The Execution of Noa P. Singleton (29 page)

I kicked the divider between us with my left foot, stubbing my toe in an instant. Ollie tried to look in, but Nancy Rae reminded him to sit back in his seat.

“Noa?”

The toes in my left foot started tingling with pain, a subtle electrocution emerging at the toenail.

“Noa?”

“What?”

He inched closer to me. “There was no intruder, was there? Was it self-defense?” I closed my eyes and thought of the quiet, peaceful things, like old-fashioned lawn chairs with nylon stretching out like a canopy below your seat. A nice silver wristwatch that ticks in your head when you wear it to sleep. Movie theater popcorn drenched in warm butter. The crack of cheap plastic when you twist a soda bottle open. The tuning of an orchestra until it settles onto that simple A major. A mechanical number two pencil.

“Ollie.”

“There’s a reason people are declared ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty.’ ”

My eyes spun upward.

“Stop, Oliver. You’re turning into a cliché.”

“And there’s two kinds of innocence, as well. Legal innocence and actual innocence.”

“Please don’t go down the actual innocence road with me.”

“As if you didn’t actually commit this crime. We’re not talking about some sort of legal fiction anymore or loophole in the case law. You didn’t actually do this.”

“Ollie, I shot her.”

He gripped his pen tighter. A yellow inch tore from the corner of his pad.

“Legal innocence, then,” he said, skittish. “Perhaps your bullet didn’t cause her death. It wasn’t even close to a vital organ.”

“Ollie …”

“You don’t know that. You’re not a doctor.”

“Neither is the Supreme Court, but they rely on good ones nonetheless to make their decisions. Just like what happened here.”

“But that’s not what happened here,” he argued. “Nobody relied on medical experts for the defense. They just stipulated to the state’s pathologist. They didn’t protest his work. They allowed all those photos of the gunshot, but this new pathologist swears that Sarah was not pregnant when she was shot. He has new theories about her cause of death. The county coroner never even had a cause of death. The police didn’t look into the medical records; they just focused on the autopsy. This new doctor focused instead on the hormone levels at pregnancy. The follicle-stimulating hormone. He stated in his supporting statement that those levels are supposed to spike between eight and eleven weeks, right at the time that she died. He compared the blood taken that day with her levels two weeks earlier at Planned Parenthood. They were on track then. They were at 8,500. When she died, they should have been at 25,000 or higher. Much higher. They could have been at almost 300,000, but they weren’t. They were less than 7,000. You see what he’s saying?”

I wasn’t sure if he was finished, so I waited an extra moment or two. Then for the first time that day, he spoke directly to my face without looking down at his little note cards. This was something that needed no practice.

“The police noted all the blood in the apartment that day, but not just from the gunshot. There was blood in the bathroom and on her clothing—her underwear. Your lawyers didn’t even cross-examine the medical examiner about that. The police simply carried all the bloody clothes into the court as if they were popcorn for the jury, without explanation. But nobody really bothered to check up on where the blood came from, outside of their simple explanation of immediate effects from her death. Nobody. They just focused on the gunshot. And you. They didn’t bother to look around once you were arrested.”

“Please, just leave it alone.”

“The insurmountable evidence of ineffective assistance is staggering. This would never happen in …”

“Please, Ollie,” I pleaded. “Just let it be. Everyone else has, and I’m happier that way.”

He picked up a stack of new papers and scanned the top page. I watched his pupils skim each line, until the desolation in his eyes faded. I, however, twirled a strand of hair around my index finger, listening to a harmony of the so-called theories that I doled out to the press during my trial. The Marxist Theory, the Victim Theory, the Cain and Abel Theory, and so on, until we came to the Kevorkian Theory, which nobody ever deems appropriate—even for trial. It’s too hard to prove, I could hear Madison McCall say to me, before I even brought it up.

“It’s not over,” he insisted. “You’re innocent of this crime. Your punishment should be commuted.”

“I don’t want to go into this again.”

“You’re legally innocent of this crime,” he continued. “I’m sure of it. You aren’t guilty of capital murder. It means you’d be off of death row—”

“—Ollie …”

“Regardless of the legal procedural flaws, there are evidentiary flaws in the state’s case. You had no motivation to do this. Nothing at all. You can’t even tell me what it was.”

“You’re so young, Ollie,” I smiled.

“So …?”

“Who knows how long you’ll be in this country. Don’t pretend that the minute you go home to your flat in London, you’re not actually going to forget this case.”

His head shook from right to left, slowly, like a mechanical doll.

“Please don’t make such presumptions.”

“Ollie, with your boarding school background and Marlene Dixon worship, what else am I to presume?”

“—Noa,” he said, softly, as if he wanted to argue, in part, and concede, in part. “I’m nothing like Marlene Dixon.”

I smiled.

“Of course you are, Oliver Rupert. You went to Cambridge. You probably were sent off to boarding school to eat crumpets alongside some earl or duke or someone like that.”

Again, he shook his head left and right. “You don’t get it.”

“What?”

“Yes, I went to Cambridge, but I didn’t grow up like that.” He laughed, nervously. “My father was the first person in his family to go to university. He was a pilot for the military first, and my mom never went to university. And then there’s me. And I haven’t even been home in years.”

I pulled my hair back and tied it at the base of my neck with a rubber band from my wrist. A red indentation remained where it had previously clung, cutting off the circulation.

“Okay, Oliver,” I said to him, raising my hands. “Mea culpa.”

“It’s all right,” he replied instantly. His voice didn’t match his words.

Then he looked to me as if he had more to say, but something
stopped him. Perhaps it was his Englishness, perhaps it was Marlene, or the guilt from not having visited his parents in years and instead tracking a double murderer sitting in a Pennsylvania prison for the better part of the last decade.

“So, I’ve been writing some thoughts down,” I said, breaking the silence. “When you began working with me, I started remembering a few things about what happened, about my childhood—you know, the usual prison memoir crap. Nothing too much, but I want to send it to you.”

“That’s …,” he stalled, as the water swelled in his eyes. “That’s wonderful, Noa.”

I gave him a moment before continuing.

“How can I get it to you?”

“You can give it to me now.”

“I’m not finished. I still have a few more weeks left, don’t I?”

He nodded. “Okay, I’ll wait for it.”

“Good,” I smiled.

“Does … does this mean we are friends now?”

“Sure,” I said. “We’re friends. But just so you know, friendship is nothing more than a polygamist marriage. At least that’s what caterpillar ’stache taught me back in the second grade.”

I tried not to laugh.

“Go ahead, laugh.” I winked. “It’s not my theory.”

“Do you miss them? Your friends? Your polygamist ‘spouses.’ ”

I’m not so adverse to social norms that I had no friends before, but any friends I had, I pushed away, not the other way around. So other than Persephone, I didn’t really have anyone to miss—before Sarah or after. Being my friend, Ollie didn’t ask further.

“You can send the manuscript to me at the firm,” he finally said.

“Isn’t there another way? Can you get me your home address?”

“Send it to Marlene at the firm. Just in case I move, I want to make sure I get it.”

“You sure?”

“Of course,” he said. “The firm isn’t going anywhere.”

I smiled as slowly as a mother does to a daughter she knows is changing clothes the minute she walks out of the house.

“Okay then,” I said. “Does this mean you’re my Russian Romeo?”

He laughed. “Haven’t we been over this before? I’m Welsh, Noa,” he paused.
“Welsh.”

E
QUALITY IS A MESSY THING
. I
N HERE, WE ARE SUPPOSED TO BE
equal to one another. A felon is a felon is a felon is a felon. On the Row, we equally have twenty-three hours of incarceration and one hour of recreation, solitary, men chained inside a basketball den in their facility, women walking the circumference of a sullen courtyard at a separate address.

Outside death row, prisoners don’t know the criminal acts of their fellow prisoners, unless they offer the details themselves. Cafeteria lines sing in a dissonant choir of petty thieves, sexual assailants, rapists, and murderers. We’re a minisociety in here. The teachers, students, poor souls in the corner wearing the dunce caps, sycophantic pedophiles, grade school teachers who slept with their students—all convicts of the same cloth.

Take one step back into normal society—productive, diligent, respected nonfelonious society—and that word
equality
slips through the cracks. Juries make their decisions based on emotion. White people based on white people. Black people based on black people. Hispanics on Hispanics. Women for women. Jews for Jews. Muslims for Muslims. You get the picture. Capital punishment is no exception.

Now, I know that our system is great. It caught me, after all, along with Jeffrey Dahmer and Aileen Wuornos. It works. It really does. Like most things, it’s not perfect nor is it without flaw, but it functions pretty well most of the time. Except when it comes to equality.

The law has created a protected class of individuals. People who, on the basis of their age or status, are more valuable to society. If they are killed—despite the fact that their hearts work the same, their eyes see the same, their bowels empty the same—the party responsible must die. If we kill someone in that precocious class of individuals, then we are sentenced to death based on whatever state we happened to be driving through at the moment. Kill a five-year-old girl, you get the needle. Kill a six-year-old girl, get twenty-five to life. Kill a police officer, get the needle. Kill your husband, get twenty-five to life. Kill a convenience store clerk after purchasing a pack of cigarettes and some gum, get twenty-five to life. Kill a convenience store clerk while stealing that pack of cigarettes and gum, get the needle. A nation that prides itself on equality treats its victims ever so inequitably in ritual.

In Pennsylvania, murder is first-degree murder with intent. You could plan out your attack for the better part of two years or form that desire on the spot. If the state wants the death penalty, the state wants the death penalty. And unlike Texas or California or many others, if the victim was under twelve, you also die. God help you if the victim was a year and one day shy of his Bar Mitzvah. Some states have gone so far as to codify capital murder, applying the sentence of death somewhat less haphazardly. Murder and capital murder are different crimes in Texas. But in Pennsylvania, far too many factors contribute to its arbitrary application. Aggravating factors, they call it. Like murder can be any more inflamed than, well, what murder already is.

For example, if the murder was especially heinous or depraved, cruel or atrocious. Killing a government worker, killing for money, as part of a gang, during the sale of a controlled substance, against a ransom subject, or if the victim was pregnant. And, of course, if she was in the third trimester of her pregnancy or just if I knew she was pregnant at any stage, as if killing her had I not known she was a hair shy of her third trimester wasn’t all that bad. As if killing Persephone would have been worse had I meant to do it.

L
IKE ALL GREAT STORIES, MINE BEGINS WITH CLASSIC
G
REEK
lore. With Persephone, the daughter of Zeus, wife of Hades, queen of the underworld, goddess of death, and my closest friend when I was twelve years old.

As children are wont to do, we thrived on habit and routine. Like I said, many of my afternoons were spent at her new house across town eating Thin Mint cookies on crystal platters and drinking lemonade in crystal glasses. I felt like royalty. Every time I drank from a crystal goblet, it would make a sound like a harp. And every time we finished eating and drinking, Persephone would show me some newly bequeathed asset in their newly bequeathed home of treasures, skipping eagerly from room to room. I was a classicist, an archaeologist excavating matter in my very own Greek myth, led to the underworld of the Riga household by my very own oracle.

For example: the sixteen-person china set, resting peacefully behind a glass casket much like the funeral of a beloved monarch—besotted within a cellophane prison, garnished by roses and medals of valor as a queue of mourning subjects paid their final respects. You may look, you may breathe, you may cry—but you must never touch.

“They’re hand-painted, Noa,” she said weekly, as if it came as easy to her as breathing.

Other times she led me to a collection of modern paintings scattered amid their home, covered with a single cloth, like a recent victim
at a crime scene or a Jewish home in mourning. There was a Miró, a Picasso sketch, even a Modigliani. “That one’s related to Granddad,” she said to me once. But I didn’t know which artist she was referring to and why the painting was buried like her granddad if it was so special. Its face covered with a burlap sack, at the time, reminded me of a stack of old laundry. Now I think of it like a corpse waiting to be lowered into the dirt.

She would pull me to corners of her family’s home, hidden alleyways that crept upon us like winding streets in Europe. “I want to show you something,” she would call, and she would show me something every time. A diamond-encrusted tennis bracelet, fused together with white gold prongs, lying beside her mother’s bed. “A gift from Granddad,” she told me. Stacks and stacks of green bills buried somewhere under the foundation of the house, spread evenly, like casualties of war on a battlefield. “They’re sort of our little fishies,” she giggled, though I’m fairly certain she hadn’t a clue that sleeping fish were not something like money that you hid beneath floorboards.