The Execution of Noa P. Singleton (36 page)

January

Dearest Sarah
,

This is my final letter to you. I’ve bought a nearby plot to yours and am burying these letters, bound together, next to you, with you, so that you may read them. If you can read them. I don’t know what else to say
.

Please listen to me and try not to be too upset. I’m also burying Noa’s papers with them. Before you get angry or proud (quite honestly, I don’t think I even know what you’d feel), please listen to what I have to say
.

About a week after Noa died on her execution date as scheduled, I received a letter in the mail. It stood out on the floor from the postal sea of bills and advertisements that were thrust through the mail slot like forgotten debris. It was a handwritten envelope. I didn’t wait to close the door when I walked in on it. I didn’t even bother gathering the remainder of the mail. I simply picked it up and ran my fingers across the return address from Muncy, Pennsylvania, Prisoner number 10271978
.

Standing by the door, I slipped my pinky finger under the opening at the corner, tearing the envelope from one end to the other. A diamond tennis bracelet slipped out of it and onto the floor. I dropped to the ground to pick it up, and in my hands, the sallow golden prongs clutching each miniature diamond stabbed at my fingers, which quickly climbed back into the envelope to find some sort of explanation. A reason for her to send her remaining possession to me. A relic of her former life returned just prior to execution. For reparations? For forgiveness? Spite?

Then my fingers found the note
.

No greeting or salutation. No apology. No explanation. Just a basic demand for transference of chattel. A selfish task bequeathed to me by virtue of failure. Mine? Hers? Failure to complete a goal,
regardless the proprietor, I suppose, looking back. Noa chose to give no final words before she died, and now she expected to get those from me on her behalf? She expected someone else to do her work for her? Absolutely not. It was not my place to publicize her final orders. Nor was it my duty to hand deliver her junk to Susan and Georg Riga
.

A name. Two names
.

Familiar names
.

Names that sit among the stack of useless declarations in my office all with the embossed seal of a notary certifying that someone matching a driver’s license made a declaration on the day scribbled at the bottom of the page. Names I’d heard only once before, names that rested inside the chamber of Oliver’s research from month one of this failed excuse for retribution. Names that fare no better than my own
.

The bracelet slipped between my fingers and slithered onto my night table, where it remained until I decided what to do with it. I placed the note beneath it and lay awake with those names ringing beside my bed every morning for a week, until I allowed myself to return to work. And when I did, I walked into my office with the note in my hand and found Susan and Georg Riga stamped on the list of supporting affidavits, stacked under the graveyard of frames beside my desk. I knew they were there. I put them there the moment Oliver left
.

I opened his folder and found an old newspaper clipping from the
Los Angeles Times
back from the early ’90s, along with a stack of declarations and affidavits from members of Noa’s past who wrote in support of clemency. People asking for her life, not for forgiveness—just for existence
.

There was a note from Andrew Hoskins, who claims he regrets his testimony at her trial, who wrote that a first love is something that cannot be killed. He wrote that he believes she should live. That she was a bright person who made a mistake, who thinks that nothing in her past was so heinous and depraved to lead to this sort of
an end. Another letter from Officer Robert McManahan, who now sits in a student dormitory in West Philadelphia, monitoring entry passes from students who flow in and out of the building on their way to class. No matter what, he said, scribbled in barely legible penmanship, she is not a person whose body should be found in a prison cemetery. There was also a letter from her mother, blaming herself and apologizing, wrongfully so, that she didn’t visit enough. Apologizing for villainizing her daughter while she awaited execution. There was not much more to her letter than that. And a letter from Georg and Susan Riga of Los Angeles, begging the governor, with more ethos than a stranger knew how, to spare this girl’s life. They hadn’t seen her since she was a child, they wrote, but they never forgot the kindness she showed to their daughter, Persephone. And for that reason alone, they wrote, she should be spared. What use does removing her do, they asked? The victim wouldn’t return, regardless of who took her, or how. And then a perforation of official validation stamped the bottom of each page like a presidential signature
.

Persephone
.

Persephone.

Persephone
.

I don’t understand what’s happening
.

I don’t understand what is happening anymore
.

Sweetheart, I can’t read on
.

I don’t know what this means. I don’t know what they mean
.

The only thing I know is that each new day, each new day since X-day, a shiny clean thread rolls out from my belly, knitting a web to cover the city, and I can’t stop it. At my home, or in my car, I cannot walk another step, because I know that mixed in with my regular paperwork, lurching above the thread and that newspaper clipping, those declarations reside with the perforated affidavit declaring what I cannot bear to read again
.

And so I don’t. I wash my face and brush my teeth, clean the sheets, slip each leg into pantyhose, each foot into a heel, and dress
myself for work. Every day. Every single day I go to my office and look away from Oliver’s files and your photos and your father’s wedding portrait
.

Then, two weeks after she sent me the bracelet, I received a larger package in the mail, fraught with the same telltale signs of bureaucracy. This time, however, the package was sent to the office and was addressed to Oliver Stansted. When the mailroom brought it to me to inquire about his forwarding address, I told them I would simply pass it on. You wouldn’t believe the stares I got when it was handed to me. Instantly I knew what it was. I went home with the box still closed and a blunted scissor in my purse, no different from how I stood at the doorway, opening the first envelope
.

Before I create a vision for you of your mother tearing into the novel of confessions like a vulture, as I did with her letter, you should know that once I got home, I calmly placed it on the kitchen table beside the bracelet and note. It was already on its first lap of decomposition, clearly stuffed, overflowing with papers and items, and God knows what else. The rectangular box didn’t even sit properly on the flat surface. It seesawed from a bulge in the center, struggling to balance on one side. Imperfect postal systems and the single unit of mail allowed for inmates produced this inoperable tumor in the bowels of a silly little package
.

So instead of forwarding that package or opening it to read for myself, I stared at it. I watched it slant one way, for seconds, and then I tapped it with two fingers as it tipped to the other side. I wanted to know what was inside. God, I did. I can’t tell you the curiosity that shot through my heart. Maybe it contained a manifesto of the sadness she felt prior to dying, or perhaps a golden beanstalk climbing with the humility and penitence she found in her final years, months, days, hours even before being strapped to the gurney. But, you see, the problem is that apologies are really just little weeds that grow over monuments and headstones. They keep coming back,
but never stop ruining what lies beneath. If an apology is truly authentic, the pain is supposed to stop. Right?

As the package settled on its bulge in the center of my clean kitchen, my arms reached out to it. I placed a single finger into one of the metaphorical loops of box string, and I couldn’t pull
.

Sarah, I was scared. I didn’t want to be that person. Not again. I didn’t want to untie the brown box string. I didn’t want to gut the cardboard box revealing the memoirs of a person’s life I so desperately wanted to end. You weren’t going to return to me. I cannot be with you. I am not with you anymore. I am not in the dirt beside you, no matter how much I may belong. Instead, I remain above ground, dangling from the thread that sways from side to side, as it drops me just far enough from you that I struggle to stand. I struggle to read, to dress myself, to merely hold on to that ropy thread, that strand of diamonds that the police report in the twenty-year-old newspaper clip said was the only thing taken from the burglary that killed Persephone Riga
.

I don’t want to know anymore what Noa did or didn’t do in her life prior to meeting you, prior to taking you away from me, while finding time to pen these hundreds of pages in her cell. Perhaps she wrote it in the darkness or maybe even while sitting on the toilet. But I don’t want to know how terrible she felt for taking you away from me. I don’t want to answer to Susan and Georg Riga. I don’t want to open the wound that is finally beginning to heal. My blood no longer coagulates. I cannot take any more chances. And I won’t
.

So I’m going to bury her apology or her tears, her retributive last words, her virulent expletives, and all of her potential in the ground with these letters. With you. She put it there, not me. She had the gun, she filled it with bullets, she used it on you. It was never up to me to refuse to speak with the governor. It was never really my choice to abandon her clemency petition. It was never up to me, sweetheart. None of that would have changed your current residence. None of that would have changed what Noa did, even without me. And no matter what she said, what she wrote, I’m still
up here and I’m sitting at my kitchen and I’m staring at that box. And that bracelet
.

That bracelet with a request. A merciless favor for another. That letter addressed to me, but intended for someone else. I think that maybe she’s right. I should give them away. I want to give them away. I want to pass the letters and bracelet on to their intended beneficiaries, but I can’t. I can’t pick up the phone and call Persephone’s parents. I can’t look in on Noa’s words. So instead, I pick up the bracelet and let it drop around my wrist each morning after I wake, struggling to secure the latch with my open hand. Sometimes it closes on the first try and sometimes not. But every day—it is with me when I drive my car, when I go to work, when I climb the stairs to the county courthouse, when I wait in a crowded elevator, when I present at a meeting before forty businesspeople in platinum cufflinks and tailored suits all looking to me for advice—the bracelet is always fastened around my wrist
.

Forever yours and only yours
,
Mom