“Miss, I mean, I’ll handle it.”

Almost reflexively, I asked the question I didn’t want to ask because I didn’t want to know the answer. It was so much easier to choose to believe that the possibility of escalation didn’t exist here; easier to believe that this boy would leave the hospital and be able to go to school safely and survive to graduation; easier to believe that he didn’t literally feel his life was in danger every time he left his home or that his fear was somehow off base. I could have chosen to believe that and simply have posed a leading question—Okay, so you mean you’re fine? Everyone will be okay, right?—and he would have had the opportunity to nod in tacit agreement. We could then have been contentedly linked in a comfortable lie—a lie, like any lie, that would have required the active participation of both parties.

But I didn’t do that. Instead, I let the question jump from my lips. (I can’t claim any great insight in asking it. It felt more as if I were on the edge of my seat while watching a film on HBO and had just blurted out what I most feared right before my friend shushed me, “quiet!”)

“Are you planning to get even with him?”

Gabriel replied, “I’m just gonna take care of myself. If he leaves me alone, won’t be no issues.”

He sat there silently gazing at his hands as he rubbed his thumbs and tapped his foot.

Again, the impulse made me ask him the obvious and seemingly ridiculous next question. It was a question that felt foreign to me, given that I had grown up in Northwest Washington, DC, where people drove Volvos with bumper stickers reading BOOKS NOT BOMBS, COEXIST, and THINK LOCALLY, ACT GLOBALLY. When my classmates parked their BMW convertibles to go to AP English class, they never worried that they would be carjacked. When I walked to my car from my private school, it never occurred to me that I might be threatened for my book bag, loafers, or cashmere sweater.

My lesson on the impermanence of material items was a little different from Gabriel’s. Toward the end of high school, I learned that parents can spend more money than they have in order to give the appearance of wealth. But that appearance is belied when one by one bathrooms are rendered unusable because the plumbing can’t be maintained and the pool algae is so dense it looks like an extension of the unkempt yard. I didn’t know exactly when my family’s financial ruin was at its tipping point, but by then, I was well practiced at compartmentalizing.

The job of my youth had been to get out of that house and out of that life. So, when strange men knocked on our doors at all hours, asking for my father (who was invariably not there), and then left, giving no name, no message, I let it go. (Honestly, I was just glad he wasn’t home.) And when I heard my mother on the phone mumbling something about legal fees, when my father had to close his medical practice, and when they went on to lose the court battle over house number three in DC, I didn’t question any of it. Anyway, my graduation from high school was only months away.

Before my first year of college ended, I knew I could never go back home. Thankfully, my parents’ divorce was well under way, and my father was living God knows where. My mother hadn’t sued him for alimony—she’d just wanted the marriage over as quickly as possible. But she couldn’t afford to maintain that home in any way. Increasingly over that period the house lacked running water and heat. Various animals could be heard scurrying around in the attic. My brother moved out soon after I had, our sister followed, and our mother was at home only sporadically. Fortunately, my grandparents lived nearby. My mother wasn’t yet working, so she spent much of her free time at our grandparents’ home, but still used our home to sleep, eat, and deal with the final proceedings.

She should have lived with her parents, my grandparents, during this time. Years later, she said her reasoning for not having done so was because she didn’t want to impose on them, to crowd their already crowded house, which was also home to my aunt and a cat. But I never found this answer truthful. What’s more honest is that for my mother, most topics of discussion—whether it was why she picked abusive men (my brother’s father was her first abusive husband; my father, her second), why she valued money over health, where all the money was coming from, and where all of it went—were merely occasions for subterfuge. The real reason she couldn’t live with my grandparents was because she couldn’t risk their being witnesses to the truth of her life: It had been a sham. Because this truth of her life was a subject she would never broach, rather than risking my grandparents’ asking the obvious questions, she stayed in the dilapidated family home. It seemed easier to her, I’m sure, than being exposed to their scrutiny within their four walls. So, my mother preferred to dwell in the dark, in our home, until the matter was forcibly taken out of her hands. This was her well-worn groove.

During my first two years in college, I worked various jobs on campus (at the food court, bartending) to help support myself. My father would send me money, too. I’d siphon off funds from the money orders he sent and from my student jobs to forward to my mother until she had a steady job and had moved out of the District.

During my second year of college, my mother had a yard sale to raise money for herself. I wanted to get back to secure the items I cared about, but she said there wasn’t time to wait for a semester break. Besides, she added, someone must have already bought the ceramic fish I made in my favorite high school art class. (I’d fashioned it after one of the fighting fish I remembered from our fish tank, but toned down the hues to black and teal.) And apparently, it was anybody’s guess what had happened to the woodblock I carved under the same instructor and the pastoral prints I made from it. Gone, too, were the ceramic mugs I’d made in elementary school.

I was glad when my mother left Washington, but the going was cruel. It felt like the void left after a fire, except there hadn’t been a fire. There had just been two adults who’d haphazardly collided just long enough to produce children, create decades of chaos, and then flee, leaving their offspring to pick up the scattered pieces however they could. So, I understood how things got lost and stolen. I “got” the pain of instability. I knew the pain of the kind of violence that happens privately, at home; the violence that’s not reported, much less discussed; the violence you can’t escape because it’s where you lay your head, until you can manage to pack up and secure a safe place to bathe, to eat, to sleep, to be.

Still, public violence was new to me. I hadn’t grown up with the reality of being unsafe outside the home, of not knowing whether you can walk to the store without being attacked, or go to school without being shot. I had only a hint of this insecurity while growing up with my brother in the 1990s. There were nights when I was worried about his safety driving while black. But that was during an era in DC when black men of affluence were spared the violence wrought upon poor men of color. Those times have since changed; in this one way, our country has moved closer to class equality.

Sure, there were other, rare acts of public violence in my community (a kidnapping in a park, a robbery in a grocery store parking lot), but these incidents were uncommon, so we felt safe at least outside the home if not within.

Still, I read the news and listened to NPR, and theoretically, I knew these things happened. So, a little embarrassed, I asked Gabriel, on that day at Mercy Hospital in the South Bronx, the question I had to ask:

“Do you have a weapon? A gun or a knife?”

“A gun.”

I asked again. “You have a gun?”

He said nothing.

I tried again. “Do you have access to a gun?”

“Don’t worry about it, miss. Don’t worry about it,” he replied tersely, indicating that this would be his final answer.

“Gabriel, this is all very dangerous. This is one of those instances I mentioned before, where I have to break confidentiality. Anytime a young person mentions that they have access to a gun and may use it to cause harm, we have to speak with the social worker just to keep you safe.”

Gabriel didn’t move and didn’t say anything. I waited for any response or sign. He simply shook his head and froze.

“I’ll be right back,” I said.

I went outside and spoke to my supervising attending physician. I presented the case to her—residents must review all patient cases with their supervising attendings—concluding my presentation with my assessment that, given the disclosure of potential violence by firearm, I had to speak with the boy’s parents and the social worker. She advised me to proceed. I put a page out to Social Work and then went to the parents, who were waiting outside the examination room. I summarized for them the situation and my concerns.