All my life I’d wanted him to change: to give up booze, seek help, be a better father. I wanted him to love me as much as he loved Lexie. But everything I ever did just pushed him further away.

As if reading my mind, Diane said, “He’s never going to change.”

I blew out a breath. “I know.”

“Your mother knew it, too. She knew it and she fell in love with him anyway. And he loved her. He really did, in his own way. He’s not a bad man. He is the way he is.”

I nodded.

“And he and Lexie,” Diane said. “They were so close.”

“I know,” I said, pushing aside my plate but holding on to my wine. “I know.”

“They both shared that… what did Ted used to call it? ‘The artist’s spirit’?”

I sank back on the couch. “Artist’s soul.”

“Yeah, that’s it,” she said, smiling.

* * *

Looking back, my social worker brain sees all the warning signs, but at the time none of us understood them for what they were. Lexie had always been a moody girl, ecstatically happy one minute, and then she’d lash out, in terrible, cruel ways. She knew everyone’s soft spots—the places that would hurt most if she poked them.

“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.”