting down on the couch, you’re wallowing in little pieces of other people!”

“Lexie,” Mom said. “I don’t think—”

“Spick and span!” Lexie had shouted at her, turning on the vacuum. “Spick and span! Spick and span!” she sang as she danced around with the vacuum.

“Did you take something, Lexie?”

“I took a bite out of crime,” Lexie said, laughing. “I mean, grime! Get it? Take a bite out of grime?” Her face was red, sweaty. Her hair was wild.

My father started laughing, too. “I get it. Grime!”

“Lexie, put the vacuum down. Let’s sit a minute,” Mom said.

“Oh, Mama, we can’t sit. Not when there’s so much to do! Do, do, da do run run! Let’s get our motors running. Grab a mop, Mom! Jax, you get the bucket. Ted, grab the broom and sweep along.”

Our father smiled, grabbed the broom, started singing, “Sweep low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home.”

“That’s it,” Lexie said. “Come on now, Mom and Jax! Spick and span!”

And what did we do? Did we put her in the car and get her to the ER to be evaluated and tested for drugs? Did we call Dr. Bradley, who’d been looking after Lexie and me since we’d been born?

No. We cleaned.

Ted, Mom, and I rolled up our sleeves and went to work beside Lexie. Although my father was oblivious, Mom and I were both scared. We knew something was wrong, really wrong—but we didn’t know what to do.

When Mom and I went to bed at two in the morning, Lexie and Ted were up, still cleaning. When Lexie finally crashed, she didn’t get out of bed for three days. Even then, Mom didn’t call Dr. Bradley. She’d hoped it was a one-time thing, a fluke.

I heard Ted talking to her about it later: “She’s fine. She’s an original, you know that. Christ, Linda! Some of us aren’t meant to lead cookie-cutter lives. The best thing we can do for Lex is to back the fuck off!”

In the end, Lexie’s illness, in all its toothy ugliness, could no longer be ignored.

We were all staying with Grandma at Sparrow Crest for Christmas that year. We’d had our traditional dinner of lasagna washed down with eggnog and cookies. Around two a.m., there was a terrible crash from downstairs. I was thirteen, too old for Santa, so I knew it wasn’t the fat man in the red suit. The hall lights came on—Gram, Mom, and Aunt Diane all came out of their rooms; my father was passed out from too much rum in his eggnog. In the living room, the tree had been tipped over—the colored lights were plugged in, and the ones that weren’t broken were flickering in a fire-hazard kind of way. The presents had been ripped open. And there sat Lexie in the center of it all. “Alexia?” Gram said, her voice surprisingly level and calm. “What are you doing?”

“Inside-outing,” Lexie said, eyes bright and cheeks red. “Everything we know and see, it’s right side out, right?” She laughed. “Right, right?” She paused, looked at each of us. “The way our skin holds everything else inside. All the bones and muscles and tendons and the stuff that really makes us work. We can’t see any of that. But what if we could? What if we could truly see everything, all the way through? What if we could take the whole world and turn it inside out?”

The room seemed to flicker in and out of focus. No one knew what to say.

“The presents,” Lexie went on. “They’re a metaphor. Don’t you get it?” She shook her head, disgusted because our faces told her we were most certainly not getting it. “Inside-outing! We open everything up. The presents! The tree! The goddamn clock in the hall—all of it! That way nothing can hide. That way we see everything. But everything is nothing, right? Inside and outside. Backwards and forwards!” She swiveled her head at me then, eyes beady and frantic, pleading. “Jax understands. Don’t you, Jax?”

I looked at the unwrapped gifts—gloves, slippers, a box of Whitman’s chocolates with all the chocolates and their little paper cups strewn across the carpet. The iPod I’d wanted so badly sat five feet away from me in its shiny white box. I didn’t want it anymore. Then I noticed Lexie’s right arm. Blood. Aunt Diane saw it, too.

“Lexie,” Aunt Diane said, stepping forward. “I need to see your arm, sweetie. I think you’ve hurt yourself.” Diane pulled back the robe to expose a deep gash on her forearm.

Lexie touched it, smearing blood. “Inside out,” she said. “Now you understand, right?”

She was hospitalized for a week and released on New Year’s Eve with a diagnosis: schizoaffective disorder of the bipolar type.

After being discharged, we drove from Vermont back home to Massachusetts in a snowstorm, Lexie and I tucked into the backseat. She smelled like the hospital and spent the whole ride with her face pressed against the window, fogging it up with her breath, then wiping the fog away.

As soon as we got home, my parents turned on the TV so we could watch the ball drop in Times Square. There was champagne for my parents, Shirley Temples for Lex and me.

“Isn’t it great to all be back home?” Ted said over and over. I looked around our dumpy little living room, at my sister’s expressionless face, at the way my mom studied Lexie’s every move, the way my father kept refilling his own glass.

After midnight, our parents retreated to their bedroom. Lex and I could hear them fighting. “I will not have her labeled like this,” my father said.

“Christ Ted, it’s a sickness, not a label. And you know what? It’s genetic. She gets it from your genes! You passed it down to her!”

“That is such bullshit!” my father yelled. “You wanna talk about crazy genes? How about your mother? She can’t even leave her fucking house, Linda!”

“Happy New Year,” Lex said to me, dumping her untouched Shirley Temple in a plant, then trudged off to bed.

Those first weeks and months after her diagnosis, while they tweaked meds, sent her to the hospital for weekly blood tests, to psychiatrist and therapy appointments, she became a strange one-dimensional form of who she’d once been, a paper doll version of herself.

My father lived with us for less than six months after Lexie’s diagnosis. He battled with my mother and Lexie’s doctors constantly, refusing any treatment plan. My mother came home one evening to find Ted flushing all of Lexie’s medication down the toilet.

“What the hell are you doing, Ted?”

“She hates them!” Ted said. “They’re turning her into a fucking zombie!”

“They’re managing her symptoms, Ted.” My mom salvaged what pills she could.

“Symptoms? You mean emotions? Since when is feeling things deeply an illness, Linda? It’s what makes us human!”

He stormed off to his art studio in the garage, my mother at his heels. They were yelling so loud, Lexie and I could hear them in the kitchen.

Their argument ended with her throwing him out. It didn’t seem like that big a deal at the time. She’d told him to leave before, but he’d always come back. This was different, though. This time he left and stayed gone. Our mother had gotten rid of him once and for all, and Lexie hated her for it. She loved our father fiercely and was devoted to him, no matter what.

Mom moved through the house like a woman on autopilot, a strange brokenhearted ghost. She knew she’d done the right thing, and that if there was any hope at all of Lexie getting a handle on her illness, it wouldn’t happen with my father around.

Our father took an apartment above Al’s Bar in town and moved his things little by little with a friend’s van. It was a crappy one-bedroom place that basically became his live-in art studio. When Lexie and I spent nights there on weekends, we slept in sleeping bags and camping mattresses on the floor between unfinished paintings and sculptures. His drinking took a turn for the worse, and Lexie and I sometimes skipped our weekend visits with him because it just wasn’t all that much fun to eat frozen dinners and watch him get shit-faced then pass out.

After Lexie went off to college, our father gave up his apartment and headed south. Eventually, he went as far south as you could go without hitting the ocean: Key West. We didn’t see him a whole lot after that. A couple times a year, he’d drive up to New England, bags loaded with crappy presents, and regale us with tales of his life in Florida: a life full of artists, strippers, fishermen, and beach bums. He was drinking a lot but seemed tan and happy. He started painting landscapes and selling them to the tourists. For the first time in his life, he was actually making a living from his art.

I went away to college in Seattle, and my father never came to visit me. Not even for graduation.

She died three years ago after a long struggle with breast cancer. We were all with her those last days in hospice: me, Lexie, and Ted. Ted had flown up from Florida and brought Key lime pie and a suitcase full of his old sketchbooks, dating back years. He fed Mom bites of pie and showed her his drawings from their lives together: Niagara Falls, where they’d had their honeymoon; my mother naked and pregnant, smiling up at him from the bed in their first apartment; baby Lexie sleeping in her crib; Lex and me on swings in the backyard; Lex and me in homemade Halloween costumes, both of us dressed as aliens from outer space; Mom sitting under a Christmas tree, laughing.

Together, they turned the pages and told stories that all started with “Remember…”

Mom died with our father holding her hand and Lexie telling her one of her fabulous stories that went on and on, one unbelievable turn after another.