The Execution of Noa P. Singleton (7 page)
Read The Execution of Noa P. Singleton Online
Authors: Elizabeth L. Silver
Tags: #Fiction, #Contemporary, #Mystery
Of course, explanations three, four, five, and seven were heavily developed by the prosecution and ultimately became the reason the public needed to put me in here. Though, deep down, I’m fairly certain nobody truly believed any of it. When I told Stewart Harris of my creative role as press secretary for the prosecution, he quickly got a gag order until the trial was over. By the time it was, I didn’t care enough to answer the question of “why” to the remaining press who were actually interested enough in my life to even cover the story for local periodicals with circulations of less than one thousand.
When you try to find the answer and explanation for a law, a scientific discovery, a tumor, and you can’t identify its reasons, then you just cut it out. Surgically remove anything potentially cantankerous. Cauterize society around it so that we’ll never know the real answer.
For example, two months after I moved to Philadelphia and began my freshman year of college, my first semester was cut short by an emergency abortion and partial hysterectomy. I was in Van Pelt Library gathering some books for a paper I was writing on the French Revolution when I fell down into a crumpled ball. A quiet librarian found me in the stacks (somewhere in the
N
s of History) and took me to the overpopulated waiting room of the emergency room at HUP. I really can’t tell you much else, other than the fact that I left a nasty pool of blood in that spot in the library, and I’m told you can still see a stain.
By the end of the week, I was no longer able to have children. Evidently, the child that Andy and I had conceived three months earlier was growing in my overrun uterus. A handful of fibroids had also decided to take up residence and refused to share the space. The child we conceived had, no sooner than it developed a heartbeat, lost that
heartbeat in the
N
s of the library and then later was cleaned out at the HUP Center for Women’s Health with another two letters I grew to hate. It would almost have been predestined had the miscarriage brought me to my feet in the
D
s and
E
s of History. That way, when people trace my life history back to this point in time, they could look at books about the Diaspora, Evolution, or Ethiopia instead of Napoleon or Nefertiti or even an edited survey of North Korea.
People always look at that moment in my life as the colorful influence that painted the following five canvassed years. The whispers, the articles, the prosecution’s theory, the voices that sit above my cell like poisonous gas.
Can I have children? Can’t I have children? Did I blame men forever? Do I blame myself? Whose fault is it? Were the doctors to blame? Did they need to remove her uterus? Maybe she could still have had children if she tried harder. If she wanted it more. If she wanted it badly enough. Really, can she not have children anymore? Really? Did Sarah know about it?
The prosecution dubbed it the Van Pelt Incident. The origin of my downward spiral, the egg to my angry chicken … you see where I’m going. But the truth is, it was simply the worst physical pain I’d ever experienced. Nothing more.
After the Van Pelt Incident, I spent four days in the hospital and was visited by only one person—the librarian who stumbled upon me in the stacks that day. She hand-delivered the book I was researching at the time so I could finish my report on the French Revolution, and also brought me a book on nuclear energy from the
N
section that no longer had any use to the library. I finished the history paper but decided not to turn it in. I remained a student at Penn until the end of the semester but didn’t return after the Christmas break.
The bottom line is that I’ve never sweated through another night worrying I might be bringing a little Noa into the world. Most important, no matter what they say, I’ve never really cared.
Besides, I know that’s what Oliver’s really doing here. He’s another paid marionette trying to get an answer to Mama Marlene so she can get that interminable “why” out of her system and finally
move on with her life. X-day is certainly not going to help. She’s stuck there in that “why” scratch on her record repeating
ad infinitum
until I pluck the disc from its player, clean off the scratch with a simple puff of my lips, and hand it back to her to hear the music properly. She hasn’t a clue that records have been replaced with newer technology. That’s the problem.
Of course, Marlene’s other problem is that she already knows why her daughter died—she just doesn’t want to believe it.
June
Dearest Sarah
,
I hope I’m doing the right thing. God, I hope I’m doing the right thing. My thoughts are so jumbled together now that I sometimes lose track. You have to know that whatever happens at the end of all of this, I am doing it all for you. I did it all for you. It’s just that these things take so much time. The system works so slowly that you can’t always predict the outcome. I know I can’t, no matter how meticulous I’ve been, no matter how many appeals I have filed, and how many friends I make and lose. Life, just like death, is as unpredictable as a jury
.
I suppose I’m sort of asking your permission for what I’m about to do. God, even when I type this, I feel conflicted. But I’ll just come out and say it. I visited her. I visited her at the Pennsylvania Institute for Women, and she hasn’t changed. Not a bit in ten years of incarceration. Not in nearly a decade of solitary confinement. She’s had all this time to think about the past, and yet the lies and haughtiness keep spilling from her as if prison doled out credit for good behavior for each and every fabrication, each and every glimmer of contempt
.
As you can imagine, it pains me to use that name. Noa. All I can see when I look at her is a cold-blooded, borderline personality-plagued, folie de grandeur double murderer. But her name, sweetheart. Not Noa Singleton. Noa
P.
Singleton, she declares
.
Noa
Noa
Noa
It means motion and movement, though she’s not doing much of that on the Row
.
Noa
.
It falls so smoothly from my lips when I say it. I wish you could try it with me
.
I’m sorry for all of this, but to whom else can I talk but to you? Sweetheart, I thought I owed it to you to tell you about my visit. It’s
taken me so many years to get to this place. I’ve tried to move on, just like I know you would have wanted. I’ve dealt with the loss of your father. (Thank goodness you didn’t have to watch him waste away.) I’ve tried to make friends, but I think people are still afraid of me so my Rolodex is fairly slim. It’s funny, because I don’t know if people are afraid of me now because of what happened, or if they’ve always been afraid of me and I’ve only just realized it
.
Sarah, in all honesty, I wish I knew how you’d feel about Mothers Against Death. You’ve been with me this entire time, from the moment I testified at her hearing, to the moment I began MAD, until even this week on my visit to the prison. You were so close to motherhood. New to motherhood, really. I know you would have understood this instinct. You understand—as someone who has created life—how it is not in our hands to take it away. It simply isn’t. I’m so sorry it took me this long to get here, but at least I’m here now
.
I haven’t talked much about the visit to the prison (and I will, I promise—I’m just having trouble focusing right now). I’m now working with a first-year associate at my firm named Oliver Stansted. From day one, he demonstrated an interest in pro bono work—in particular, criminal defense. No other First Years wanted to soil their new suits with prison work, and Oliver walked into my office more eager than he really should have been, almost as if he had planned this all along. At first, it took me off guard. He is a Cambridge graduate. He graduated with a Double First, spent quite a bit of time traveling around America, and also skirted offers from most of the major firms in New York for his summer internships. He chose our firm in Philadelphia for his first permanent job. I actually remember his original application over the summer several years ago. (I always remember the foreign applicants. Their résumés are usually printed on A-4 paper, and they never bother to Americanize the spellings to fit. He did, though.) Right now it’s just the two of us. I set up Mothers Against Death shortly after he came into my office with his mammoth smile and perfectly tailored suit. You probably would have had a crush on him. I’m fairly certain Noa already does
.
So, I’ll just come out and say it and hope that you approve. Through Mothers Against Death, Oliver and I are putting together a clemency petition for Noa. It really is almost a formality, a futile plea to deliver to our trusty executive, and is more than likely to be turned down
.
Before you worry, though, make no mistake—Noa will never see the light of day. We are just trying to get the governor to commute her death sentence into a life sentence, where she’ll spend the last of her too many remaining decades behind bars. She will still be in maximum security, still a convicted murderer, and will still continue to agonize over what she’s done, turning her arrogant, self-centered, self-righteous mind into mulch. But she will be alive while she does all of this. It’s not really our place to kill her, just like it wasn’t her place to kill you. I believe that now. It took me nearly ten years to get here, but I believe it. You understand, sweetheart, don’t you? I know you do. She deserves this. It’s afar worse punishment for taking you away than getting to leave this life before me
.
I have to go now. I probably shouldn’t have written you, but I had a few minutes to spare and there was nobody else with whom I wanted to spend it
.
Forever yours
,
Mom
I
THINK THE THING
I
ACTUALLY MISS THE MOST IS WATCHING A
sun sit still on a solid evening hour, its talons skewering the clouds beneath. That elongated stretch through the clouds; that beam downward, pointing like a strict schoolteacher, informing everyone around that, yes, there is a higher purpose. I’m not saying I found religion in here just because I can’t watch a sunset anymore. God, that would be cliché, and I’d rather die than pass on that impression. But I do sit alone, sometimes, wondering whether the clouds are gathering together, communing like a collection of cotton balls in a tightly sealed ziplock bag, or whether they’ve been flattened out like a stack of pancakes. Or if they’ve been vaccinated with a syringe of rainy dye so that only a select few darken into grays, blacks, and charcoals.
It’s funny how most things come in threes. Cumulus, nimbus, stratus. Three times a charm. Three strikes and you’re out. Hickory, dickory, fucking dock. I suppose, then, that it would only make sense that I’m going to die in a trio of poisons. Sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide, potassium chloride. A three-drug cocktail designed first to anesthetize, second to paralyze, and third to exterminate. This, my lawyers told me, was a far more humanitarian way to finish the job than its predecessors, which included all but not limited to public executions of any and all forms, a firing squad, hangings, gas chambers, electrocutions, and, of course, our very own lethal injection. For some reason, people still like to call it The Chair,
as if they’re holding on to the good old days. But nobody fries from the needle. They know this as well as they know the instrument of death that brought them here. No. They just experience botched anesthesia, welcoming the paralysis that precludes them from informing a single living being that the potassium chloride stings. It stings so much that the volcano at the vein has erupted prematurely, and as a result, molten lava is slowly rolling through the body, incinerating and smoldering arteries and organs in its track, like being burned alive without the ability to scream.
I’ve read up about it. I have articles from those habeas lawyers and from Madison McCall. It’s supposed to be painless, and might actually be. But how can that be tested? Honestly, is someone really going to care about any pain we feel on our twenty-sixth mile? They’re going to do it anyway, no matter how many veins they have to test to find the right one, no matter how many people divide up the task, no matter how late in the night they proceed. They’re going to do it anyway.
In the ’40s, they tried to fry some kid for murder and failed twice. They charged his body full of electricity—the metal cap tickling his brain, the straps wound tightly around his arms—but they couldn’t do it. It wasn’t his fault that the incompetent executioners messed up twice. Still, they tried it a third time to make sure the boy was dead, taking pleasure as his body shook in a lightning bolt of momentary seizure until, like the sizzling flicker of a fading lightbulb, he finally turned off.
Like I said, everything has a way of coming out in threes.
