The Execution of Noa P. Singleton (5 page)

“Noa, sweetheart,” my mother screamed. “Cry for me, baby. Cry!”

At that exact point in time, I apparently issued a guttural sound, a choke that sounded like I was releasing a gulp of seawater.

“Noa!” my mother cried. “You’re okay. You’re gonna be okay. You’re gonna be okay. You have to be okay.”

She reached for the phone. She still used a rotary and struggled to insert her red-tipped index finger into the pea-sized holes.

“You have to be …” she mumbled. “You have to be.”

She called the police.

“Nine-one-one operator. What is your emergency?”

My mother picked me up and patted the pillow of my arm as she spoke.

“Yes, please, send someone right away. My daughter, she’s ten months old.”

“And?”

“And there’s been an accident!” she continued.

“What happened, ma’am?”

My mother froze, words unable to both form and swim from her. “My daughter—”

“What happened, ma’am?” the operator persisted. “I need to know what happened.”

“My … my daughter has been injured!” she cried.

“How was she injured?”

My mother kissed the windshield of my forehead with her two wide lips and continued to smother me with them, creating a path of saliva all the way down my arm, from the injured shoulder to the elbow.

“Hello?” the operator asked. “Ma’am, are you still there? Is this a crank call?”

She held my arm between her thumb and index finger, feeling the heat of the injury beneath.

“Ma’am?” the operator asked, raising her voice.

“There was an intruder,” my mother blurted, spontaneously spouting language. Any language. “I don’t know who it was, but he came in and took some of my jewelry and then left.” My mother paused. “And … and … and when he was here—he was wearing a black ski mask, so I didn’t catch his face—my baby girl started screaming. He ran … he ran … he ran upstairs to stop her, and, and then … when he got there, somehow, she … she had crawled off the top of the stairs. And … then … that was when it happened!”

“When what happened, ma’am?” the operator asked, her voice still calm.

“That was … that was when she fell.” My mother paused again, gasping and punctuating her tears. “She fell down from the second
story. Oh my God, please come quickly with an ambulance. Hurry, please!”

An unnatural pause dangled between them.

“What is your address, ma’am?”

“I don’t even know how she got out of her crib,” my mother added. Each syllable was laced with emphatic tension.

“We can worry about that later, but let’s get your daughter the attention she needs,” the operator added in a soothing voice. “I need your address now, though.”

“It’s 1804 Pin Oak Drive,” she sputtered. “Hurry!”

“We’ll have an ambulance there right away, ma’am. And please try to stay calm until it gets there.”

“Uh-huh …”

My mother hung up the phone before the operator could complete her warnings, ran back upstairs with me in her shaky grip, and placed me on a rocking chair. Then, she leaned over and kissed me again, this time on the tip of my nose.

“I’m so sorry, sweetheart. I can’t lose you. Not this way.”

People might wonder how much of this story is true. But every other year when she got a part in the local theater or when she met someone new, there it was like the goddamned quality of mercy, polished in iambic pentameter. I don’t know. Perhaps I piece together bits and pieces of the legendary story in a way that makes me comfortable. It doesn’t really matter. The only thing that matters is the truth, and the truth is, I’ll never forget the sound I next heard.

“I love you, sweetheart,” my mother whispered, before lacing up a long black boot, sticking it out from her body like a martial artist, and pirouetting it to kick the wooden bars of my crib with so much power so that they broke into dozens of splintery pieces. I began to cry again.

“Shhh, shhh, sweetheart,” my mother continued to say, looking over her shoulder to make sure I was still safe. “I have to do this. I have to do this.”

She tore apart one side of my crib so that an exit route was simple,
even for my underdeveloped ten-month-old mind. She picked me up and then ran downstairs, grabbed a butcher’s knife and launched it into the cushions on the couch. Dragging it horizontally, a single stab carried across the flat surface, resembling a fault in the earth’s crust. Puffs of polyester shifted beneath.

My mother knew that in order for the break-in to appear authentic, there had to be collateral damage. She picked up her trophy from the Los Angeles County Beauty Pageant of 1970, and with the strength of an Olympic shot-putter, tossed it directly into the television. An explosion of colorful wires, seizing and scorched with clouds of smoke, culminated. My mother dropped the trophy on the serrated sofa and fell onto it; I was placed on the neighboring love seat. And then we waited. She, sweaty with feathers of polyester floating across her chest, and me on my back, upturned like an exterminated cockroach.

As soon as the ambulance arrived, my mother was finally able to dry her tears. She sat in the back of the van, along with the two paramedics who arrived on the scene a cool seven minutes after the television exploded. No police arrived, even though my mother’s call expressly suggested illegal activity. No report was filed about a break-in, and nobody ever called to follow up. I’m not sure how she managed to avoid that, but then again, she was an expert actress. It never brought her the success she dreamed of, but it came in handy at times like this.

“She’s going to be fine, Mrs. Singleton,” a paramedic said. He had blond hair and a long Corinthian neck.

My mother was strangled by tears. Her left hand, naked as the day I was born, caressed my right arm.

“It’s a good thing your little tot has so much baby fat. It really protected her fall,” another paramedic added. “It looks like it’s just going to be a bad bruise.”

My mother’s voice croaked through her hysterics. “A bruise?”

The first paramedic put his arm around her, covering her shoulders with one of the red blankets in the back reserved for flood survivors.
“Yes, Mrs. Singleton, we’ve just got to check her out at the hospital, but it looks like she’s going to be okay.”

She shrugged, pulling the blanket a little closer to her chest. “It’s only Ms. Singleton. There’s no mister.”

Three months later, my mother married Paramedic One in a little white chapel in Las Vegas. She was pregnant again and determined not to lose this one to another woman five years her junior. It was June in the late seventies. My mom wore a miniskirt, long auburn hair, flat and singed at the tips by an iron, and gold-plated hoops. I was her bouquet, dressed in a ballerina costume painted with lilies. My mom even sprayed my dress with perfume so that I would smell like flowers. She walked down the aisle to “Bridge Over Troubled Water” when Paramedic One took her as his one and only wife. And then, he proudly slept by her side for another fourteen months.

Regardless of what transpired during my first year, my arm never properly healed. Although the ER doctors disagreed with Paramedic One’s initial diagnosis of “just a bruise, ma’am,” my mother refused to accept anything but his advice and treatment. In fact, my arm was broken in three places and, considering the early stages of bone development of a ten-month-old, required a great deal of care. After we arrived at the hospital that night, my mother stopped paying attention to me. She was flirting with Paramedic One throughout the drive, the examination, and the treatment plan, with which, of course, she and Paramedic One disagreed. She was supposed to wrap my arm every few hours for ten days, changing the dressing and keeping the arm tightly wound to my torso, but over the next month, she was too busy making baby #2 to wrap and rewrap the arm, so needless to say, it healed improperly.

The baby fat that protected me from the initial fall slowly evaporated, and my arm atrophied into a pencil-like spike for a short portion of my toddlerhood. I was briefly left with only three working limbs, which, at the time, wasn’t as horrid as it sounds. I learned to
walk earlier than most toddlers because I needed my feet to take me places that my arms never would. I learned to talk early, too, because I couldn’t point to what I wanted. This is not to say that one look at me, and I appeared like Kevin Spacey migrating between Verbal and Keyser Söze. My right arm was fine—it fell parallel to my left, enabled me to grasp a pen, write on a chalkboard, hold a flute, that sort of thing. By the time my little brother came around, it was as if my mother had never dropped me in the first place. Had she not felt the need to habitually remind me of that day, memorializing jolts of electricity up my right arm with each retelling, I would have forgotten it even happened.

But this was not enough for Ollie’s first day out.

“The more we speak, the more I can know you,” he pleaded to me when I told him I was done for the day. “The more I can try and find people who can write in to support you. It will help us produce the best clemency petition possible. Marlene’s endorsement is essential, but if you have any other people in your past who might write in to help commute your sentence, it can only help.”

Like Paramedic One was going to sign an affidavit in favor of keeping me alive.

I actually lived a decent, middle-class suburban life with a single working mother, stereotypical tagalong baby brother, and a rotating set of stand-in fathers, each one sporting a different style mustache. One was a wormlike Clark Gable do, another an oily blond handlebar, another an ebony Dalí, and sadly, I’m embarrassed to report, my mother slept with a man sporting a Hitler ’stache. (I know it was peculiar, to say the least, but I didn’t know better at the time.)

I must have been seven when my mother stuck me in speech therapy, thinking it would help eradicate my minor speech impediment, thanks to an incident with one of the ’stache men. She had been sleeping with a man with a caterpillar mustache and thick wiry
spectacles who worked as an accountant for the restaurant where she waited tables. (I saw him at our house for breakfast one morning. He was wearing blue pin-striped boxer shorts and a V-necked white undershirt with mustard stains across the chest. I remember feeling his shifty eyes scanning my body like a Xerox machine, from top to bottom, slowly, a light flashing behind his eyes when he reached my end.) One morning, he made fun of the way I asked for my cereal (“Mommy, can you pwease pass the fwoot woops?”), and the next thing you know, I was stuck in speech therapy two afternoons a week.

The speech therapy continued for two years, bleeding into my mother’s theatrical antics, and led to advice by my therapist to propel my newfound freedom of speech into professional public speaking. So, when I was nine years old, my mother dragged me and my brother to some forty rehearsals for her one and only starring role in a musical. She was playing Annie Oakley in
Annie Get Your Gun
, and dressed to the nines in colorful anachronistic country western flair, she belted out those ridiculous songs from the stage as if singing directly to me.

Anything you can do, I can do better. I can do anything better than you
, she sang, as the pathetic twelve-person orchestra below her cranked the final notes of the obnoxious song. At the time, I might not have known what they were singing about; but what I did know was that my mother and this actor (who, because he had a mustache, I’m pretty sure she was sleeping with at the time) sang that they could do random acts of attrition better than the other, thirteen times in three minutes without any evidence backing it up other than playful romps that only slightly humored the audience. I was on the crux of double digits, and even then the music seeped under my skin with irritation. Here was a woman who could do nothing right in life singing before thirty or forty people about how great she was, and they all believed her because of painted-on freckles and a fake wooden rifle. On opening night, right after she finished the song, I remember her tilting her head ever so slightly to my direction and winking. It was the last time she would break character.