The Execution of Noa P. Singleton (15 page)

“Look, Marlene, I’m sorry, but I really don’t know what you want from me. So your daughter’s dating my father. So they’re together.
Okay. So you and I may be related one day. So my father was in prison. You’re not telling me anything I don’t already know. If you don’t want your daughter dating my father, that’s your problem. Not mine.”

Marlene took the photographs and put them back into her briefcase, only to pull out another envelope to hand me.

“Don’t bother counting it. There are ten thousand dollars in there. I need you to do what you need to do to break up that relationship.”

I laughed. “You’re kidding, right?”

She didn’t budge.

“Seriously, you’re kidding.”

“I am not.”

I continued laughing.

“Do it yourself.”

She placed both of her hands on the table, neatly woven together at the knuckles as five delicate blood knots.

“If I do anything connected to that man; if I so much as speak with him alone, Sarah will know it was me,” she said, her voice crisp and low. “That is not an option.”

I couldn’t help myself. She was sitting across from me, fetid and poised in her tailored suit and gold locket as if she were royalty, deigning to speak with the likes of me; no, supplicating the likes of me, for help.

“If you say so. Still, get someone else.”

She shook her head slowly.

“There’s no one else.”

“There’s always someone else,” I said.

She unhooked her fingers from one another, crushed them into a fist, and waited. Then she picked up her pen, dabbed it on her lower lip, and flipped to a new page of her legal pad. She opened a menu stuck together with syrupy residue. She cleared her throat. She tapped her fingernails in a round against the table, all without looking my way. It was as if she knew it took only one minute at most for people to change their minds to hers, as if all she needed to do was sit before someone, threatening to take away her presence, to make that
person care. That was something my mother never mastered. If she threatened to remove herself from me, she removed herself from me.

“Why on earth is it me?” I finally asked.

“Because he’s your father,” she answered, “and like it or not, that matters.”

“It doesn’t. Not with him. Not anymore. Sorry.”

Marlene patted her eyebags and licked her lips.

“This relationship hurts you just as much as it hurts me. And if it doesn’t today, it will tomorrow. If it doesn’t tomorrow, I promise you, one day in the near future, you will wake up wondering where the father you’ve so longed for is living, and you’ll remember this conversation. You’ll remember that, once again, he left you. Only this time, it wasn’t for someone different. It was for someone just like you.”

“Someone just like me?” I asked. “I get that this lunch date has been rather intimate, but I can’t imagine I’m anything like your daughter.”

“Your father is not just with someone half his age, he’s with someone your age, who went to school with you. And that, Noa, is going to slowly eat at you as you meet new people, as you date, as you want to introduce boyfriends to your parents—one an ex-con in multiple jurisdictions across the continental United States, and another, a failed community theater actress. We both know that’s precisely why you’re going to help me break up this embarrassing excuse for a relationship,” she said, as if concluding a lecture. “Now, did you order your tea?”

I shook my head no.

I never even told her I drink tea.

“Do you still want some?”

I shrugged, looking over to the legal pad. Her handwriting was illegible, as if she had been writing out prescriptions all day. As if she were mad herself, a self-appointed Don Quixote. Or maybe she was relegating that role to me.

“How much money did you really bring with you?” I asked. I hadn’t paid rent in over a month.

She pushed the envelope toward me.

“You can count it. There are ten thousand dollars in there,” she looked back to my wrist. “Easier money than selling that bracelet. It could probably help you get back in school, if you really wanted it to.”

My hands escaped back into my jacket sleeves.

“Don’t you want to know a little bit more about me first?”

She folded her arms.

“Like my favorite color?” I asked. “Or what sort of music I listen to? Or, say, my favorite food? Clearly you’ve done the basic biological research. Absent father, according to you because of criminal tendencies. Blasé mother. Do you know I have a baby brother? He works in porn in North Hollywood. Is that just like your daughter?”

And then quickly unfolded them, unamused.

“I know everything I need to know,” she said.

A spill of laughter fell out of me so slight even I didn’t believe it.

“You don’t have to believe me, but will you help me?” she concluded. “At the very least, you can find out a little bit more about him.”

“I know all I need to know about him,” I said, looking back to the stack bedded within the envelope. It seemed to be multiplying the longer I stared at it. Perhaps that’s why my father was keeping her from me.

“Where does she live?”

“In a high-rise near Rittenhouse on Walnut Street.”

She stood partially from her seat to move the envelope closer to me. I could tell at that point that she was a bit overweight, but only if I stared at her hips. (Hence, the pantsuits, no doubt.) Inside, I could see just exactly how much was inside. Enough to pay my bills for nearly six months.

“I’m gathering from our conversation that you didn’t know anything about this. I’m sorry to be the one to break the news to you, but your father has a predilection toward fabrication.”

She pulled out the photograph of the shadowman again.

“I can’t have my daughter with a man who does this for fun. If our roles were reversed, Noa, you’d do the same.”

His jaw was bruised and his eyebrow split in two in a way that looked glued in a permanent state of disorientation.

“If not for the curiosity or familial pull, then at least for the money,” she said, handing me the heavier envelope.

The thing is, the quest that Marlene had given me was sensational at best, but it was a job no less. And it had been nearly five years since anyone had asked me to do anything meaningful, despite the motivation behind it. The quest toward a windmill is more fulfilling than an empty stroll, sometimes, even if the windmill isn’t real.

T
HE FIRST TIME
I
SAW
S
ARAH WALKING OUT OF HER APARTMENT
in Rittenhouse, she was wearing a misplaced business suit that suggested anything but power. From a distance, I imagine she looked a little bit like what I would have looked like if I were a virgin. Hair tightly pulled back by at least nine clips, eyes bulging out from her head, oversized baggy clothes covering what could be either (a) bulimia or (b) blistering insecurity set off by that one night in college when she was told by a third of the B-string lacrosse team that she was a dull tease.

She strolled down to Broad Street to catch a SEPTA train. I followed her but was caught between the untold limbs squirming among one another like worms competing to escape a tackle box, only to see her slip into the river that was SEPTA’s Blue Line. I didn’t follow her much beyond that.

The second time I saw Sarah was on the track at Penn. It was almost as if a higher power were gifting me this surveillance. God help you if you’re not running after someone.

On the track, she seemed different than on the street or in the photos. Initially she came across as plain, with dirty blonde hair that struggled to find a structured identity between curls and limp strings. It was as if her hair reflected everything on the inside—did she have curly hair or straight? Greasy or clean? Was she tall or short? Pretty
or average? She was wearing blue basketball shorts and a black sports bra with an oversized white T-shirt draped on top like a flag. There was a Penn logo on the outside, dirtied with a few signatures from perhaps teammates? Friends, even? If it hadn’t been for the T-shirt, she would never have stood out.

She stopped ten, maybe fifteen feet before me on the track and bent over with one hand pushing down on her lower back. Her T-shirt stuck to her body, perspiration revealing every inch of it save the thin straps of her sports bra underneath. Her birdlike arms wrapped themselves around her waist as if they were capable of being tied in three knots below her belly button, and then she began to jog slowly. I watched from the sidelines as she picked up some speed, passing an elderly couple as she turned the corner. Her face grimaced with discomfort each time her body touched the ground, almost as if it were painful to tread through her own life. She was panting even during the slower laps. Then, contrary to what the prosecution claims, I just started running behind her on the track because I was ready to start running again. I didn’t stalk her. I didn’t pick her out as my victim from the moment we met. It would have been impossible based on their theory—yet another inconsistency in my trial.

The third time I saw her was in her place of employment. She was a curator in training, which according to Marlene was barely a job, as the role of assistant (despite its expected upward movement) didn’t require graduate school training. She was one of two assistants to the head curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and did everything from liaise with art students to liaise with estates of dead artists to liaise with janitors. She seemed to enjoy her job on rare occasion, despite the fact that she got to climb the Rocky stairs every day on her way in and stare at the works of Thomas Eakins and Georgia O’Keeffe at lunch, if she was so inclined.

When I watched her wander from the American painters to the costumes every so often, she would stop and lock eyes with a subject as if they were sharing a secret. And for that brief moment, Sarah
Dixon seemed comfortable. Her shoulders elevated with strength, her feet rested in fifth position, and her hands gathered around her chin as if posing for a photograph. She didn’t realize the mounds of visitors jutting around her, the loud kids, the field trips with no more than the one forty-something-year-old exhausted teacher who looked at least fifty, the European vacationers stripping the space to her right and to her left, holding hands. All that she knew was the safety of living in a frame. Something beautiful, painted with the color choice of another, with the artistic intent of that same other, designed for a purpose—to wear an expensive and mightily elaborate coat and be seen in the right place for thousands to ogle on their day off. In that, I could never understand the secret she shared with the Degas ballerinas on loan from the Louvre or the Rubenesque women staring at mirrors.

In all my visits to the museum, never once did I see my father step foot in the Philadelphia Museum of Art to meet her for lunch, to pick her up after work, or drop her off before. If he even knew where the museum was located, he was probably outside on the front steps, impersonating his matinee idol, running up and down, no doubt inadvertently bumping into tourists. I never waited around to see one way or another. From what I could gather, this relationship that Marlene Dixon so proclaimed was one that could not exist, did not exist.

I was moments away from calling Marlene and letting her know that there was nothing to worry about—at least nothing where my father was concerned—when I decided to follow Sarah after work to see if she was going to Bar Dive or some other establishment in North Philly. It was 6 p.m., and she walked out the side door of the museum with a heavy backpack on her shoulders instead of the leather briefcase that she carried most days. She wasn’t walking toward the subway or across the river to go home. Instead, she was meandering across Ben Franklin Parkway, walking east until she reached Market, turning to cross the river, and continuing block after block, when any other person would have hopped into a cab, until she hit the Penn campus. Somewhere around Drexel, she removed her backpack from
her right side, stretched her shoulders, replaced it on the left side, and continued until she reached the library.

I hesitated. I hadn’t stepped foot near anything related to Van Pelt Library in five years. But I continued, placing one nervous foot in front of the other until she opened the door. Twenty feet of cement bore the river between us, and it was navigated by dozens of anxious college students preparing for their midterm exams. Before she opened the door, she turned toward me as if she recognized me—from the track? From the park? From the museum?—before disappearing inside.

I walked toward the front doors as just another student eking my way one inch closer to a college degree, until I tripped on a piece of cement sticking out from the ground like an ocean wave. In once-wet cement, there it was, staring at me in submerged cursive: “Beware the Bloody Mistress of Van Pelt 4.”

I didn’t look up to see if Sarah saw me. I didn’t continue in after her. I didn’t want to see the stacks in the
N
s of History or revisit the multiple interpretations of the French Revolution. Floods of neologisms, neophytes, nepotists, and necrophiliacs washed over me and carried me home alone.

I refused to follow Sarah Dixon for another three weeks.