The Execution of Noa P. Singleton (17 page)

“Yeah,” I said. My voice cracked from dormancy when I tried to answer her.

Footsteps snaked around the corner like columns of black smoke.
I was sure it was Nancy Rae. A different Nancy Rae. The behind-the-scenes Nancy Rae who didn’t feel the need to unroll her eyes and flip up her gums when lawyers and parents were in the visitor’s booth.

“Do you think that lawyer of yours will take on my case?” she asked.

Her voice slipped into my cell like a nightlight under the crack of a door.

“I don’t know. I can’t imagine Marlene Dixon is taking on any new clients.”

As much as I wanted to give Patsmith a few final months of possibility, Marlene Dixon didn’t care about human rights. Not really. Her longstanding heart, to which she finally claimed she’s grown into, was clearly targeted at me. Selective advocacy, preferred pro bono, self-righteous rationalization—whatever you want to call it.

“Don’t you already have a lawyer?” I asked. “Don’t you have like five? You’re always out in the visitor’s booth.”

“Yeah,” she said. The word just sort of dribbled out in multiple syllables. “But not for lawyers. Just visitors.”

“That’s got to be nice, though,” I said, and it shocked me that not even one word was sputtered acrimoniously. “My lawyers only visit about once a month. And before Ollie, other than journalists, I can’t remember the last person who even came to see me.”

“Ollie is the young one?” she said, sort of half-inquisitive, half-declarative. “The boy? Always parts his hair. Looks like he went to college.”

I smiled. “I would hope he at least went to college.”

“Yeah, him,” she said. “Think he’ll take my case?”

Footsteps filled the nearby cell. I didn’t know what to say. I spent years doing or saying the wrong thing on instinct. I didn’t want to do that to someone who has only a few weeks left. Days, even. No matter what she did, she deserves at least a little bit of honesty at this point.

“I lost my last appeal,” she finally said. Years of age seemed to congeal around her voice, as if in the course of a ten-second conversation,
she jumped from forty to eighty. “I have two weeks. I don’t have enough time left to see my daughter. I need a lawyer to get me time with my daughter.”

My head dropped to my chest. Nancy Rae walked through the cells, spearing us with her gaze.

“How old is she?”

“Thirteen,” she said, laughing nervously. “She was only one when I was arrested.”

I waited again before responding. It takes time and quite a bit of practice to learn how to hold your tongue. Even here.

“She’s only thirteen,” Patsmith said again. “Thirteen. Almost fourteen.”

“I’m sorry,” I finally said. “I’m really sorry.”

If Marlene were here, she’d hardly recognize me.

But I didn’t put Patsmith in here. She did. She may not understand it now, but at some point, she’ll realize that she’s here for a reason. She did something wrong. She needs to be here. She’ll realize it. She will realize it.

Still, I just wanted to hold her hand.

And I wasn’t lying to her.

“Her father refuses to acknowledge me,” she said, “but my daughter wanted to know me about eight years ago. Someone in her class told her it would be important. Her stepmother, who she calls ‘Mom,’ also thought it would be good. They said it would heal her or something like that.”

“So she was only one when,” I stalled again, looking for the right words. I wish they told you that upon admission to prison, you’d lose vocabulary as quickly as you lost friends. “She was only one when—”

“—when I did my crime?” she said, finishing the sentence for me. “Less.”

“I see,” I said to her. I didn’t know what else to say. I’d only so much as looked at Patsmith from a distance, through bars or glass or a school of big-boned prison guards with necks as thick as goalposts. And again, “I’m sorry.”

She didn’t respond at first. I’ve garnered from the nightly ritual of blessing the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit that her priest probably told her she’d be going straight to hell if executed. (He probably should have told her that upon execution of her crime, but that’s another story altogether.) No wonder she lived in fear.

“You know,” I told her, “there’s nothing to be afraid of. When it happens, it happens. We all go at some point. Might as well make it mean something. You killed someone. An eye for an eye, right?”

“One of my lawyers tried to get me to convince my judge that I was crazy,” she said. “That I didn’t know what I was doing. That it was some sort of postpartum defense, but it didn’t take.”

“It’s not going to ever take,” I said, rather jumpy.

I didn’t mean for it to come across harsh or anything. Again, that’s another chapter that should be put in a “Welcome to Prison” pamphlet. Your not-so-subtle subtleties rise up out of your vocal cadence like punches on at least each occasion you’re allowed to interact with another. I cleared my throat.

“I just don’t think it’ll work. It didn’t work already, right?”

“I know,” she sighed. “I know that. It’s just … I want to see my daughter one more time.”

“Nothing’s gonna happen in two weeks’ time that hasn’t already been cleared up. You aren’t crazy. You know that. And even if you were—”

“I didn’t realize what I was doing in that convenience store, P. You gotta believe me. I didn’t know.”

Again, I smiled, as if she could see through the walls. I didn’t mean it in a condescending lilt. I meant it in a solid embrace of solidarity. I felt pity for her. Like she still believed something happened to her instead of the other way around.

I don’t know.

Maybe in retrospect, it was really envy. She still believed in herself, at least.

“Listen,” I said to her. “Did you know that some guy from Arkansas decided to shoot a couple of people in three days on a killing
spree? He turned himself in and then, in the process, tried to shoot the cop arresting him. Idiot shot himself in the head, essentially self-lobotomizing whatever brain was there in the first place. You see what I’m saying. Clearly this guy was crazy or incompetent or whatever they want to call it, but from the point he shot himself, he certainly was an idiot. Couldn’t tie his shoes or tell anyone his birth date. And still, he was given a death sentence. They didn’t allow the insanity defense at all and allowed him to be executed.”

She was quiet. Or asleep. Or praying.

“He was given his last meal and asked his last words. Know what they were?” I continued. “ ‘I’m saving the dessert for later.’ ”

“I wonder if they saved it,” she said, after contemplating this far too long.

Visions of Patsmith slinked through our shared wall in a prism of surgary desserts.

“Why don’t you try to focus on all the visitors you have coming to see you before you go,” I said, changing the subject. “Think about it. Imagine if you knew when you were going to die on the outside, how amazing it would be to see how people felt before. When it actually counts, you know? It looks like you’ve got that already. That’s actually pretty nice.”

She didn’t know.

“So, who are all the people visiting you?”

“My family,” she said. “My pastor. My parents.”

Nancy Rae next stopped at my cell. I looked up to her just as she opened her mouth. Her bottom lip was filled with congealed tobacco. Little specs of blackened hairs seemed to crawl into the pink wedges between her teeth, holding tight in their new home.

“That’s really great,” I finally said. “Try to think about that.”

Nancy Rae fumbled around with her keys, looking for the one to my cell. When she finally found it, a smudge of pasty tobacco slipped out of her mouth and splattered on the floor.

“Singleton, you’ve got a visitor.”

“C
HEETOS OR
D
ORITOS
?”

Oliver stood across from me with a handful of quarters and a lined forehead. We had already met a handful of times since this whole clemency mess began and he’d only just discovered the vending machines. No doubt had one of Patsmith’s myriad visitors been in his stead, I would have been feasting on a three-course meal of Frito-Lay-Twizzler-Kisses.

“I’m sorry that I can’t offer anything else, but that’s all that’s left. Do you want Cheetos or Doritos or a really old bag of pretzels that I think might have been in there when you were still part of the British Empire?”

Visitors don’t get to personally hand over the snacks they purchase for us when popping into the Row for a quickie. Instead, they purchase delicacies from the patisserie of Frito-Lay or Coca-Cola to serve as a consolation prize for freedom. And since we get these little caloric goodies (which, I’ll admit, do sometimes make an inmate’s week worthwhile), veteran guardess Nancy Rae must accompany them to the vending machines, take out the candy bar from the machine, place it in a brown paper bag, and deliver it to us, without their ever having placed a handprint on it. Contraband, they’d call it, if such an event were to transpire.

“Can you see if they have any chocolate?” I asked him. “I’d like a Three Musketeers bar.”

He calculated the change in his hand methodically, counting aloud.
One quarter, two quarters, three quarters, four
. As he left, Marlene’s face took his place. Of course she was wearing the black pantsuit from her previous visit and her omnipresent monotone frown.

“I think it’s time we discuss what happened,” Marlene said to me before even sitting down. “Enough dawdling.”

There was no lead-in, no exposition, no leisurely weighing of options as I considered whether to speak. It probably would have been easier if, instead of Oliver, she were here from the beginning, trying to uncover whatever it is she was trying to uncover with this ridiculous clemency petition. But like all demigods, she sent her underlings to do her work. Patsmith couldn’t have had this problem.

“Did you hear me?” Marlene repeated. Her face was rubbery, like she’d had plastic surgery in the previous few years and I’d only just noticed it. I looked back to her, hoping to see Oliver, but he was still at the vending machines. It was certainly easier to talk about my father to him than to Marlene, who, let’s be honest, had ulterior motives grander than
the statistics of executions that have been turned down at this level
that Oliver indicated to me on practically each and every visit.

“I’m trying to have a conversation with you,” she demanded.

Oliver snuck back to our little booth. “All taken care of,” he smiled. “The food will be out to you shortly.”

I imagined that he was wearing a black tuxedo with a pleated shirt beneath, slightly creased where he had forgotten to iron it. But instead of serving me like a diner at a fancy restaurant, Mr. Oliver Rupert Stansted was offering me my requested meal of Three Musketeers.

“Oliver, if you’ll just wait a moment, Noa and I are in the middle of a conversation.”

“No we’re not,” I said.

“Sit down, Mr. Stansted,” Marlene demanded. “I’d like to go back to New Year’s Day,” Marlene said, turning her attention back to me.

I sighed. “Fine.”

“What were you doing that morning before you broke into her apartment?”

“Shopping for beverages.”

“And …?”

“And … what?” I asked, the timbre in my voice hinting upwards.

“Shopping for beverages and what else?”

But before I could think, Nancy Rae knocked on my door and handed me the brown paper bag.

“Thanks,” I told her and also mouthed to Oliver. He nodded to me, graciously.

“Noa, please focus on that morning,” Marlene said.

I picked up the Three Musketeers bar and sliced it open from one of the serrated zigzags at the top, so that only a small desert of sepia appeared. I was starving. The dark brown shell peeked out from the wrapper, like the head of a banana climbing out from its peel. Next, I bit the hard chocolate, grabbing an inch-long piece of the candy bar in my mouth. It sat flat on my tongue for a cool ten seconds, melting against my body’s heat and vanishing between the invisible taste buds of my tongue. I hadn’t wanted food this badly since …

“Noa!” Marlene commanded, banging on the partition.

 … since …

“This is ridiculous. I don’t need to waste my time on this today.”

But I skinned another wall of the candy bar, this time chomping down on the hardened chocolate.

“Oliver, do something!”

 … since that time.

“We need to talk to you,” Oliver said.

“Noa!”

The banging was loud on the Plexiglas. I almost dropped the receiver to stop them.

“This is a complete waste of time,” she yelled at Oliver. “Do your job! Do your job if you want to keep it.”

But the banging continued, plangent and percussive, like the whelps of a police baton.

By the time I finished the candy bar, I no longer saw Oliver or Marlene across from me. Instead, I was back in the police station, locked in a tiny office with no glass wall separating me from an empty desk. My hands were cuffed, facing each other like confused children outside the principal’s office. Red slices of my skin ran beneath the silver bracelets, which covered my favorite tennis bracelet, another cruel foreshadowing of my future. And my right sleeve was soaked in blood, hidden safely under my coat. I don’t think anyone noticed.

The door creaked.

My heart jumped.

A middle-aged man with a goatee walked into the room wearing jeans and a button-down shirt. He had no badge, no name tag, and he was wearing sporty sunglasses on his head as if he had just come from the beach, despite the fact that it was winter and the middle of the night and we were in Philadelphia.

“Noa Singleton?”

I hesitated before nodding.

“I’m Officer Woodstock. I’m the detective assigned to this case. Do you understand that?”

My eyes pickpocketed the room. There was a glass mirror and a tiny black bulb at the corner of the ceiling. It was inside there that everything I said, everything I did, every move I made, every menacing gaze I gave would be recorded. As of that moment, no red dot accompanied it. That, I’m sure of.

“I’d like an attorney,” I told him. “I have the right to an attorney.”