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  “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 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 s
acrifice 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 asked, his voice cracking like he was about to cry.

  As young as he was, Lil Kev sensed that it would just be best to cut his ties with their father right away. Not Cheyenne. She’d held onto the hopes that her father, Kevin “Big K” Turner, was going to win his appeals and be home with them in no time. At least, that was what her father had told her he was “working on” every time they visited him after that.

  It wasn’t until 2003, when Cheyenne was sixteen years old, that she finally stopped believing in her father’s appeals story. Seven years of the same old story had turned her into a cynical, bitter teenager who didn’t believe in shit. Her father had been transferred from Rikers Island to Upstate New York, which signaled to Cheyenne that he was going away for longer than they’d all expected. She was old enough by then to figure out that her mother had no more money to pay lawyers and that her father’s street influence and connections had dried up, so none of his former employees came up off any money to foot his appeals bill.

  When Cheyenne did her own silly form of research, she found out that her father had been sentenced under New York’s Rockefeller drug laws, and no amount of appeals could reverse the draconian sentencing guidelines that came with those laws. It was a lifetime behind bars unless a miracle happened and something changed about the system.

  Kelsi was the only one who faithfully accompanied Cheyenne’s mother to visit her father. Her mother didn’t take Lil Kev anymore because he never spoke to his father, and it made the visits harder on everyone. Cheyenne stopped going as well. It had become too painful for her to see her father aging ten times faster than if he’d been home. Seeing him in shackles and handcuffs, helpless, useless, had also taken its toll on her emotionally. She suddenly found herself really angry with her father. Cheyenne guessed years of watching her mother bust her ass to become a nurse, all while keeping food on the table and clothes on their backs, made her resent him for leaving them.

  Her mother would act like she didn’t get the memo that Cheyenne wasn’t visiting her father anymore. The night before each visit, her mother would still try to get Cheyenne to change her mind.

  “Y’all need to go to bed so we can get up and get to the vans early. I like to find seats in the front so I can be first on that line when we get up there,” her mother said one evening as she stood in Cheyenne’s doorway, a warm smile spread on her beautiful but tired face.

  Cheyenne hated seeing her mother so tired all the time. She worked twelve-hour shifts four days a week as a nurse at Brooklyn Hospital. Then, her mother would use her days off to either shop for things for her father or visit her father. Cheyenne didn’t know how her mother did it—stay loyal like that. To Cheyenne, there was loyalty, and then there was stupidity. In her eyes, after so many years of getting nothing in return, her mother was bordering on stupidity.

  “I’m not going. But you already knew this, since I didn’t go the last three times y’all went,” Cheyenne told her mother flatly that evening.

  Her mother let out a long sigh, and her face went dark. “Cheyenne, I know it hasn’t been easy, but he is still your father. You know that he would’ve never left if he had his choice. He is powerless right now, but it is not his fault. Kevin would’ve given his life to be here for us,” her mother replied, her tone stern but soft.

  She had been telling Cheyenne and Lil Kev the same thing for years at that point. Cheyenne had grown tired of her mother making excuses for her father. Cheyenne could not understand the kind of love her mother had for her father, and she could only hope to have anything close to it when she grew up. Even though her mother had worked herself to the bone and had to live in the filthy projects, she never showed one ounce of resentment toward her father. Not even one ounce. That night, Cheyenne turned her back and pulled her blanket up to her neck. She was done discussing the issue with her mother. If she ever laid eyes on her father again, it surely wouldn’t be while he was behind prison walls. That was Cheyenne’s final proclamation on the topic.

  “Have it your way, Cheyenne, but he loves you more than he loves his own life,” her mother said with feeling.

  Cheyenne sucked her teeth, wishing her mother would just turn off her light and get out of her damn doorway.

  “Well, Kelsi, if you’re going with me, be up,” she heard her mother say, her voice filled with defeat.

  The door clicked closed. Cheyenne finally relaxed. Then she heard Kelsi rustling with her blanket on the other bed in the small bedroom. Kelsi was rocking. Cheyenne could tell from the sound the mattress made. Kelsi rocked when she was mad.

  “You know what, Cheyenne? I wasn’t going to say nothing to you, but you are a fucking spoiled brat,” Kelsi gritted.

  Cheyenne could tell that Kelsi’s teeth were clenched as she spoke. Cheyenne knew Kelsi so well. Cheyenne popped her eyes open in response to her friend’s words.

  “No, correction. I was a spoiled brat. Now I live in the projects with the roaches and rats and crackheads just like everybody else,” Cheyenne snapped back. She hadn’t meant for it to come out like that, but it was too late. The words had already left her lips.

  Kelsi jumped up and turned on the light. Her eyes were hooded over, and her face had folded into a snarl. Cheyenne saw the hurt etched on Kelsi’s forehead like a mask. Kelsi moved on her legs like a boxer ready to pounce.

  “What the fuck is that supposed to mean? Like everybody else like who? Like me? Oh, you won’t go visit your father because he got arrested, and you, Princess Cheyenne, was reduced to living the projects like Kelsi, the poor bi
tch, daughter of a crackhead who lives with roaches and rats? You are fucking disgusting, Cheyenne! Your father was so good to you when he was out on these fucking streets! You lived in a real house and now you have to live in the projects? So what? You don’t have enough clothes to throw away or give to the poor, destitute daughter of a crackhead? Oh, woe is fucking me, Cheyenne! Why don’t you remember all the things he did do for you while he was here? How he loved you like no man ever will! How he gave you everything and risked his freedom to do that! How he loved your mother and showed you how a real man is supposed to love you! Why don’t you fucking love him and appreciate him like I do and thank God he is your father, instead of wishing everyday he was your father like I do? You fucking disgust me! I’m going home!” Kelsi ranted and pointed in Cheyenne’s face with every word like she wanted to slap the shit out of her.

  Cheyenne’s eyes stretched as wide as dinner plates, and her mouth hung open. She couldn’t even respond to what Kelsi had said.

  Kelsi slammed the bedroom door and left. Cheyenne’s shoulders slumped, and her chest felt like a two-ton elephant was sitting on it. The tears came hot and fast. Cheyenne couldn’t have stopped them even if she wanted to.

  That night was the first time Kelsi and Cheyenne had had a real disagreement in all the years they’d been friends. That night was also the first time Cheyenne realized how much Kelsi really loved her father.

  * * *

  It was over three hours after Cheyenne returned home from medical school to deal with her mother’s murder when Kelsi finally showed up. Cheyenne was lying on the couch with a cold compress over her eyes when Kelsi came in. Kelsi rushed over to Cheyenne.

  “Oh, Chey... I’m so sorry,” Kelsi cried out, bending down and hugging Cheyenne. “I’m so, so sorry,” Kelsi repeated.

  Cheyenne’s floodgate of tears started up again. “Why? Why? She didn’t deserve this! She was a good person,” Cheyenne sobbed. “She would never hurt anyone. Everyone loved her! I loved her!”