The Execution of Noa P. Singleton (26 page)

I
TOLD
M
ARLENE ABOUT THE PREGNANCY ABOUT ONE WEEK
after watching Sarah walk into Planned Parenthood with my father on her arm like an urban accessory. Forty-eight hours later, she insisted we meet again in person.

Unlike our previous rendezvous, I was the first person to stroll into the diner. I sat at a corner table, ordered a Lemon Zinger tea and an everything bagel and waited. A crew of college students walked in and out, nursing their hangovers. A businessman sat on his cell phone for about five minutes until he realized he was in the wrong place. And I’m fairly certain a deal involving the price of an ounce of cocaine was taking place in the booth just ten feet from my own. As for me, I was nearly on my third refill of hot water and picking up crumbs with the cushions of my fingers when Marlene finally walked in.

“I thought we were meeting at 3:00,” I said to her, looking at the invisible watch on my wrist. “I’ve got things to do, people to see.”

She sat down. “Don’t pull that with me today.”

As she inched into the tight plastic booth, something seemed off about her. She was still wearing her habitual black attire, but she moved around in it clumsily, as if nothing quite fit her anymore.

“You all right?”

“Am I supposed to be all right with this news?”

“We haven’t even spoken yet and you want to blame me for your mood? I don’t have to stay here anymore.”

She rearranged the table décollage and finished getting ready in the booth.

“Sorry,” she said, without looking at me. “Sorry. Just tell me what you know,” she demanded, weaker than usual.

“Just that she looked happy.”

“No, no, no,” Marlene burst, pushing up her sleeves. “She’s not happy. She’s not happy. This is not okay.”

I crossed my legs under the table.

“I know you don’t like them together, but such is life, no? What can you do?”

“She can have an abortion is what she can do,” Marlene declared. In hindsight, it probably should have been more of a shock to me at the time.

“Wow,” I laughed. “And here I was, thinking I got lucky in the parent department.”

Marlene ran her fingers through her hair and pulled out a rather hefty score on her way down. She tossed them under the table.

“Shit, Marlene, are you okay?”

“I’m fine, Noa,” she said sternly. “She cannot have this baby.”

“Yeah, you already said that.”

“I want you to help me, Noa. You must help me.”

The words
needy
and
desperate
never previously applied to Marlene. This powerful woman, this sophisticated senior law partner in a major multinational law firm, was in need. She needed to talk and get something off her chest. And she needed that with me. From me. And that’s the one morbidly positive thing I learned from what happened with my father. When someone needs something from you, you offer it to that person, even if you can tell it is leading somewhere dark.

“Please, Noa,” she pleaded, holding out a hand with a Band-Aid. I could see a slight bluish bruise beginning to form underneath. “Please.”

“What could you possibly need from me now?”

A waiter came by and asked Marlene for her order. She was momentarily flustered when she couldn’t find the menu and then just ordered a cup of coffee. No, she changed it. She ordered tea. Then she changed it again to just orange juice. And a biscuit with butter on it. Then she looked back at me, adjusting her posture on the plastic bench. “Sarah won’t speak with me anymore.”

“Is that why your hair is falling out?”

I didn’t mean that. I didn’t mean to say that. I don’t know why I said it. To this day, I don’t know why I said a lot of things to her.

“I went over there to talk her out of this relationship,” she continued. “And that’s when I saw the pregnancy books and clothing and everything. I knew about it before I got your message.”

“I’m not giving you the money back.”

Again, I don’t know why I kept speaking to her like that. It was as if the screening mechanism that was stripped from my communication skills upon prison acclimation began fading a year earlier.

“We had a huge falling-out, and she kicked me out.”

“I thought it was your apartment. The whole da Gama period and all?”

“Please, Noa,” she pleaded. “Stop interrupting me. It’s hard enough.”

I nodded and the waiter came by with Marlene’s orange juice. “Sorry. Go on.”

Marlene picked up the glass and drank from it. I could almost see the juice travel down as she primped her nascent balding self into talking to me.

“Sarah has a disease called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. It’s a congenital heart defect that can lead to heart attacks, sudden death.” She paused, thinking. “Every year or so, there is a news story about a healthy active athlete who drops dead in the middle of the basketball court or the football field or track. You’ve heard of this, certainly.
Well, they likely had this disease—unknown or undiagnosed—or something similar.”

“And, let me guess,” I paused, eyes open. “Pregnancy makes it worse?”

Marlene nodded, her focus back to me. “Exactly.”

I shied a bit. “I see your predicament, Marlene, but like I told you before, this is a little above my pay grade.”

“I’ll pay you more.”

“It’s an expression.”

“I know that. I know that. I just—”

“Exactly what do you think I can do?” I asked, nervously trying to fill the silence. “I’m pretty much a nobody here. You could have plucked anyone off the street to do the same ‘job.’ ”

For a change, I decided to use quote marks around my words. I think it actually might have distracted her a bit.

“I just …”

She was trying not to appear flustered.

“Look Marlene, I don’t know your daughter. I hardly know my dad. You helped me pay my bills for the last few months, so thanks for the job and all, but now this is what it is. I’m not about to break up a relationship with two loving parents who both want a kid.”

“But your father …”

“Okay, you’re right,” I corrected. “Maybe
one
loving parent. That’s better than none, right?”

“He’s …”

“Yes, he’s a loser. He’s a criminal. He’s not the brightest. What about him?”

“You have influence over him, and he has influence over her,” she declared, before clutching the inside of her arm. “I can’t imagine you’d want him going back to prison.”

Marlene was speaking to me as if I were sitting in the wings of the theater, a lone patron to her preauthored soliloquy. As if she actually had any control over what happened with my father’s future.

“You’re wrong,” I told her. “I have no influence over my father, so don’t try to blackmail me with sentiment.”

“Noa, you do have influence over him. You just don’t realize it. You have to learn how to use your role. Your strength.”

“So I have influence and power now?” I laughed, “and you have …?”

She nodded silently.

“Marlene?”

“I have nothing without Sarah. And now I have nothing,” she said. It was angry and pinched with pity in a way that made me want, at the very least, to keep listening. “She thinks that I want her to have an abortion because your father is not a college graduate. Or because he’s older. Or because he has a criminal record.”

“She thinks you think he’s beneath her,” I said, confirming aloud what she clearly had difficulty articulating for upper-middle-class guilt or professional embarrassment or some other concoction that people with china patterns endure.

She looked away.

“She does, doesn’t she? It’s a class issue.”

“This is America. We don’t have class issues,” she declared.

I laughed. “You’re kidding, right?”

She didn’t join me.

“Seriously, you are kidding. Your shoes probably cost more than one month’s rent for me. You drive home to the Main Line or wherever you live in your Mercedes or Lexus or Audi.”

“That’s enough.”

“What?”

“I think we both know.”

“What? That my father is beneath your sacred daughter?”

“Stop.”

“You know it’s true. I know it’s true. Why try to hide it?”

“Enough!”

She looked around to inspect her surroundings. Luckily, nobody cared whether she raised her voice or not.

“Sorry,” I said. Again, it used to be easy to say that word. It used to be easy to apologize for things I hadn’t done. It was the things I had that posed the most problems.

“So you’ll help me?” she finally said.

I stood and dropped a few dollars on the table to pay for her orange juice.

“It’s just not my problem anymore. Sorry.”

“I
NEED YOUR HELP
!”

“Who is this?” I said into the phone. “Hello?”

“You know who this is,” he paused, breathing heavily into the receiver. “I … I need your help, Noa.” The tornado winds of his voice tossed me aside. More than six months absent, and back we were to our original conduit of reconciliation. “Please. Can you meet me?”

I inhaled with a deep yogi breath.

“Absolutely not,” I said and then I hung up.

But it rang. And it rang. And rang again until I answered it once more.

“I’m going to call the police,” I said answering the phone. “I don’t want to see you. I don’t want to get involved with your business. I’m trying to fix my own life here.”

“Noa, sweetheart,” he pleaded. “I’ve never asked you for anything in my life—”

“You’re joking, right?” I laughed. “Seriously, Caleb. You can’t hear yourself, can you?”

“Please, I … I need you. And I haven’t asked you for anything—”

“—you constantly asked me to see my apartment, to visit your bar, to forgive you.”

“Hear me out—”

“—and secondly, you’ve barely been in my life long enough to even
make such claims. The few minutes you’ve been a part of it, all you’ve done is ask for favors. Do you even hear yourself?”

“Please!” he shouted, quietly, like a muted stage whisper. “I don’t know where else to turn.”

“Not my problem,” I said. “Good-bye.”

But I didn’t hang up. My hand clutched the phone close to my ear, waiting.

“I don’t know what to do,” he said eventually, his voice crumbling.

I listened to him. I’m not sure what took over me at that moment. Maybe it was his panting that felt reminiscent of that stray golden retriever. Maybe it was the fact that I could hear him wiping a lip of a semiclean pint glass with a rag that probably hadn’t been washed in the better part of the fortnight.

“I don’t know what to tell you, Caleb—”

“—she’s pregnant,” he finally said. “She’s pregnant, and I don’t know what to do about it. You above all people should know how it feels to have a father like me. I shouldn’t be a father. I shouldn’t … I mean … I … can’t …”

“Stop stuttering!”

“I’m … fr … fr … freaking out, Noa!”

“You’re a grown man. You’ve made this mistake before. Deal with it the way you’ve always dealt with it. Run the fuck away.”

He breathed in through his nose, and I could tell he’d been crying. Every breath was clotted with mucus and felt caught behind a fear he so rarely displayed.

“I don’t want to run away anymore,” he said. “Believe it or not, I really have changed.”

I heard him gulp something liquid. Water? Juice? Beer?

“Where are you now?” I asked.

A faint bell dinged nearby.

“I’m at Bar Dive,” he replied. “Can you meet me here?”

“It’s freezing. I’m not leaving my apartment.”

I held the cell phone in my left hand as I bit the skin hanging off
the corner of my cuticle on my right thumb. It tore a little beyond its dead root and started bleeding little rivers drifted into the wrinkles on my hand like red tributaries.

“Please,” he said.

“Aren’t you preparing for tomorrow’s big new year celebration with Sarah or something?”

“Please,” he said again. “I need you.”

“Come on, Caleb.”

“Please, Noa.”

I don’t know that I recognized a crack in his voice or if it was the swivel in his tone, but I thought about it as if it were true that he had no one else but me in the world. I waited a few moments—long enough for him to wipe the sweat from his brow three times—and then I gave in.

“Fine. I’ll be right over.”

I grabbed my messenger bag, draped it over my chest like a Girl Scout sash, and covered it with my black down jacket, a red scarf, red gloves, and purple hat—all courtesy of my new income from Marlene. The whole time I was getting ready, feverishly, as if my father’s life depended on it, the sound of his phone call rang in my head like a warning. A siren circling my subconscious as if I knew exactly what was going to happen before it did. It’s funny how our minds work. Almost like that movie soundtrack with the tremulous violins prescient of our next move. Even though the soundtrack dictates otherwise, we still enter that dark room. Still, we tell our loved ones we’ll be right back. Still, we drive home alone when all the power is out in a thunderstorm.

For me, that soundtrack was playing against the telephone ring in my head when I left my apartment. It played when I dropped into the subway stop and traveled all the way to Girard Street, where I exited by the corner where I first saw the shadowman, strolled the few blocks until I arrived at the hanging tennis shoes and Bar Dive. The letters on the marquee were still canary yellow as they were the day I fled all those months earlier.

The door was locked, and the sign in the window read
SORRY, WE
’
RE CLOSED
. I knocked on the door and peeked through the slight opening in the window where the blinds were broken. My father was sitting alone in a chair, trembling, his arms wrapped around his torso like he was wearing a straitjacket. He hadn’t shaved in what appeared to be days. No hair grew over the pea-pod scar over his lip, and for a moment, he looked almost like a negative of a thin Charlie Chaplin. Scattered images of my mother’s elementary-school fetish flashed in my memory.

“Dad?” I yelled through the glass, knocking on the door. “Hello?” He looked up and rushed to let me in. “What the hell is going on?”