The Execution of Noa P. Singleton (30 page)

“But this,” she cried, “this is the coolest thing!” She led me to the guest room where I stayed when it was too late to go home or my mother was too busy to come for me. Just behind the antique armoire was a family safe filled with ammunition, firearms, and relics of past skirmishes. “Check it out,” she grinned, “they’re from World War Two.”

She pulled out one of the three old rifles and pointed it at me.
“Bang, bang!”
she joked, as if she were seven years old. But we were nearly thirteen, practically adults in some religions and cultures.
“Bang!”
she called, and I pretended to be hit. “Here, try it out!”

She handed it to me and I took it willingly, no differently from how I accepted the lemonade in the two-hundred-dollar crystal glasses or the occasional movie ticket and ride home. They were heirlooms, familial droppings of wealth begat by someone with whom she would have had absolutely no connection other than perhaps a chin dimple or abnormally high cholesterol. The rifle was heavy and cold and felt more like one of the props my mother would use in that community
theater production of
Annie Get Your Gun
than an actual rifle used to kill people in wars past.

“Give it,” she commanded. “I need to put it back.”

She grabbed it from me and put it back into the safe. Hiding beneath the safe was a small wooden drawer, chipped around an old keyhole that looked like it could have been opened with only a toy key to the city.

“What’s that?” I asked.

She shrugged and opened it.

“Ooooh!” she cooed. “That is so cool.”

She looked over at me in pools of deep indigo. Dark black hair hung over those phosphorescent eyes, while her Greek knob of a nose poked through the waterfall of curls. I imagine if she lived to maturity, she could have been one of those models with what they like to call a quasi-ethnic look. Gorgeous and ugly at the same time, and you can’t quite tell what she is. To me, though, she was just Persephone. Not Persy or Perse—just Persephone and sometimes P.

She grabbed the hidden jewel and twirled it around her fingers where the trigger lay. At first twist, the barrel was pointed at me.

“Come on, Persephone,” I urged. “Put it back. Your parents probably don’t want you playing with this.”

“I bet this was Granddad’s.”

“Put it back,” again, I urged, “please.”

She continued looking for initials or some form of identifying detail. “It must be Granddad’s. Why else would it be here?”

“Come on, P,” I urged. “Your parents.”

“They’re gone all day. They’ll never know.”

“It might be loaded though.”

A giddy chuckle cracked from her chest as if a rib had broken. It’s funny. Sometimes I think that—even at thirteen—she was trapped in a childhood innocence that most thirteen-year-olds surpass before the age of ten. I suppose in some books that might have suggested she was never destined to grow into an adult. A mystical soothsaying countenance to the core.

“Nah,” she said. “I’m sure it’s fine.”

“It doesn’t look so old. Maybe it’s your parents’? Like for protection from burglars and stuff. Andy’s parents have a gun at home, too.”

“I guess,” she sighed, “but Mom says that this neighborhood’s pretty safe.”

She shrugged, looking around the room. The gun was still perched between her fingers like a lollipop.

“Maybe they got it before you moved,” I said.

She shrugged.

“Maybe.”

“So, are you sleeping over tonight?”

I shook my head, no.

“Oh well,” she sighed, walking over to the bed. She fell back onto it and dropped the gun. It lay alone in the whiteness of the sheets and the lacy duvet cover. “What time is your mom coming over to get you, then?”

I looked at my watch and shrugged.

“I dunno. An hour I guess? Maybe less.”

Persephone shrugged, too.

“Okay.”

“Are you gonna put that gun away?”

She sat up, bored.

“Yeah, I suppose.”

And that’s when it happened. There was nothing dramatic leading up to it. No dialogue, no argument, no juvenile games of Russian roulette. No
High Noon
standoff. No motivation on my part or hers. No class distinctions. No begging. No lies. No theme. No theory. No Kevorkian thoughts at the time. No sibling rivalry. No father issues or mother issues or familial issues or internal psychological issues on which to lay blame. No
mens rea
or
actus reus
or affirmative defense or justification. No immaturity, no silliness, no immunity. No latent hatred. Just a simple favor.

“Hey, Noa, will you put it back for me?”

We were both quite bored, I suppose. With the gun? With the house? With each other?

My shoulders slumped. “Sure,” I said, taking it from her.

The problem was that her fingers were still curled around the metal, her knuckles bent from their hinges, clinging onto the trigger. It was entangled between our fingers as if caught in a braid. There might have been an involuntary struggle as she tried to pull her fingers out of the frame. There might not have been. I can’t be certain. What I am certain of is what happened immediately after the untangling of the gun. My heart trilled like the swirling end of a violin solo. My mind circled like whirling dervishes. My eyes dried as if someone were blowing into them. And, languidly, a horizon of smoke settled between me and Persephone. By the time it lifted, no different than the morning haze, the gun was no longer in Persephone’s hands, nor was it in the safe. It was in mine.

That’s when I saw her limbs, spread out on the bed just as they were when she lay down minutes before, lanky and long, a bit knobby around the elbows and now jiggling from the impact of the bullet. Her legs seemed almost as long as her arms, marionette-like in their resting position. A small black dot mounted her forehead, the crowning jewel of her newly anointed tiara. It was leaking. Dark fluid drained onto the duvet, flowing like lava from the mouth of a volcano. But with all the movement around her, Persephone was still. Her chest wasn’t inflating like mine. Her eyes weren’t peeled back like mine. Her hands didn’t shake like mine. The only movement was near the floor. A slight seesaw of motion tilted my eyes toward her feet, where her flip-flops dangled off the ridge of her now cooling toes, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, until one of them finally fell to the ground.

“P?” I whispered.

Nothing.

“P … P … Persephone?”

Still nothing.

My hands dropped to the ground, and the gun instantly slipped out of my grasp, releasing another bullet, which shot the base of the bed at one of its feet. I can’t remember hearing the gunshot. I can’t even remember hearing the previous gunshot. Or screaming even. I know that they happened, because I was there and I saw the wood splinter. But there was no sound. There was no memory. I found out later that the second gunshot caused the bed to lose footing. Apparently when the police arrived hours later, Persephone was no longer lying flat, comfortable, napping as I saw her last. Instead, she had slid off the silken sheets when the wood began to collapse and was practically sitting on the floor with her back leaning on the mattress and a single fist clutched under her chin in a macabre Rodin tableau.

My mother was scheduled to pick me up at any moment. She’d know what to do. She’d done it before. She told me the story a million times. She told me the story about how she and Paramedic One met—serendipitously, spectacularly lucky, she always said—when she dropped me from the second floor landing of our home in the North Valley. She never knew how well I remembered sounds from my infancy. She never knew that I remembered everything she did with Paramedic One, and caterpillar ’stache the accountant, and Bruce the speed walker. I never told her that I also remembered her breaking down the walls of my crib so that nobody would know what she really did.

A line of blood slipped out of the corner of Persephone’s mouth like delinquent drool.

I didn’t see the telephone. I hadn’t ever dialed 9-1-1 before. This wasn’t the time. But it was a break-in, of course. There’s nothing else it could be. A break-in. That’s why Persephone’s parents had the gun, after all. That’s why Andy Hoskins’s parents had one, too.

The pearl of blood dripped onto the white duvet like a spot of chocolate. Persephone still wasn’t moving. She hadn’t yet drifted onto the floor. The wooden bed hadn’t yet lost its footing.

But, suddenly, the world began to spin around me. Garments moist with sweat cloaked my arms and legs like shrink-wrap. I closed
my eyes and imagined days passing as I would sit cuffed to a chair by myself explaining that it wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t my fault. Can’t you understand? It wasn’t my fault.

It was five minutes—just five short minutes that I watched Persephone drained of life. Hades in the form of her twelve-year-old friend grabbed her from the fields and ran her to the underworld. The minutes turned into days, which turned into months and years. Blood rushed to my face. I felt it with my shaky hands, only to scream from the burning sensation, like I had placed my hands on the stove, like I burnt a confession directly into them. Those same fingers reached over and touched my feet, which too quickly also filtered the viscous fluid of loss. My bladder was full, my eyes were leaking, my pores were leaking, but none of them could move. My heart beat in my ankles. My hands blistered over, red and white and yellow with blood and pus and mucus. She needs to get to a hospital. She needs to get to a hospital, I thought. She needs to get to a hospital.

And then I heard my mother say it again on the phone to the 9-1-1 operator.

My daughter … she’s … she’s fallen. There was an intruder. Please, come help
.

Nobody ever followed up that day.

Please, we need help! There’s been an intruder!

But nobody checked in on us to see whether they caught the man responsible. My mother was the best actress I knew and perhaps the best actress in California that day. And now it was my turn.

I picked up the gun and wiped my fingerprints from it, putting it back just as Persephone had asked me to. I closed the safe and pushed it into its coffin just as it was designed. Just as Persephone had asked me to five minutes earlier. I walked to the phone to dial 9-1-1 to tell them what happened: an intruder walked in on us while we were playing, while Mr. and Mrs. Riga were out of the house for the day. But I never made it that far.

For the first time in my life, my mother arrived early. She must have pulled into the front and slammed the car horn with her palm.
It honked all the way to the back of the house, where I was waiting with my only friend. I started walking toward the front door, one foot in front of the other. Perhaps my mother was there early for a reason. Perhaps she knew what would happen. Perhaps she’d know what to do. Yes, she’d know exactly what to do. She was there to remind me of what I must do.
Anything you can do, I can do better
, I heard her sing.
I can do anything better than you
.

There was an intruder
, I heard my mother say to me, whispering via infancy, insinuating from a honking car no more than fifty feet away.
Say there was an intruder. Just tell them that. You’re a good actress. Just like me. Just like me, you’re a good little actress, Noa. You can do this. You can do anything better than me
.

I looked around for a phone but couldn’t find one. I would have wanted to call and say, “Yes, there was an intruder. I don’t know who it was, but he came in and took some of my jewelry and then left. And … and … and when he was here—he was wearing a black ski mask, so I didn’t catch his face, but that’s when it happened. And … and she was shot.”

But I didn’t. She was never singing to me from the stage. I needed a new tactic.

I ran upstairs and took the nearest item I could find that weighed more than a pound (a vase, maybe? A frame? I can’t remember anymore) and tossed it through the glass case that housed the Rigas’ china. Little fleurs-de-lis cracked at the intersection of their curves and crosses so that all that remained were twenty thousand pieces of rubble. I ran to the office, where I found the family’s Apple IIc sitting on a high burgundy stool and ripped it from its socket, tossing it on the ground. I didn’t wait to watch as it cracked in two, its innards spilling onto the frozen wood paneling below like electronic road kill. And then I rushed back to the room—the mausoleum where Persephone lay moments before slipping into her final statuette of a pose. If a burglar had done this to her, then a burglar would have had his own gun, his own weapon. Or worse, he would have found this gun and taken it with him. I shuffled through the drawers in the room,
emptying their contents as if I were actually searching for a weapon. Then I grabbed the gun, wrapped it in my sweatshirt, and placed it in my backpack, where it sat until I could think of its next home.

There was only one more thing that I needed in order for it to look authentic. Upstairs, next to Mrs. Riga’s night table was a freestanding jewelry box. I remember my mother always telling me she hid her jewelry in her sock drawer because it was foolish to advertise to a burglar where all your valuables lie. I just presumed she said that because she didn’t have anything of great worth. But maybe she was right. As my mother’s persistent car honked into an enduring recitative, I ran up to the jewelry box, and opened it using my shirt as a makeshift glove. I knew from school that fingerprints are like your soul; nobody knows how to discern them properly, but everyone has a unique design. I picked out the diamond tennis bracelet that Persephone displayed weeks earlier because it looked like the most expensive item in the box, shoved it into my backpack next to the gun, rushed outside, and hopped in my mother’s car.

She was busy looking through a month-old edition of
People
magazine. She didn’t ask me how my day was, where the Rigas were, or why I took so long to come outside. If she had listened harder, she would have heard my heart beating through my voice as it dictated the direction home.

A day later, my mother came into my room to tell me about a tragic accident. She had heard about it on the afternoon news. The police didn’t know who did it, but evidently the Rigas’ house was broken into, and one of the burglars (there were allegedly two) shot and killed Persephone in the process. She was so sorry to be the person to tell me this. She was dreadfully emotional because, as she knew, “you were just so very close. Two peas in a pod,” she repeated at least four times in that conversation. She showed me the newspaper clipping of the police report. Along with the homicide, “the burglars took all sorts of money and a diamond tennis bracelet and smashed twenty thousand dollars’ worth of hand-painted porcelain china.” I knew then that I could never tell her what I had done. Three days later, I
laid the gun to rest beneath an old oak tree hovering above countless hundred-year-old corpses in the nearest cemetery I could find.