The Execution of Noa P. Singleton (19 page)

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Authors: Elizabeth L. Silver

Tags: #Fiction, #Contemporary, #Mystery

BOOK: The Execution of Noa P. Singleton

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I looked up. Her eyes twitched and her hair was wet around the scalp. It was already beginning to fall out, and she looked angrier and more pitiful than any human being I’d ever seen. My own mother included. Sarah included, even at her death. She knew at that point, and almost like a cartoon balloon unplugged from its air source, she deflated.

I never answered her question, even to this date. I’m not sure what changed between that encounter, my trial, and nearly three months ago when she and Oliver walked into my life.

“Where did Marlene go?” I asked him. Ollie was the only visitor on the other side of the Plexiglas. He looked away from me as if he was upset I’d been ignoring him all this time. “You’re not going to answer my question, are you?”

I looked down to the Three Musketeers wrapper in my grip. There was no chocolate left.

“Ollie?”

He didn’t reply. Instead, he sat quietly in the chair, brushed his fingers through his hair, and collected his thoughts.

“Ollie?”

He looked directly at me.

“I think there’s something more we can do besides clemency.”

August

Dearest Sarah
,

You were born during the rain. Did I ever tell you that? I used to hate the rain, and funnily enough, it was during the rain when you were born. Your father was nowhere to be seen when one of the associates had to rush me to the hospital. Thirteen hours later, you were in my arms. Your father arrived around hour six of labor, so he was sufficiently present to claim that he had a large part in your delivery, but you and I both know that’s hardly the truth. It’s our little secret. We’ll share it until I’m with you
.

Do you see him? Do you talk to him? There are just so many questions I have for you. I wish I had asked you some when you were alive, but I’ll spend the rest of my life trying. I write these little notes to you—questions, really—that are my way of trying to know you. I slip them between cracks at the cemetery as if it were one great Western Wall. Part of me thinks you read them. Somehow you pluck one of the two-by-five-inch torn papers from their stones, and you find unique and mystical ways of answering them
.

For example, two years ago when I started MAD, I read books and articles and visited prisons to speak with some inmates, who, in between the cacophonous pleas for help, were able to answer questions about guilt, about responsibility, about their own narratives with such eloquence, such musicality that it brought me to visit Noa. Of course, I couldn’t walk inside the prison walls that day, but those few conversations with inmates (both guilty and, I’m sure, some not) helped me get to the next stage, which was this: I wondered if you wanted to be a mother. I mean really wanted to be a mother when everything started, regardless of what I told you. So I wrote it down on a little blue piece of paper and slipped it behind your gravestone. Two days later, I bumped into your gynecologist at a food truck by City Hall. She hugged me, just as she did at the trial, and eventually gave me the sonogram photos. Although the only copies I thought in existence were part of the trial record in evidence,
she had evidently saved another set. She didn’t know why she had saved them, she told me, but when we saw each other, she just knew
.

Another time, I wrote a little note asking if green was really your favorite color. I never asked. I never knew. What kind of mother doesn’t even know her own child’s favorite color? One week later, it rained so hard that all of Philadelphia woke up to an emerald city. Not a single burnt leaf hung in a tree. Not a single aging weed clogged the manicured lawns of the parks. It was at that point that my hatred toward rain melted. You’d think it would have been on the day you were born, but it wasn’t. It was the day the wizard actually answered my questions in Oz
.

Some time later, I wrote to you asking what you would have wanted to do with your life if I hadn’t pushed you into the college of my choosing and toward grad school, or if I had put no dictums on your da Gama period and let you enjoy the museum. On my way out from visiting you, I bumped into an artist doing a watercolor of the gravestones. He smiled at me. He was missing a tooth but didn’t seem to notice or even care. The next day, I woke up, and one of my colleagues had placed two tickets to the ballet on my desk. His wife didn’t want them, and he said he knew that you had always loved to dance. He thought I might like them. Did you want to be an artist? A painter? A dancer? Both? Were you caught living in an adolescent fantasy that never matured because I never let it grow? I thought you might have wanted to be a painter, because the following day, I received a package in the mail, a thin poster tube, stuffed with bubble wrap and newspapers. There was no return address, but when I opened it, I found the watercolor covered with raindrops from the old toothless man at the cemetery. The date of the crumpled newspaper was your birthday
.

You understand what I’m saying, don’t you? These things don’t just happen. They simply don’t
.

Yours always
,
Mom

Chapter 15

J
URY TRIALS ARE REALLY NOTHING MORE THAN POORLY WRITTEN
stage plays. You’ve got two authors writing opposing narratives and a director who is paid not to care about either outcome. Hired actors sit on either end of the stage, while unwitting audience members strive to remain quiet. No applause should be rendered, no gasps of glory. Witnesses sit agape with fury as they stumble across their rehearsed lines. If only they had practiced just once more. If only they had more time or a dress rehearsal, then they would recite their packaged words with such eloquent delivery that the critics in the jury box would believe only them.

On his most recent visit, Oliver bequeathed to me a clean copy of my trial transcript—all twelve volumes, as if I would read through them and inexplicably be able to tell him about all the testimony that never came in and show him all the evidence that was deemed inadmissible by
Herr Direktor
. He seemed to need some sort of tangible reason for involvement that he could take home to his girlfriend or mother and show purpose of trade. After all these months, he still didn’t realize that my memory has become as foggy as an old shadow. As watered down as community theater.

For a childhood spent in the wings of the theater watching my mother traipse across stage to stage, singing that she could do everything better than me, I would say my trial was one of the few comforting episodes of this entire ordeal. Even if I was declared guilty
upon arrest, invariably my life was serene sitting on stage right with the director all in black and the stagehands adorned in blue and gold. The audience was, well, the audience—comprised of film crews and journalists, and family, friends, and professional partners of Sarah and Marlene Dixon. The only problem, of course, the only hiccup of human nature in the entire production, rested with the jury: twelve individuals and an alternate selected by the authors of opposing narratives all generating theatrics to get someone to see the story their way. It’s the same each time, and yet trial after trial produces the same predicament.

Without fault and without fail in nearly every trial, the judge directs the jury to disregard a statement just accidentally uttered by one of the witnesses. And when they pollute the simple cognition of twelve sedentary jurors, the judge presumes that they will simply ignore it.

“I will instruct you now to disregard the witness’s last statement,” the judge says. Ad nauseam. Ad infinitum. Ad … well, you get what I’m saying, at least one time too many per trial.

How a system that delights with impeccable and acerbic precision can employ such a gelatinous technique astounds me, even today. Please disregard what I said when I mentioned my mother dropped me as a baby. Or erase from the appellate record of your cerebral cortex that once upon a time I lied to Oliver Stansted. Or Marlene Dixon. Or that I cried myself to sleep for three years straight after Persephone Riga moved away. Or that I used to fuck the guy down at Lorenzo’s for a slice of free pizza every other Tuesday. They have nothing to do with what happened on January 1, 2003.

I instruct you to disregard the witness’s statement
.

The poetry of the line is almost comical. Nowhere else in life can a person of power instruct another to ignore a statement or observation and ensure its pragmatic compliance. Observation is inherently pliable. In life, we witness movement and emotion and sensation dissimilarly from everyone else. Once spoken, words will never be ignored, no matter how many judges instruct us to do so, no matter
how many appellate courts confirm this to be true. People will never forget. Memory simply doesn’t work that way.

Madison McCall told me later on (during my first appeal) that the law simply presumes that the jury complies with this judicial order. I guess we on the Row aren’t the only bobble heads in the chorus of players after all.

I can’t remember exactly how many times my judge actually instructed my jury to ignore statements made by unwilling witnesses, but it had to be well into the double digits. That many serendipitous errors have to be planned. Or at least cause for a do-over. At the parade of pretrial motions—the government’s most expensive dress rehearsal—Madison McCall tried unsuccessfully to throw out my interrogation, but only after an intestinal road of paperwork throwing around words like
Miranda
and
police misconduct
. Even with the interrogation transcript admissible, I would not testify to rebut it, or repeat the offense in phase two, the segment that would bring in the death sentence.

Chapter 16

P
LEASE DISREGARD THAT LAST CHAPTER
.

Chapter 17

J
URY SELECTION FOR MY TRIAL TOOK NEARLY THREE WEEKS
. The county dragged in over three hundred and fifty spiteful anti-establishment cronies who refused to accept their civic duty to sit in judgment of me. Their excuses rained like biblical plagues—entertaining, but time-consuming narratives nevertheless.

“My father’s a lawyer. I can’t be impartial.”

The constant, omnipresent, ever popular excuse
.

“My mother’s a policewoman. I can’t possibly be impartial either.”

Slightly less popular, but frequently used
.

“My daughter went to Penn.”

Eh …

“My sister works as an art historian.”

Even more eh …

“I’m a teacher, and my students are having their AP examinations.”

Perhaps, if they’ll all flunk because you can’t stick a sheet of paper into a Scantron grader
.

“I’m having back surgery in one week. My doctor can’t reschedule. Will this be finished by then?”

Maybe, but likely not
.