I can’t understand you. What are you saying?” Cheyenne asked urgently. She was definitely jolted into full wakefulness now. Something was wrong, that much she knew. Her father continued sobbing into the phone. Cheyenne’s body went ice cold, and her teeth began to chatter. She had never heard her father cry in her life. Even when he’d been snatched away from their family and locked up like an animal, he hadn’t shed a tear.
“What? What are you saying? Something happened to who?” Cheyenne asked, her voice going so high-pitched it hurt her own ears.
Amber was standing in front of Cheyenne now with wide eyes. She was moving her lips to silently ask Cheyenne if everything was okay. Cheyenne put her hand up in a halting motion to Amber.
“Okay, calm down,” Cheyenne said, her voice cracking. She heard her father take a deep, shaky, wet breath. He started speaking again. She was finally able to understand what he was saying.
“Something bad happened to Mommy?” Cheyenne asked calmly at first, not really registering what he was saying. Her face crumpled in confusion. There was no way something bad could happen to her mother. She was the best person on earth. Nothing bad could happen to her. Then, suddenly what her father was telling her finally settled into Cheyenne’s brain.
“Something bad like what?” she asked, her words coming out slowly. She held the phone tightly to her ear.
No!” she screamed so loudly Amber jumped and looked like she’d seen a ghost.
Her father had said, “Cheyenne, your mother is gone.”
Cheyenne collapsed to the floor like someone had kicked her legs out from under her. There was no way she could live without her mother. She was and always had been Cheyenne’s whole world.
* * *
Cheyenne still didn’t know how she’d made it from Texas to Brooklyn in one piece. Amber had come along to make sure she got there safely. Amber was just a sweetheart like that. The entire trip home was a blur for Cheyenne. Bus, train, plane—all a blur. Amber and Cheyenne didn’t talk much, but their unspoken body language let Cheyenne know that she wasn’t imagining things. Her mother was dead. Murdered. She wasn’t going to believe it until she saw it. Proof was what she needed, but definitely not what she wanted.
According to her father, no one knew anything about the circumstances surrounding her mother’s death, except that she had been murdered. Shot to death. No robbery, no motive. Just cold-blooded murder.
Kelsi, Cheyenne’s best friend from childhood, hadn’t called Cheyenne after she spoke to her father. Cheyenne had checked her cell phone several times as she traveled, but she had never gotten a call from Kelsi. That was odd, but Cheyenne figured Kelsi was probably just as distraught as she was. After all, Kelsi had practically been raised in the Turner home. She was more like Cheyenne’s sister than her friend.
When Cheyenne arrived at her building, there was a candlelight shrine outside dedicated to her mother. Her father met her outside. As soon as Cheyenne stepped out of the cab, she started screaming. It was real. Her mother, her best friend, her whole world was gone. Dead. Cheyenne’s legs refused to work, and her mind refused to accept it.
“Hi, baby girl.” Her father greeted her with a forced smile. His eyes were visibly swollen, and he trembled as he pulled her into him for an embrace.
Cheyenne looked around at all the people outside. All the candles. It was real. Her mother was dead.
Murdered. She couldn’t stop repeating that in her head. Murdered. But why?
“Who would do this? She never hurt nobody! She never hurt nobody! Why?” Cheyenne screamed through tears. “Why? No!”
She caught a glimpse of a few people from the neighborhood crying and wiping their tears away. Everyone loved her mother. That was a fact.
Her father grabbed her and held her, but even he couldn’t keep her from dropping down to the ground where people had placed candles and teddy bears in her mother’s memory.
“No! No! God, no!” Cheyenne could not stop screaming. Her body shook all over, and her head pounded. Everything seemed to be moving in slow motion. Cheyenne just knew she would wake up from a nightmare any minute.
Cheyenne couldn’t remember how and when they were able to get her upstairs, but she did remember walking into the apartment and collapsing again. There was no life without her mother. None at all. Her mother had been everything to everyone all of Cheyenne’s life. When her father had been snatched from their family, it was her mother who’d kept them afloat. Cheyenne squeezed her eyes shut at the thought.
The hot summer day in August 1996, when the police took her father away, they’d also taken the Turner family’s house. They trashed it before they took it. Cheyenne remembered her mother explaining to her that what the police had done was called “asset forfeiture.” Her mother said it wasn’t the regular police; instead, it was the Feds that executed a search and seizure warrant on their place that day. They had destroyed Cheyenne’s room and almost every room in the house. They took all the family’s jewelry, clothes, fur coats, artwork, couches, and beds. They’d dumped out their cabinets, closets, and garage. They had pulled up the floorboards and the carpets. Cheyenne never understood what they were looking for when they had taken sledgehammers to the walls.
Who hides things inside of walls? she remembered thinking when she saw the huge holes.
At nine years old, her family and her life had been devastated. There was no fixing it. Without her father, the Turners had nothing but the few clothes her mother managed to gather before it had all been destroyed or seized.
Her mother had a small stash of cash that the police hadn’t gotten to, and someone from across town brought her some money they’d owed to Cheyenne’s father. None of that lasted long. Desiree Turner and her two children ended up moving to the sixth floor in the same building Cheyenne’s best friend Kelsi lived in, in the Carey Gardens projects.
“Back to the projects from where we came,” her mother said sadly the day they moved back. She told Cheyenne it was the apartment her father had grown up in when he was a little boy. He’d kept it after his mother died.
Cheyenne had assumed they’d always lived the lavish life she’d been accustomed to down in the gated community called Sea Gate. She didn’t know her mother and father had ever lived in the projects when she was a baby.
At first, it was exciting living in the same building as Kelsi. It was easy for Kelsi to just come upstairs to the Turner house to play, eat, and do all the things they liked to do. After a while, Cheyenne realized that living in the building where her father used to work was terrible. She had never seen a roach in her life until they moved there. There were so many roaches that her little brother, Lil Kev, refused to walk on the floors in their apartment. He would scream until their mother or Cheyenne picked him up and carried him everywhere. The constant noises in the hallway all night kept Cheyenne up, since she had been used to living on a quiet, tree-lined block in Sea Gate. Kelsi told Cheyenne she would get used to the noises, but Cheyenne never really did. Instead, she just grew accustomed to not getting much sleep.
By the time 1998 rolled around, Cheyenne was eleven, and Lil Kev was four. Like a faucet turned off, just like that, their mother had finally stopped all her crying over their father’s absence and their living situation.
“Look! Look at what I did for us!” her mother exclaimed one day, throwing a stack of papers onto their
