The Execution of Noa P. Singleton
Read The Execution of Noa P. Singleton Online
Authors: Elizabeth L. Silver
Tags: #Fiction, #Contemporary, #Mystery
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2013 by Elizabeth L. Silver
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Silver, Elizabeth L., 1978–
The execution of Noa P. Singleton : a novel / Elizabeth L. Silver. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Death row inmates—Fiction. 2. Women prisoners—Fiction. 3. Attorney and client—Fiction. 4. Women lawyers—Fiction. 5. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3619.I5475E94 2013
813′.6—dc23 2012040204
eISBN: 978-0-385-34744-0
Jacket design by Ben Wiseman
v3.1
For Amir
Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice
.
H. L. M
ENCKEN
I
N THIS WORLD, YOU ARE EITHER GOOD OR EVIL
. I
F NOT, THEN
a court or a teacher or a parent is bound to tag your identity before you’ve had a chance to figure it out on your own. The gray middle ground, that mucous-thin terrain where most of life resides, is really only a temporary annex, like gestation or purgatory. It shadows over everyone in its vacuous and insipid cape, flying across the sky, making smoke letters out of your fears. You always know it’s up there, but you never quite know how to get rid of it. It waits for you, patiently, until the day it wraps you in its cyclone and you can no longer vacillate between black and white, artist or scientist, teacher or student. It is this point at which you must choose one way of life or the other. Victor or victim. And when you do, the fear drips away as seamlessly as a river drains into an ocean. For me, it happened on January 1, 2003.
My name is Noa P. Singleton. I am thirty-five years old and I reside in the Pennsylvania Institute for Women. My identification number is 10271978. I am the only child of Miss Teenage California 1970 and a weeklong sperm donor whose name my mother claimed she couldn’t recall. I was salutatorian for my high school, where I ran varsity track and wrote for the school newspaper, investigating the illicit and often extensive use and sale of drugs on campus. I studied biochemistry and engineering at the University of Pennsylvania and have worked as a restaurant hostess, roller rink waitress, substitute teacher, math tutor, and laboratory research assistant. I can recall with faint hyperbole the moment I took my first steps. I’ve had one serious boyfriend. The trial that led me to you lasted only five days, though the jury deliberated for another four. It took only a handful of
additional jury pools to select the twelve individuals who were to sentence me to death five short months following my trial. Their names are now embossed in my memory, along with my grandmother’s scent (mothballs and jewelry cleaner), my first boyfriend’s habitual postcoital cigarette, and the feeling of the Latin letters from my high school diploma raised against my thumb.
Sadly though, my memories are starting to fade in here. Events slip off their shelves into the wrong year, and I’m not always sure that I’m putting them back in their proper home. I know the loneliness and the lack of human contact is the ostensible culprit for my memory loss, so it would be nice to talk to other inmates at least. There are so few of us.
When I arrived, there were fifty-one women on death row in the United States. All we needed was to drop one to have a proper beauty pageant, or add one if you wanted to include Puerto Rico and Guam. Now they tell me there are fifty-eight. And, of course, of these fifty-one, fifty-eight, fifty-something women, half claim to be innocent. They’re always trying to blame their crime on a phantom. The phantom perpetrator who framed them, the phantom DNA evidence that vanished from the evidence locker, the phantom accomplice who was truly the megalomaniacal brains behind the operation. But the reality is there is really only one phantom who matters. The state of Pennsylvania, madam landlord to one of the most copious apparitional populations in the country. She bubble wraps humans onto death row, rolling us out on the conveyer belt of justice as if we were nothing more than bobble heads, only to let us sit forever in our single cells, with our heads wobbling to and fro, to and fro, to and fro, to fucking eternity, never allowing the stifling, nauseating shrill of motion to stop. It’s almost as if that death sentence sucked the stability out of our minds, ripping out our vestibular anchors, and now everything around us, for all intents and purposes (and pardon the pun), wobbles.
I can see the five silver bars three feet beyond my arms’ reach. They shift into double vision as ten lines of coil, prison garments,
a staff of music. I hold out my hand to observe the intersecting life lines on my inner palm, and they morph into the unknown streets of a town map. A town I barely recognize anymore. The outer sheaths of my dry hands slough away in crepelike film before my eyes. And my five shaky fingers become ten, and twenty, and sometimes forty. This wobbliness never ceases, no matter what they do to us, no matter how many appeals our lawyers feign to promise us, no matter how many visitors we get, or how many journalists and television producers suckle on the teat of our fascinating life histories. Pennsylvania rarely kills us, almost as if she is trying to mimic my sovereign California home in a perpetual state of circumventing mediocrity. We just stay here until we die of natural causes—old age camouflaged by a potpourri of breast cancer, ovarian cancer, pulmonary emboli, cirrhosis, lupus, diabetes, suicide.
So here I sit, attempting to relive the flaws of my own past with ineffectual fortitude. I know I did it. The state knows I did it, though they never really cared why. Even my lawyers knew I did it from the moment I liquidated my metallic savings bank hoarded in the bloated gut of a pink pig to pay their bills. I was lucid, attentive, mentally sound, and pumped with a single cup of decaffeinated Lemon Zinger tea when I pulled the trigger. Post-conviction, I never contested that once.
I
T ALL STARTED SIX MONTHS BEFORE
X-
DAY WHEN
O
LIVER
Stansted and Marlene Dixon visited the Pennsylvania Institute for Women in Muncy. Oliver trotted eagerly in first, like a wet surfer trying so desperately not to miss his second wave. He had thin brown hair that hung limply around the cherry contour of his face in a style that was probably at least a decade behind the times. (I know this because it was the hairstyle of choice when I was arrested.) A lone dimple nicked the center of his chin in a clean gunshot.
I was in the diminutive holding cell with the telephone receivers where they dragged me whenever I had a visitor. Visitors weren’t rare—a story for the local newspaper? a feature for a news magazine television series? a book deal?—but when Oliver Stansted came up for his first breath, firm but anxious, steady but nervous, twenty, maybe twenty-five, I realized that my expectations would quickly need readjustment.
“Noa, is it?” he said, speaking impossibly close to the receiver. “Noa Singleton?”
The aristocratic
Noa is it?
British phrasing of his greeting skipped upward at the end of the statement as if it were a posh question in one syllable. Confidence and naïveté burst in the same hyperenunciated greeting.
“My name is Oliver Stansted and I’m a lawyer in Philadelphia,”
he said, looking down to his little script. His was handwritten in red ink. “I work for a nonprofit organization that represents inmates on death row and at various other points of the appeals process, and I’ve just recently been appointed to your case.”
“Okay,” I said, staring at him.
He was not the first wide-eyed advocate to use me as a bullet point on his climb to success. I was used to these unexpected visits: the local news reporters shortly after I was arrested, the national ones after my conviction, the appointed appellate lawyers year after begrudging year as I was drafted into the futile cycle of appeals without anyone truly listening to me explain that I had no interest in pursuing further legal action, that I just wanted to get to November 7 as quickly as possible. They, like this new one, had no concern for my choices.