The Execution of Noa P. Singleton (4 page)

After Marlene and Oliver abruptly left, just as abruptly as they came, Nancy Rae (my sometimes favorite prison guard—she works only three days a week) cuffed me and walked me back to my cell in my own version of the correctional institute Walk of Shame (or, in our case, Walk of Fame).

It never takes long, particularly because, in recent years, I’ve come to be a model citizen on the Row. When they shout “Hands” immediately after finishing a visit, I walk backward to the door like the queen of England is before my personal Plexiglas court, cross my arms behind my back, and slip them through the opening in the door, where Nancy Rae (or someone slightly less resembling an institutionalized caricature) cuffs my wrists. They don’t apply them with care, and for about three months into my incarceration, I would often return to my cell postvisitations with a scattered sanguinary design, not too dissimilar to those bangle bracelets I used to wear in the ’80s or my favorite diamond tennis bracelet anteincarceration.

(One of my former neighbors, Janice Dukowski, who was convicted and sentenced to death for paying someone to kill her husband, used to try to kill herself at least once a month by slitting her wrists with her fungal toenails, and you could never pick out the scars because her bloody bangles always covered them up. But I digress.)

I, of course, am nothing like that now. I always allow my arms to be locked and always hold my head high during the Walk of Fame until arriving back at my cell, where I sit for another twenty-three hours for a single hour of recreation or until another journalist or lawyer wants to come and speak with me. Really, it’s that simple.

I lie down so much in my bed that my body can’t always handle the mere act of standing upright. Sometimes, when a guard comes to my door and lets me know that I have a visitor, like with Oliver and Marlene, I stand from my bed, and instead of walking toward the bars, I fall to the floor instantly, my muscles atrophied, my limbs
bereft from activity, my bones hollow and echoed. Once, I gave up my daily hour of recreation because I was so upset with my mother after she stopped calling and writing for two weeks that I lived within that six-by-nine-foot cell by myself for upwards of five additional weeks, only standing up to urinate and defecate. I found out later that she was on a Baltic cruise with a fireman named Renato, whom she met while at a support group—not for parents of the incarcerated—but for single mothers slash actors sans equity cards. By the time she got in touch with me again, the five weeks were over, and I had to spend another ten trying to redevelop my muscle mass by pushing up from the cold floor forty times an hour.

Now, though, I take advantage of my recreation hour (often sprinting for fifteen feet at a time, watching television, or selecting new reading material), and I sashay with correctional humility when I’m walked between the visitation booth and the cell as if my handcuffs are actually diamond bracelets, Nancy Rae is my secret service officer, and my cocoa-brown prison scrubs are cashmere shawls.

At least once an hour, I’m woken up in my cell. Most people wake up midslumber because of nightmares or to quash their dreams or to use the bathroom. I wake up because my current neighbor screams hourly for her lover. She killed him in Harrisburg, allegedly in self-defense, but the truth is quite contrary. I remember it vividly because it happened before I got here. She was robbing a convenience store when she shot him in the head. “Him,” of course, was not, in fact, her boyfriend or lover or husband or friend, but a guy named Pat Jeremiah, who was the owner of a local sports bar she frequented. He had gone out to pick up some cigarettes when she followed him inside the convenience store to get the cigs for him—of course free of charge. She pulled out a gun when the convenience store clerk wouldn’t oblige but, not knowing how to use it, accidentally set it off toward the door where her stalkee was exiting. She was so fraught with fear and heartbreak that she shot the convenience store clerk as well and ran away. All of this was caught on surveillance camera and played on the news at the time I met Sarah, so she has a special
place in my heart. But the point of the story is that she screams at twenty-one past each hour, the time of death for her beloved “Pat” of “Pat’s Pub.” It keeps me aware, at the very least, though. I don’t have a clock, and the only way I know the time is by my neighbor screaming, “Pat, I love you, Pat! I need you, Pat. I miss you, Pat!” in triplicates. In truth, I don’t know that she even has a clock in her cell. Presumably not. Maybe it’s not actually twenty-one past the hour each day when the conductor taps her baton. But something tells me her internal hour stings at that moment daily, so I trust it as much as I’d trust a sundial. She’s reliable and omnipresent. I like to call her Patsmith in homage to the olden days when your name indicated your vocation, like a blacksmith or silversmith. In this case, she was a lover-killer, a Pat-killer, a Patsmith.

The other fifty-five minutes of each hour are occupied by contemplation of my past, of my crime, of the spiders that build their homes in the corners of my cell. I can’t speak with any counterfeit personalities that purportedly live in the cell with me, and I don’t think that anyone wants to hear my singing voice. My neighbors speak with themselves rather than through the wall to me. And I’d rather remain silent than confess, yet again, through a wall with bars and eyes and ears and microphones.

I’m in prison, for Christ’s sake. It’s literally a vacuum into which people are sucked to clean up the outside. I live inside this vacuum that is my own universe, and I think about me (and Sarah and Sarah’s child, and occasionally Marlene and my father and my childhood friends). That’s why, when I get a visitor, all I can do is talk. Talk and take in what the visitor is wearing or saying or not saying. Observation is my only remaining skill. If they or anyone else (be it Oliver or even Marlene) want to claim that I was self-absorbed before I got here—fine. But not now. Now I obsess over image because that is what people obsess over with me. What I look like, what I say, what I did. I obsess over the fact that I’ll never become middle-aged. I obsess over the fact that I’ll never be able to change my hair color to cover my experience. Or counsel younger versions of myself.

Then again, every once in a while, a person will come into the vacuum to bring me something new to ponder. Oliver certainly didn’t. At least not yet. But there was something seductive in his innocence. For hours after he and Marlene left, I pictured him looking at me through the Plexiglas divider, smiling a smile stretching from Alcatraz to Sing Sing. In that hour, he was a politician, a TV game show host, a weatherman, selling me on his authenticity and his reliability. He was also a fifteen-year-old boy who had just graduated from middle school and this was his first assignment. No, he was a twenty-four-year-old young man who had just graduated from law school, and this was his first appointed case—the case, in fact, that he felt could inform the rest of his pathetic career. But he was too young to do anything. Too untested. Too unsure of who he was going to become to devote his time to anyone like me.

Then he came back alone the day after Marlene gifted me with her presence and brought with him an empty pad of yellow legal paper. He pushed a loose strand of hair behind his ears (where an unexpected tuft of gray sat like a bird’s nest) and pleaded to me, just like Stewart Harris and Madison McCall and all those lawyers pleaded to the jury so many years ago when they convinced me to fight the charges in court.

“Let’s look at you as a person,” he said. “Let’s look at Marlene and what she has to say. Victim impact testimony is precisely what makes this case different from others. And because of Marlene, we can approach clemency from the inside out. We can allow her to spearhead everything. A clemency petition, a declaration from the victim’s family, an affidavit with her signature and with her plea for you to live, all directed to the governor’s desk for his immediate review. Let’s see what the governor thinks. Does he really want to let you go to the gurney without a fighting chance?” Oliver said to me, as if begging me to grant him clemency. “People are what matters now. It isn’t the facts. It isn’t the law. It’s compassion. It’s people.”

It was clear that I was Oliver’s first client in here. And who doesn’t want to be somebody’s first anything?

Still, even though the taste of being someone’s first something (even while incarcerated) seemed delectably irresistible, I did resist. He wasn’t offering anything new for me. It was the other way around, and quite frankly, I was exhausted from giving. Then he reminded me about Marlene.

“She doesn’t believe in the death penalty anymore?” I asked. “Truly?”

Oliver shook his head.

Clearly there had to be more to it than just that, but in an instant, my head dropped to my chest in defeat. To Oliver Stansted, though, my acquiescence was a vigorous nod of compliance. And almost on cue, he picked up his legal pad in his right hand and pushed on the head of the ballpoint pen with his left.

“Do you mind if I take notes?” he asked. It was his first moment of willful determination, and I couldn’t help myself. I wanted to spend my final days with Atticus Finch. I wanted to be charmed by Mark Darcy before I ate my final meal. I wanted to speak with Clarence Darrow. Instead, I settled on Ollie Stansted.

“No, I don’t mind.”

I’m sorry for agreeing. In retrospect, I wish I never had. I’m saying it out loud so it’s quite clear: I wish we had never started this.

M
Y MOTHER DROPPED ME ON MY HEAD RIGHT AFTER
I
WAS
born.

It happened in the hospital, just moments after bequeathing my first sound (a rough high-pitched scream reminiscent of a mezzo-soprano). The doctors handed me to her, and slimy and laminated with blood and amniotic fluid, I just slipped through her fingers and fell right onto that sweet spot of softness crowning my skull. Preempting a double lawsuit, one of the nurses gathered me from the ground and pumped me with drugs while the doctors attended to my mother. I never even had a chance.

Okay, it didn’t exactly happen that way. And clearly, it’s not exactly a memory per se, but it’s a story that I like to think captures my early days. Take it or leave it.

It is true, though, that my mother dropped me when I was a baby. As the story goes, I actually did fall out of her hands from the top of a stairway when I was ten months old, landing on my right side where the shoulder meets the arm. My mother screamed at the top of her lungs after it happened and rushed down the stairs until she grabbed me from the floor.

“Noa!” she cried, scooping me up into her bosom, kissing my ears, my forehead, my shoulders. “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.” Kiss, kiss,
kiss. “I’m so, so, so, so sorry,” she continued, as if any ten-month-old could understand her muffled apoplectic utterances. But perhaps I did, because, as the story goes, I stopped crying at that point, which did anything but calm her.

“Noa?” my mother stuttered. “No … Noa?”

Needless to say, she was afraid I was dead.

“Noa?” she screamed, running to the phone to dial 9-1-1. “Please be okay, please be okay, sweetheart.”

No doubt not only the idea of my death or paralysis tackled her fears, but perhaps also the news that a year earlier, her best friend’s boss’s older sister’s cousin’s next-door neighbor accidently fell in her kitchen, rather unfortunately causing a burning skillet to fly off the range of the stove and land on the soft head of her two-week-old newborn, killing him instantly. This woman was immediately arrested for capital murder and had since been in jail in some nameless state in middle America awaiting trial for something over two years. I’d like to think that my mother was more concerned about my continued life, but somehow I’m fairly certain her fears were slightly more focused on the urban legend
du jour
. That’s what I take from her semiannual mythological reprisal of the day that changed our lives forever. (At first, she seemed almost proud of her ability to cover up for her immortal maternal deficiencies. Then I was arrested, and oh-so-conveniently, she decided to publicly blame herself and this incident in particular for how I turned out.)