The Execution of Noa P. Singleton (24 page)

O
LIVER HASN
’
T VISITED ME IN WEEKS
. N
OT SINCE HE LEFT ME
with stacks of trial transcripts to read as if flipping through the pages were shoddy excuses for hash marks dictating time served. I troll through the documents like they are my very own Genesis, my Tanakh, my personal Book of Mormon, my trusty Koran. Patsmith does it, too. So do all the other inmates, on the Row or off.

When I read over the pages, at first I think of what Ollie wants me to understand. I look back to the testimony of my ninth grade science teacher, my former School District of Philadelphia employer, even of Bobby, and they all seemed to be trying so hard to make me seem normal, as if sifting through the drawers of my past would help explain what happened on January 1. But they couldn’t do it. Normal was not something that my lawyers successfully argued on my behalf at my trial nor what the witnesses portrayed, no matter how hard they tried to make it fit. It was like a pregnant woman trying to fit into her grade school jeans, a twin-sized sheet on a king-sized bed, a tape in a CD slot. It just didn’t work.

Maybe Ollie disagrees. Maybe he sees something in me. Maybe he sees in me what I see in him. Maybe he’s trying to tell me that if I were anything but normal, then my life’s story wouldn’t die with the three syringes I’m bound to consume in the next couple of months. If I were truly anything but average, then maybe I wouldn’t have gotten
caught. I wouldn’t have gotten convicted. I wouldn’t have gotten the sentence I got.

Then again, maybe he just lost interest as quickly as he found it and is leaving me with my pages for, I don’t know, redundancy. Because when push comes to shove, I know that I’m just another story for cable television, expected to leave my final words for society to probe.

Only in the last few weeks have I pondered language as furiously as I did when I was eighteen. These trial transcripts will remain public record until I am gone (and long after I go), and news stories about my death will be played for a handful of afternoons and nights. By this time in two months, everyone will have forgotten about me and about Sarah and about what happened New Year’s Day all those years ago. But those words, those last thoughts, which I will be expected to bestow upon the public like a defective consolation prize, terrorize me almost more than my own trial. Granted, just like my trial when I didn’t have to take the stand, I also don’t actually need to proffer any words of wisdom just moments before the gurney.

And yet, I’m torn.

Language stays with us longer than even our crimes themselves. Perhaps that’s what Ollie’s trying to get me to see. Those words remain always, while papers and evidence eviscerate, peeling into orange curls and blackened petals in the crematorium of dead documents.

In here, our final words are the criminal equivalent of stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Each handprint and footprint is hardened for eternity in the eye of the beholder for people to fit in their palms or ogle from a distance.

You can be simple and delicate, like most of the women in here, telling their babies they love them and will meet them on the other side. Or you can be shocking and scandalous for the very purpose of being shocking and scandalous.

Before he was executed in North Carolina, Ricky Lee Sanderson said, “I didn’t take [the last meal] because I have very strong convictions about abortion and the 33 million babies that have been aborted in this country. Those babies never got a first meal, and that’s why
I didn’t take the last in their memory.” Bobby Atworth decreed, “If all you know is hatred, if all you know is blood-love, you’ll never be satisfied. For everybody out there that is like that and knows nothing but negative, kiss my proud white Irish ass. I’m ready, warden, send me home.” And of course, George Harris so deftly stated, “Somebody needs to kill my trial attorney.” (I’m sure he’s not the only one who thought that, but he’s the only one with the guts to admit it.)

You can persistently protest your innocence by declaring it bluntly.

“I am innocent, but was not given the tools at trial, or on appeal, to make my innocence into a legal reality.” Or, more verbosely, “An innocent man is going to be murdered tonight. When my innocence is proven, I hope Americans will realize the injustice of the death penalty, as all other civilized countries have.”

You can express remorse, and it seems one should do so, not only for what might or might not happen after the gurney, but for the emotional stasis of your victim’s family. Your own family, too.

“I want to offer again my most profound and heartfelt apologies to my victims’ families. I am truly sorry. I have tried my best to empathize with their grief and devastation, and I hope they come to know of my concerns and prayers for them,” said Arthur Gary Bishop. Or Napoleon Beazley, who claimed, not through oration, but rather through the written word, “The act I committed to put me here was not just heinous, it was senseless. But the person that committed that act is no longer here—I am.” If it isn’t spoken, though, I’m not sure that it carries the same weight. Do you?

Still, I suppose those last words, either through valediction or the pen, can try to provide a drop of understanding for the public, for the government, for the families.

“It was done out of fear, stupidity, and immaturity. It wasn’t until I got locked up and saw the newspaper; I saw his face and smile, and I realized I had killed a good man.” Johnathan Moore. Texas. 2007.

You can be fanatical about your crime, God, religion, your innocence, or even your favorite sports team.

“Redskins are going to the Super Bowl!” said Bobby Ramdass,
just before his execution in Virginia. “Go Raiders!” pumped Bobby Charles Comer, executed in Arizona.

And my personal favorite, a hybrid of all archetypes:

“We all got to go sometime, some sooner than others. I’m going to be busy getting the Browns to the Super Bowl. Working magic. I love you guys.”

Of course, the last thing you want to do is complain.

“Please tell the media, I did not get my SpaghettiOs, I got spaghetti. I want the press to know.” Thomas Grasso, executed in Oklahoma on March 20, 1995.

The pressure grows each day. A last-minute stay is a whisper of the past. I am sure of that now. I should have known that when Marlene thrust Oliver upon me four months ago, but I didn’t want to believe it. The writ, too, no doubt has run its course. It must have. I would have heard by now. Oliver would have told me. He would have visited me more in the last month rather than just sending me paperwork to review. He would have done more than just a phone call every couple of days to check up on me. I have to accept that my appeal and my final words are nothing more than permanent imprints of my hands in the cement, now dried in their final mutilated form. Language, after all, does have a way of cementing permanence in history, just like those handprints. People can do what they like with it once you’re gone.

So on that final day on the gurney—whenever Pennsylvania deems me ready—I don’t know what I’m going to say. I’m not “inhuman and fearless.” I do have fears, and I have no idea how to control them. The main thing that I fear, that one fright that sits above my head like a bony halo, is that once I’m gone and my soulless limbs float through dirt in an anonymous prison cemetery, is that I’ll just be nameless. And then nobody will remember Noa P. Singleton. Not for what she did or what she didn’t do. Not for writing an incarcerated memoir or killing a pregnant woman. Not for getting waitlisted at Princeton. Not for helping to raise her little brother, or for coming up three hundredths of a point below the valedictorian in her high school GPA
for the title of salutatorian. Not for flying in a 1980s biplane over the coast of San Diego or saving the little league game in third grade. Not for learning to play the piano, or for drinking sixteen Mountain Dews in one sitting. Not for nearly running a full marathon, or for being cast as the understudy for Ophelia in my high school’s spring Shakespeare production of 1995. Not for anything.

Look, I’m not protesting my innocence, or my insanity, or my need to live a long and prosperous life on the outside. I have no offspring. I have no family who visits. No spouse desperate for my consortium. No friends who cry for me on the other side of the wall. And that’s precisely how I’m going to die.

Maybe my final words should be just as typical as more than 50 percent of the others. “I’m sorry for what I’ve done.” “May God be with me.” “I’m ready, warden. Let’s do it.”

Windmills of words spin around me, tossing out consonants and vowels with each gust of air. I really don’t know what I’m going to say. Sometimes I think I’ve forgotten how to form a cohesive sentence. Sometimes I think I’ve forgotten how to form even a lucid thought. I haven’t used these tools in years, beyond chatting with Oliver and reading over my spider-webbed appeals and eroded transcripts. I suppose I have a little bit longer to craft a skilled speech. But like that day over ten years ago, my mortarboard held on by a bevy of hairpins, a royal blue robe swimming around me in pleated oceanic purity, I’ll probably say something insignificant again.

F
OUR MONTHS OF GRINNING FACADES
, T
HREE
M
USKETEERS
bars, and stale Doritos had passed since Oliver Stansted walked into my life with Mothers Against Drunk Driving tailing him like, well, like the cops tailing a drunk teenager. Four months of found high school report cards and hospital records from my former life; four months of signed affidavits by my mother’s dentist and my brother’s best friend, claiming that I was, as Oliver once said, “worth it.” He’d listened for four months, nearly five now, as I emptied the drawers of my past, folded them (sometimes neatly, sometimes not so neatly) and placed a few of them in his briefcase to take home. It had to end soon, regardless of X-day. Four months is usually the time it takes a new couple to fall in love or part ways, for a business deal to be brokered, and the time it took most people to walk away from me, melodramatically or otherwise.

Andy Hoskins was the first to bring this flaw to my attention, having slept in my bed for no more than four months precisely. Every man or woman I befriended from that point on lasted approximately the length of a season, corresponding with the temperature outside no differently than, say, your coat or scarf, or the length of your jeans. There was Paul, who took me to the Ritz during the fall of 2000; Sandra (who went by her surname, Ginter), who was my confidante back in the winter of 1995; and then Ling, who I met at the nail salon on Chestnut Street and subsequently visited for a weekly manicure in
the spring of 1999. The only exceptions to this rule were my father, sort of, and, of course, Persephone. And now it would appear to apply to Ollie, too.

On that dreaded four-month mark, I waited for Ollie to show up and break up with me. I listened to the percussive clippety-clop of his expensive European shoes beating against the plastic rollers of his wheelie briefcase as the predictable seasonal friendship was about to come to a close.

“What do you have in there?” I asked, as soon as he settled into the visitor’s booth. There was something different this time, and I couldn’t quite place it.

“Sarah Dixon’s medical records,” he said, sitting down. He bent over and pulled out a single file, fat with stuffing.