At-Risk by Amina Gautier

me
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boogiemen
    Our mother’s voice—raised in anger—followed by the crash of something sharp, delicate, and expensive shattering against the wall that was ours on one side and our parents’ on the other woke us up. Dressed in a black full-length slip with pink rollers in her hair, our mother stood tough by her side of the bed—tough despite the defeat that sat in her eyes and the tears that rolled down her puffy cheeks—holding up a picture frame, the muscles on her brown arms flexed with the need to throw. The picture was barely recognizable under the layers of dust that had piled up on the cheap frame, but I knew that it was the picture of us taken at Coney Island two summers ago. Our father looked relaxed in it. For once, the wary slant of his mouth had given way to a hesitant smile. Our mother stood on the opposite end, her hair curled in a flip, her face beaming, looking like a taller version of Coretta Scott King. My older brother, Julian, and I stood between the two of them. Julian’s eyes were closed; he’d gotten caught blinking. I had a scowl on my face because I couldn’thave a second candied apple. They took that picture back when we did things as a family, when we went to Coney Island and Mets games during the summer and to the skating rink in Restoration Plaza during the winter. Before my father started spending nights elsewhere, before Julian and I found out that we had a little brother or sister—we never learned which—out in Jamaica, Queens. Before we fell apart.
    â€œStop it, Anna,” our father said as he turned his back to her and continued to pack.
    Our mother ignored him. “You see this?” she asked, shaking the frame. “This is a family. Why don’t you take this with you to remind you of what you’re throwing away?” She made as if to hand it to him. When he reached out to take it, she pulled back. “Or why don’t you just throw it away like you’re doing to us, Walter? Here, I’ll do it for you!” She hurled it against the wall. The dusty glass splintered on impact and the cheap ceramic frame broke off into chunks.
    She yelled, “Go on then. Leave! That’s what you do best! How these boys gonna eat? Who they gonna look up to with you gone, Walter? Who gonna teach them to become men. Me?”
    Our father went over to her, taking deliberately slow steps, and grabbed her by her wrists. He held them both in one of his large hands. “Now you’re gonna stop throwing things! You already broke two frames. This how you want the boys to see you?” he asked. She looked over to where we huddled in the corner by the door, gripping each other’s hands. Our mother turned to us as if she’d never before seen us in her entire life. Like we were ghosts. It took her a few seconds to focus on our faces. Julian squeezed my hand. A shiver passed from him to me. I squeezed back. Then she smiled and waved us off, “Go back to bed, boys. Everything’s all right. Go back to your room and go to sleep.”
    We beat it back to our room but left the door open so we could hear.
    The fights were nothing new. They had been going on for the last two years, ever since we moved from our brownstone in Bed-Stuy to these projects in East New York. We could always hear them arguing, but our mother’s anger had always been long-suffering, quiet, and plaintive. It seemed to me that not only had the fights become more frequent but that they had reversed so that they were now more dispassionate on our father’s part and more violent on our mother’s.
    â€œThink he leaving, Ju?” I asked my brother.
    Julian shrugged and climbed onto the top bunk. “He been leaving for two years and ain’t never left yet.”
    We were too caught up in ourselves and our tiny world that summer to be affected by our father’s departure. Our world consisted of a six-block radius. It encompassed the