The Execution of Noa P. Singleton (35 page)

Persephone.

Persephone.

Oh, Persephone …

She was going to—

“—are you still there, ma’am? I’m sending an ambulance. Ma’am, please tell me what—”

“—there was an intruder,” I blurted. Yes, there was an intruder. That’s what happened. “I … I … I don’t know who it was, but he came in and took some jewelry and a laptop and then he left.”

“Did you get a look at him?”

“He …” I thought desperately back to my mother’s performance; to her life’s work. To my work.
He was wearing a black ski mask
, she said to the operator. “He was wearing a mask, so I didn’t catch his face,” I reported. “Sarah started screaming. We were just sitting at the table drinking tea. Drinking water, I mean. I think it was one of the mummers. Shit, it was one of the mummers. That’s when it happened.”

“When what happened?” the operator asked.

I walked back to Sarah and stood over her. From that perspective, I was as tall as a beanstalk. I was as tall as the Empire State Building. King Kong and the Eiffel Tower. I didn’t bother to bend down to her the way I did two days earlier. I didn’t feel her pulse to see if she was alive. I didn’t have to. One of her eyelids spread open and looked at me through its tiny windowpane. It looked like she was trying to tell me something, but she was incarcerated. Nothing came out. Tears formed beneath my chest. She knew about Persephone. She knew about Persephone.

That’s when I made the decision.

“Ma’am?” the operator asked.

“I … I think she’s dead,” I said.

Sarah blinked at me, slowly, one eye closing momentarily.

“An ambulance is on its way.”

Sarah’s other eye opened. A wave of salt sank to her mouth from her eyes as if she knew. There’s no question in my mind that she knew.

“Holy shit,” I continued on the phone. “I think she’s dead!”

“Did the intruder have a weapon?”

My backpack was sitting upright, two feet beyond Sarah. The external zipper had not yet been sealed, and its contents were fully exposed.

“He had a gun,” I cried. “Oh my god, please come, quickly! I’ve been shot, too.”

“An ambulance should be there right away. I can stay on the phone with you until they get there, if you—”

I hung up the phone.

Within seconds, it rang again and didn’t stop for the next three minutes. I didn’t have a lot of time. They’d be here shortly. I lifted Sarah up from the floor and placed her on the chair at the table, closest to the kitchen. It would have to be her face that the intruder would see when he knocked down the door. I didn’t bother checking her pulse at this point. I could feel her infrequent breath on my neck the entire time to know she was still alive.

My father’s revolver still poked out from my backpack.

I hobbled toward the bag and retrieved the gun. The grooves in the handle were cold, and my fingers slipped into place, just like that, resting against them. I didn’t even bother with the safety.

I pivoted back around toward Sarah, narrowed my line of sight so that only my left eye could grasp the target, that thin shadow sitting lifelessly between the metal studs of the Smith & Wesson, and I shot once. The bullet hit her just below the clavicle. I didn’t even feel the recoil thrust me back two full steps. It was only an hour later, when the police were searching the apartment, when the wheels of the gurney rolled Sarah out into the blunted winter, that I noticed my skid marks on the wooden panel beneath. Ragged patterns of mountains cyclically twisting in the sole of my sneaker.

Next, just as my mother taught me, just as Persephone taught me, I proceeded to tear apart one side of the apartment. I opened the door with my torn fingers and jammed the lock into the wood so it would appear as though someone had broken in, and I thrust my body into the door. Wooden ribbons tied around my right arm.

Then I ran to the kitchen and grabbed the butcher’s knife, pulling it from its magnetic home in a single plough, and launched it into the cushions on the couch, just like my mother did. Just as I never got to do ten years earlier. But this time, unlike the faulty memory of my mother, it had to look authentic. And as always, there had to be collateral damage.

The gun still rested, loaded and quiet within my hands, between my palms, its safety off. I walked over to Sarah.

“I’m so sorry.”

Then I turned the gun on myself at a perfect level of perpendicularity to my right shoulder. It was hard to focus, to point directly, and for this I am still grateful—even to this day, but I pulled the trigger. And those few moments, as the setting smoked and feathers glided, as flakes of snow drifted inside, and as the phone continued its ring, were the first I remember being able to live my life since she died. The bullet only grazed my right shoulder, an even column of skin removed from muscle, but it was enough to appear caught in the crossfire of a break-in. I wiped my prints from the gun, tossed it out the open window, and waited for the ambulance to arrive.

T
HROUGH THE GREASY FINGERPRINTS AND SCRATCHED SURFACE
, Sarah’s uneven face smiled back at me. She was on the other side of the Plexiglas divider in the visitor’s booth, flat and two-dimensional in a two-by-three-inch grade school photograph grasped in Marlene Dixon’s wrinkling hands.

“Where’s Oliver?” I asked her.

Marlene sat across from me just as she had six months earlier—only, this time, silent. She had pulled out a few pictures from her stack of papers and was thrusting each photo onto the glass divider, one by tarnished one.

“Marlene?” I asked again. “Where is he?”

She continued to hold the photo toward the glass in my face the same way she did to the jurors during the penalty phase of my trial.

“I have something I want to give to him.”

“Look at the photo,” she commanded.

“Please, Marlene,” I asked. “How do I get him a letter?”

“Look at the photo.”

So I did. I looked at the photo.

“This is all getting a little too melodramatic for me, Marlene. Why come here in my final week like this?”

“I’m not playing any more games with you,” she dictated. “What do you see?”

A slight nervous chuckle escaped my lips. Marlene didn’t say a word.

“What do you see?” she asked again, with the same monotone timbre, the same inflection, as if she was an old LP on repeat.

Sarah’s pale face, highlighted by a bridge of freckles, her eyes slightly caught between green and hazel, her nose, upturned with a slight bump.

“Please tell me what’s going on with Oliver,” I asked. “I’m worried about him. I haven’t heard from him in days.”

“This is not about Oliver,” she said, as if not only his name but his entire existence was expectorating from her gut. Her face was just behind the photograph of Sarah, and after ten years, two deaths, and countless other personal tragedies, no doubt, there was no longer any resemblance between the two. Not that there ever was.

“Oliver is back in England,” she said, taking the photograph down.

Part of me believed her, and the other part didn’t know how.

“He was looking to get some experience on a real-life death penalty case. Now he’s done that. He was needed back in London. It’s as simple as that. We don’t need him to complete the last of the paperwork.”

In retrospect, I thought about this for a few moments longer than I probably should have.

“When you say ‘we,’ who do you mean? I got the impression from Oliver that—”

“—whatever impression you might have received from Oliver Stansted is certainly far from the truth. He has an excellent mind and much greater perspective than the rest of my bleeding-heart advocates, but make no mistake about it, Noa. He is an attorney, a young and inexperienced attorney, and he worked for me.”

“I’m not sure you know what sort of impression you—”

“—do not interrupt me,” she recited, as if it was part of her planned speech. “Don’t be fooled by any relationship you may have developed in here. He is not a lonely soul searching for a wife on death row, and you are far from the match that would suit him.”

You know there are times where the most important thing you must say in your life has arrived. Someone asks you to marry him.
An employer wants to hire you. You are on television. You are on the fucking witness stand defending your life. You’ve arrived at the pearly gates. Well, the smart ones, the people who have tested their intellect, who have practiced running and tennis and violin day in and day out, the ones who actually read a book a week when they say they will, those are the people who, when asked that pivotal question at the most crucial moment, have the ability to spit back a witty comment, a genuine retort that stabs like a thumbtack, or a heart-wrenching soliloquy that could rival Hamlet’s. After nearly ten years in here, any extraordinary potential I might have been given was as rusty and dry as a corroded nail.

“Did you submit the clemency petition, Marlene?”

That’s all I could muster. A brief and bootless interrogation. A slip of the tongue. She wasn’t going to tell me what happened to Oliver. She was never going to explain to me why his calls stopped. Why he no longer visited me when he said he would every day before X-day. Why the letters and packages of food ceased to arrive in my cell. I already knew. He now inhabited the same uncertain terrain as my father.

“Excuse me?” she said, feigning shock.

And those people who have refused to let their minds gather webs and dust balls the size of hail, they never walk out of a room wishing they could have said:
Thank you for all your efforts, Marlene. I appreciate everything you’ve done for me, Marlene. I know that if our roles were reversed, I would not be so great a person, Marlene. I would not be able to forgive. I would not be able to believe in humanity again
.

But again, all I said was, “You weren’t—”

I regret it, Oliver. I regret it more than you know.

“I think that you had better choose your comments more carefully, Noa.”

“I … I …”

“Say something,” she interrupted.

Marlene allowed me to struggle, and I’m fairly certain the right corner of her mouth curled as my deficiencies reappeared.

“I know that you are surviving these last few days, unable to eat, alone without the company of any surviving family or friends, because you have none. Your mother and brother are unwilling to look at your face before you go. And I cannot understand how that could make you feel. But Noa, make no mistake about it. I do not care if you are lonely. Or sad. Or hurt.”

“I don’t expect you to care,” I said, softly. Maybe my voice cracked. Maybe it didn’t. I don’t remember.

“Care?” she laughed. “I have known you far too long not to care about you, Noa.”

Marlene’s ability to care about people is why Sarah was dead in the first place. Marlene’s ability to care about people only pushed them farther and farther away.

“But there is a spectrum of colors that define the word
care
,” she continued. “For one,” she added. Her voice was monotone throughout, a bass guitar keeping the beat. “I care about what you did to my daughter. I care that you claim you didn’t mean to do any of what you actually did. I care that we had a dialogue that you took to mean something inexplicable. I care that you were in touch with my daughter beyond your father’s relationship with her. I care that you changed your plans. I care that you had a gun on New Year’s Day. I care that you’ve spent ten insufferable years in here. I care that you have the ability to keep secrets locked tight. And I certainly do care if you live or die. You could use that lofty IQ of yours and engineer yourself a noose in that little cell for all I care. You won’t be the first person to take the honor and thrill away from the state. But,” she paused, “you shot my daughter point-blank execution-style, so please, Noa, do not ever claim that I do not care about you.”

My hands began to shake, and my heart beat faster than it did even at the shootings, the trial, the sentencing.

“Do you have any idea why I didn’t say a word to anyone all these years about your involvement?”

“I had no involvement in my daughter’s death,” she declared. “Do not insult me. I’m fairly certain that after everything you’ve put me
through and everything I’ve done for you, you owe me just a little bit of respect.”

“Respect?”

“Ahhh, there it is,” she smiled.

Up close, I noticed that her eyes were slightly mad. And that dirty blonde hair was mixing with her grays as if she had forgotten to dye it. She was locked in a room full of carnival mirrors. I can’t imagine she even recognized herself anymore.

“Don’t condescend to me, Marlene,” I asked. “Please.”

She rubbed her nose. I swallowed and continued.

“We both know what happened. And I haven’t uttered a word of your involvement to this day to a soul—Oliver included.”

“We both do not know what happened,” she said. “What I do know, however, is that you did what you did on your own. That I know. That is clear. That changed everything.”

We both know that’s not true, I wanted to say to her. But I didn’t. I waited for her to catch her breath.

“You know, Marlene, I may be on this side of the division and you on that, but I am still a human being.”

“You’re barely a human being.”

“Just tell me,” I whispered. “Be honest with me. I know you don’t owe me that, but did you ever even plan on speaking with the governor? Did you ever plan on filing my clemency petition? I just need to know. I’m sorry for asking, but I just … I just need to know that one thing.”

“The fact that I am sitting here across from you should answer that question for you well enough.”

“Does it? I don’t know anymore,” I said. “Were you ever planning on filing anything?”

Again, she refused to speak, but could not look away from me, consuming my breath, my words, my presence into hers, and for a moment, I remembered exactly how she acted on that first meeting all those years ago when she slapped the photo of the shadowman, broken and compliant, before me. Only this time, she refused to look
away from me. She just focused, eyes on my face, lips pursed, wrinkles all coming together at her mouth like a plastic grocery bag tied at the center. Her eyes were filling like a man-made lake, structured, controlled, and focused just enough so that they would never overflow.