“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 theER 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 thatreally 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 youget 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 seeeverything. But everything isnothing, 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 couldwatch 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 fromyourgenes!Youpassed 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?”
