The Execution of Noa P. Singleton (33 page)

I grabbed my coat, my backpack, scarf, and mittens. The minute I walked out of my apartment, I heard a faint chanting, almost like I was attending a concert with earplugs. I could hear the joy from the New Year’s Day crowds all the way twenty blocks west. It was the Mummers Parade.

Mummers, by definition: “urban moral squalor,” as Marlene Dixon would say. The poor man’s Mardi Gras. A poverty-stricken Carnival. My father’s people, if you will. Thousands of pedestrians, crusty and lethargic with hangovers pacing beside them, saturating Washington
Avenue all the way from Broad Street to Penn’s Landing, marking their territory with nothing other than a six-pack of beer, beads, face paint, and fluorescent polyester, until they arrived before City Hall to be crowned.

I walked toward Center City and thought of my brother. I hadn’t heard from him more than three times in the previous year. It was New Year’s Day, and what are these contrived holidays if not for starting anew? So I called him. Of course he didn’t answer. I left a message wishing him a happy new year. I said I hoped we would see each other more this year. I told him I’d like to meet his girlfriend. I said I was proud of him, even if he had chosen to be a production assistant for the porn industry’s biggest director, that sort of thing. I didn’t call my mother.

As I walked into Center City, the voices elevated in both volume and pitch. I rubbed shoulders with a mummer in costume, absorbing a piece of face paint on my jacket as a souvenir. By the time I made it all the way to Broad Street, I was sifting through the thickest crowd yet. Mummers paraded up and down, hoisting their multicolored umbrellas above their heads with one hand and balancing a bottle of Yuengling in the other. I turned the corner onto Bainbridge and started walking east toward the river, where I found my favorite corner store: an old Apothecary Shoppe masquerading as a modern-day CVS or Duane Reade or Rite Aid. (Or perhaps it was the other way around, I can’t remember anymore.) Either way, I darted over to the front door, hidden halfway between two burnt-out buildings on either side. It was almost as if the fire that had destroyed the buildings on the block managed to escape this small sliver of wood and brick.

I went in looking for apple juice and some tea and a refill for my sleeping pills. Shards of light clustered on the glassy walls. Dusty shelves of thick medicine bottles, liquid capsules stuffed in bowls, all stopped with a cork. It was a nice touch. I always loved aged authenticity. I selected a nice glass bottle of apple juice, a new carton of Lemon Zinger tea, paid for them both, and then placed them in my
backpack. I didn’t realize it at first, but when I opened my backpack and moved around my belongings, the cashier began his lethargic flight, backing away from me, one microscopic step at a time.

His name was Bob. Apothecary Bob and I met ages earlier when he walked out of the back room wiping his hands on a white cloth that he had wrapped around his waist as an apron. I was looking for some cough medicine when he pointed it out for me. He filled my prescriptions for two years, checking me out when I needed juice or soda or snacks or condoms or postage stamps or sleeping pills. He belonged in a different era the way he kept his old-fashioned corner drugstore. White hairs clothed his face all the way from his sideburns to his upper lip and even halfway down his neck.

But this morning, just as soon as he gave me my change and put my purchases in the brown paper bag, he backed away from me. I know he was going for the emergency silent alarm because he told me about it three months earlier when he was robbed. (“I didn’t get to it in time. I just didn’t get there in time. They took ten thousand dollars’ worth of inventory.”) And now, he was doing the same to me. That’s when I realized something was different. I looked at the coarse creamy hairs of his faux beard first, the voluminous patch of his mustache second, and his eyes third. Of course it was the eyes that told me what I already knew. I followed them into my backpack where I saw my father’s Smith & Wesson staring back at me, nestled tightly between the new brown paper bag and an extra pair of panties.

“Get out of here!” he yelled, motioning for the button.

I tried to talk, but nothing came out. I don’t know how it got there. I don’t know why it was in my bag. I don’t remember. I must have put it there, but—

“Get out!” he cried. “Get out before I call the police!”

The red emergency button was already approaching his hand, shaky and tight.

“But—”

“—out!” he shouted.

I grabbed my backpack and rushed out the door. I wasn’t watching where I was running. I just followed the sound of the cheers. My ears were my compass, directing me through arms and legs, masks with long pointy noses, flat balloonlike shoes. Noisemakers and shouts, the crash of beer bottles on the cement, and the delicious crunching of metal cans.

In the dense crowds, I spotted someone I thought was my father, hidden within the Blue Brigade of Generals. He was taking photos with a beautiful woman wearing a bodysuit made of feathers. She was posing proudly between him and another costumed drunk, and was allowing them to smile and pantomime fellatio for the camera. I stopped running and stared at him as his swelling tongue thrust through his left cheek. I don’t know if he recognized me, but as soon as he looked my way, I started running again. Away from him, away from Apothecary Bob. Away from I don’t know. I just ran. I pictured Andy Hoskins jumping over hurdles and sprinting around a crimson track. I pictured Bruce the speed walker sprinting toward my mother and then back away again. I pictured Sarah Dixon on the track those few times I watched her. I ran so quickly that I collided with a mummer wearing a puffy rainbow wig and painted-on red lips that bled out from his own by at least an inch.

My backpack was the first thing to hit the rough cement. I heard the glass from the apple juice mash against the ground, cracking into hundreds of shards, coated in a prism of juice.

“Sorry,” the rainbow clown mummer said, bending down to help me gather my belongings. “I didn’t see you.” He grinned and flecks of rounded teeth peered out from between the red lips. I almost vomited on his outstretched hand.

“It’s okay,” I said, pulling myself up to run away from him.

My phone rang as soon as I was on my feet, and I answered it without even looking at the caller ID.

“Dad?” I panted. “Is that you?”

There was a pause.

“Is this Caleb’s daughter?”

I caught my breath.

“Yeah,” I wheezed, letting it out. “Who’s this?”

“Sarah Dixon’s apartment,” I said to the doorman fifteen minutes later.

The Cotton Bowl was getting started on his miniature black-and-white TV.

“Hello?” I said again to the distracted doorman. He was wearing a Texas Longhorns jersey under the uniformed blazer. “I’m here for Sarah Dixon.”

He didn’t even look at me. “Hold on a second.”

That abrasive tone reminded me of Marlene, and for a brief moment, I blanked on the apartment. Numbers and symbols, which usually came to me as easily as my name and age, spun in my head. Had she even told me her apartment number? Had Marlene? Unfortunately for me, the security guard answered the prosecution’s prayers that day. Because of that football game, he had no recollection at trial of ever seeing me walk in casually, request an invite, and then calmly enter Sarah’s apartment like an invited guest.

“No! NO!” he yelled at his TV. “Penalty, that’s a penalty!”

“Sarah Dixon?”

“Right. 15P,” he mumbled, still infuriated with the Longhorns.

I walked into the elevator and pushed the button for the fifteenth floor, and as the elevator climbed slowly and with each harmonious ding of a passing floor, I imagined what Sarah’s apartment looked like. After all, it was the place that my father presumed would have been mine when we first met—not the musky fourth-floor walk-up with the rodent problem. It would have to be immaculate, with light shining on each newly lain tile from one crown molding to the next. Copper pots and pans would be hanging from the ceiling just over the six-burner stove, where she would come home and cook hybrid dishes like beef Wellington and baked Alaska. I suppose, now that I
think of it, that was the vision I had of Marlene’s kitchen. If Marlene was subsidizing Sarah’s da Gama period, then certainly she would have projected her own visions of perfection and consciousness onto her daughter’s palace.

I was bitterly wrong. The elevator opened to the fifteenth floor. Apartment 15P was the second one on the right. The door was slightly ajar. I walked over to it and knocked lightly.

“Hello?” I called.

She came straight to the door, without bothering to really open or close it, and just sort of hovered. Hair was matted to her temples, mascara was crumbling beneath her eyes, and a thicket of red lipstick from a previous application mushroomed at the corner of her lips, waxy and covered with morning spittle.

“Sarah?”

“Don’t
Sarah
me. You know exactly who I am.”

I loitered about the threshold for an extra few moments.

“Come inside,” she demanded, directing me beyond the hallway and into her small apartment. She closed the door behind me in a frenzy. My eyes toured the grounds. The reality of Sarah’s apartment was quite different from my elevator fantasy.

It was small and dusty. An old refrigerator sulked in the corner of the miniature kitchen. No sunny bursts of copper hung from a sterling silver grate on the ceiling. Instead, garbage leaked from a small plastic bag sitting in the corner of the kitchen with malodorous puddles streaming out from it, fjordlike. And waves of heat instantly sank into my skin.

“What happened in here?” I asked, placing my backpack on the ground.

“My window’s sealed shut,” she snapped, “and the heater’s broken. It’s stuck.”

She was pacing from the front door to the couch in the center of the main room. I hadn’t really seen her up close in person before, at least not conscious. Photos and distant observation make for a poor likeness when face-to-face.

“Where is he?” she asked, wasting no time.

“Where is who?”

“Don’t who me! Where the hell is he?” she demanded. She had trouble saying the word
hell
. It was both painful and sort of comical to watch.

I did my best to sound calm. “My father?”

“Of course your father! Why else would I call the Bloody Mistress of Van Pelt 4, for Christ’s sake? Where the hell is he?”

It was hot and it was cold in the room. My hands peeled from each other, in part swelling from the heat and in part smooth as ice.

“I was there, you know. I know it was you. I know,” she added, continually emphasizing the word
I
with her hands. She couldn’t focus, she couldn’t sit. She just paced to and fro, to and fro before the radius of the couch.

“I’m not following,” I said.

“You and I were both working on projects in the library the day you dropped out,” she said. “You left quite the mark on our class. No pun intended.”

Words slipped away from me. The cool breeze of sweat started kicking away the heat.

“Did you know that people refused to go to that part of the library for months after?” she continued. “God, I can’t believe you’re related to him.”

I tried to change the subject.

“It’s really hot in here, Sarah. You look dehydrated. Have you been drinking enough water?”

“Water?”

“You look like you may be sick,” I said to her. “Should I take you to the hospital? Call a doctor?”

“Of course I’m sick. You slipped me something,” she said. “I’ve been spotting since I got home. I don’t even know how I got back here. I think,” she choked over her words, slowing down and sinking into the couch. “I think something may be wrong with my baby.”

My throat closed up. Nothing was coming out, nothing could come out.

“Didn’t you go by Noa Persephone Singleton back in school?” she asked, massaging her belly.

“Persephone is just my middle name,” I told her instinctively, as I had every year since I moved away from home, as I had written on every driver’s license, school registration, doctor’s form, voter card.

She nodded. “Interesting response.” A few beads dripped from her brow. “Look, Persephone or Noa or whoever the hell you are, I don’t want to go into a history lesson here. I called you because I got your phone number out of Caleb’s cell phone a while back. I was debating getting in touch, but decided against it.”

“Uh-huh,” I mumbled, without hearing a word of it. If I tried to say something else, it would come out hoarse, like a seasoned smoker. “And … and now?”

“I just want to know where he is,” she said with a wheeze. “I can’t get in touch with him. He’s not returning any of my calls. Nobody’s answering at the bar. We were supposed to spend New Year’s together. And … and all I remember is that I went over to the bar to talk about the baby, and then suddenly, I’m lying on his couch passed out. Then I wake up and see you. The next thing I know, I’m sleeping in my bed back here.”

She wiped the corners of her lips with her fingers before continuing. The day-old lipstick was now smeared on her fingertips.

“That was two days ago. I haven’t heard from him once since then and I’ve been bleeding. And it hurts,” she said in a panic. “It hurts like—”