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 small kitchenette table.
Cheyenne looked at her mother with her head tilted and brows crumpled, then picked up the stack of papers. She crinkled her forehead more and looked at her mother strangely.
“It’s college! I got accepted to college. I’m going to school for nursing,” her mother said excitedly.
Cheyenne’s eyebrows flew up into arches on her face. “Wow, Mommy! That’s great!” she said enthusiastically. In Cheyenne’s mind, she selfishly wondered what was going to happen to her and Lil Kev while their mother went to school.
“I have to make things better for us while your father is gone. I wasn’t on the system all this time, and I’m not going on it now,” her mother said that day. Then, as if she could read Cheyenne’s mind, she broke the news to her and Lil Kev that they would have to stay with fat Ms. Lula at night while she went to work and school.
Cheyenne groaned. She knew that Ms. Lula and her house stank like corn chips and ass. She hated every time they had to go there. But her mother was too determined to let Cheyenne and Lil Kev’s complaints deter her. As much as they cried, their mother held her head up high, left them, and pursued a nursing career.
When her mother had a break from school, she would pack them all up—Cheyenne, Kelsi, and Lil Kev—and they would take the same long van ride upstate to see her father. Her mother would sacrifice everything to make sure she visited her father. If it was visit day for her father, her mother didn’t care if she missed school, work, or they missed school. There was nothing more important to Desiree Turner than going to see her husband. She was as loyal as they came. When most women would’ve moved on with their lives as soon as they heard his sentence being read in court, her mother stood steady, stuck out her chest, and made a promise to hold her father down no matter how long it took.
Cheyenne couldn’t ever forget the first time they visited her father. He had only been gone for a month, and she’d been missing him like crazy. Her mother dressed them all in their best clothes. She herself wore a pretty yellow-and-orange sundress that brought out her complexion. She had accessorized the dress with gold bangles and a pair of tan espadrilles. Kelsi and Cheyenne were dressed alike in bright sundresses—Kelsi’s aqua green and Cheyenne’s fuchsia.
Her father was still on Riker’s Island at that time. Cheyenne remembered that the guards at the jail treated them like animals. They were searched like thieves. Lil Kev’s milk had to be poured out of his bottle, and her mother’s pocketbook was dumped out.
“This is just stupid! We not in jail here, you know!” Kelsi sassed to the guards.
That was the one thing Cheyenne loved about her best friend. She never backed down from a fight or confrontation, even with adults.
When the guards brought her father out to see them that day, he had chains on his hands and feet. He sat on the opposite side of a broken-down table, and after one hug for each of them, they weren’t able to touch him again. In one month, her father had changed drastically to Cheyenne. He just didn’t look healthy. His skin had gone dry, his hair had grown out into a small afro, and he looked way older than he had the day he was arrested.
Cheyenne thought to herself that her father was dying inside that place, that he would never make it out of there alive. She cried for almost the entire visit. She hated seeing her father in that stupid orange jumpsuit when she was used to seeing him in nice, crisp, name brand clothes.
Kelsi, on the other hand, was overjoyed to see him. She even tried to hog Cheyenne’s father’s conversation from her mother.
Lil Kev refused to even look at their father that day. If he tried to touch Lil Kev, he would scream at the top of his lungs. Finally, her father relented and never tried to touch her baby brother again.
“What’s up with my baby boy? He forgot his old man already?” her father