IT ALL STARTED SIX MONTHS BEFORE X-DAY WHEN OLIVER Stansted and Marlene Dixon visited the Pennsylvania Institute for Women in Muncy. Oliver trotted eagerly in first, like a wet surfer trying so desperately not to miss his second wave. He had thin brown hair that hung limply around the cherry contour of his face in a style that was probably at least a decade behind the times. (I know this because it was the hairstyle of choice when I was arrested.) A lone dimple nicked the center of his chin in a clean gunshot.
I was in the diminutive holding cell with the telephone receivers where they dragged me whenever I had a visitor. Visitors weren’t rare—a story for the local newspaper? a feature for a news magazine television series? a book deal?—but when Oliver Stansted came up for his first breath, firm but anxious, steady but nervous, twenty, maybe twenty-five, I realized that my expectations would quickly need readjustment.
“Noa, is it?” he said, speaking impossibly close to the receiver. “Noa Singleton?”
The aristocratic Noa is it? British phrasing of his greeting skipped upward at the end of the statement as if it were a posh question in one syllable. Confidence and naïveté burst in the same hyperenunciated greeting.
“My name is Oliver Stansted and I’m a lawyer in Philadelphia,” he said, looking down to his little script. His was handwritten in red ink. “I work for a nonprofit organization that represents inmates on death row and at various other points of the appeals process, and I’ve just recently been appointed to your case.”
“Okay,” I said, staring at him.
He was not the first wide-eyed advocate to use me as a bullet point on his climb to success. I was used to these unexpected visits: the local news reporters shortly after I was arrested, the national ones after my conviction, the appointed appellate lawyers year after begrudging year as I was drafted into the futile cycle of appeals without anyone truly listening to me explain that I had no interest in pursuing further legal action, that I just wanted to get to November 7 as quickly as possible. They, like this new one, had no concern for my choices.
“So what do you want with me?” I asked. “I’m out of appeals. They’re killing me in November. ‘First woman to fry in years.’ You read the news, don’t you?”
Mr. Oliver Stansted forced another smile to replicate the one that had deflated while I spoke. He ran his fingers through his hair, pulling it out of the clean part on the side, all in order to appear the very image of a public interest lawyer; a die-hard anti–death penalty advocate who chose to marry the alleged system of justice instead of entering a legal union of his own. And, like all the others who came to me before the middle-age conversion of Republicanism set in, even his voice was typecast to match his hairstyle and choice of wardrobe: docile as a prostrated ocean, as if he had slipped from his mother’s womb begging for a nonprofit position and studio apartment to match. I hated him instantly.
“Well, despite the fact that you’re out of appeals, I’ve been chatting with some of your lawyers, and—”
“—which ones?” I jumped. “Stewart Harris? Madison McCall?”
I’d been sitting in this cubicle for nearly a decade listening to a veritable rainbow of lawyers talk at me about the lowly little trial attorneys they thought screwed me over.
“Tell me this, Mr. Oliver Stansted. Why am I supposed to sit here and destroy their careers just so you can feel like you’re doing the right thing?”
He smiled again as if I had just complimented him.
“Well, I have spoken with Mr. Harris about some of the things that happened at your trial.”
“Harris is useless. What about McCall?”
He nodded and I could tell he’d prepared for this visit.
“Unfortunately, he’s since passed.”
“Passed?” I laughed. “No euphemisms here, Oliver. Ollie. Look around. I don’t think any one of us deserves a gentler explanation. What was it? Cancer? AIDS? I knew he slept around. Maybe it was syphilis.”
“There was a fire at his office,” he conceded. “He wasn’t able to get out in time. He died from smoke inhalation.”
My head nodded three short times. Things like this weren’t supposed to impact people like me.
“I see,” I finally said.
“I’ve also spoken to some of your appellate lawyers,” he added, moving on. “The habeas ones.”
“What did they tell you? That I was abused by my uncle? That I’m mentally unstable? That I didn’t mean to do it? That there’s something in my past that should give the court cause to spare me?”
I waited for a comeback. They always have one. It’s like law school trains these junkies to masticate language as if it’s gum. Stick a slice in your mouth, chew on it, blow it full of hot air, and then spit it on the ground when it no longer tastes good.
“No,” he said. “Not exactly.”
“So why are you here, then? I’ve come to terms. It’s over.” He followed my lips as I spoke, as if the Plexiglas between us stifled his voice. “And if I’m okay with it, you should be okay with it. You don’t even know me.”
“The thing is, we really do believe that you could be a good case for clemency.”
“Yes, we think you’re in a remarkably unique position that could make a strong case for filing a clemency petition.”
And there we had it, the perennial reason for the visit. A deep-seated desire to right a wrong. Or wrong a right. Or right a wrong that was done rightly for someone who did something wrong. But there was nothing more to hear. He might as well have handed over another stack of appeals, new evidence on my behalf—all futile attempts of desperation that nearly every other person with a JD who’s met me has already tried.
“You think I’m wrongly convicted, don’t you?” I smiled. “You want to start your career off with a bowl of karma so big you’ll be set for all the nasty stuff you’ll do in the future when you work for a multinational bank or reinsurance company or something like that. Am I right?”
He didn’t reply at first.
“I’m right, right?”
Again, no reply.
I sighed. “Please.”
He looked around cautiously. “Innocence is always a factor to discuss, especially when dealing with executions.” He almost whispered, placing extra emphasis on the word innocence, as if it actually meant something to him alone.
The truth is, at one point, I did contemplate my innocence, but it was short lived, like adolescent lust or a craving for chocolate.
“Did you know, Ollie, that there are, like, five thousand lonely women in Europe who are dying to marry all the men in prison?” He didn’t respond. I don’t think he was amused. “You’re British, right?”
“Technically yes.” He nodded, not realizing I was barely listening. “I’m actually Welsh. I was born in Cardiff.”
“Well then. Guess how many Welsh Romeos we women have?”
Mute. He was mute.
I lifted my hand to my mouth as a whisper cone. “I’ll give you a clue. It’s the same amount as the Russian ones.”
Still nothing. His reticence wasn’t much of a surprise. Silence in retaliation did have its roots in proper places. After all, he walked in trying to act like Atticus Finch but didn’t realize that smug complacence on the body of a pale-skinned soccer player from Wales wasn’t exactly the most effective legal tactic.
“Ollie, you’ve got to be quick on your toes if you want to make it with the likes of these other defense attorneys,” I said, snapping my fingers. “They come in here semiannually, begging for my free hour a day, you know. Come on, you can do better.”
When he didn’t kick the ball back my way, I figured that was that for this umpteenth self-righteous solicitor.
“Fair enough,” I said, and then put the phone down. “Guard!”
“Noa, please listen,” he finally said, faintly. I could barely hear his words leaking from the receiver in my resting hand. “Please pick up the phone.”
He held out a hand to the division. Four of his fingers kissed the Plexiglas wall so that I could see their blueprints, little lines curved within the cushion of his surprisingly meaty fingertips. Their heat fogged the glass.
“We very much would like to talk to you.”
I waited for him to follow that statement with a name, but not one materialized. I almost turned away when he knocked again on the Plexiglas wall, imploring me to listen. A name drifted faintly through the noise. Hands pantomimed, beseeching me to pick up the receiver. Place it near your ear, I heard. Almost ten years after my incarceration, staring at that mismatched set of Welsh teeth, I could have sworn that Ollie Stansted was saying Sarah’s mother’s name.
“We?” I asked, eventually picking up the receiver.
He smiled, relieved.
“I’ve recently had the pleasure of meeting Mrs. Marlene Dixon, and she believes that you should live. That is why we believe—the both of us—that you’re a viable candidate for clemency. It usually is a routine, dead-end last option, but because of her relationship with both …”
I stopped listening at “viable.” The last of his imprints had faded on the Plexiglas, and all that was left was a greasy translucent wall. It was the only thing I could focus on at that moment. The thick manufactured division between those who live and those who, well, live another way.
“Really,” I finally replied. “Marlene …?”
The polysyllabic connection of letters that spelled out Mahrrrr-leeen Dihhhck-sunn brought me to nauseous self-flagellation every time I heard it, so for the last ten years, I’ve tried never to think of those sounds together. Ollie, clearly trying to think on his toes to compete no doubt with the likes of people just like Marlene Dixon, didn’t stop to listen to what I was saying, or not saying, or intimating, or, I don’t know, protesting in unrepentant silence. He was a quick learner—at least that’s one thing to admire about him on first impression.
“Mrs. Dixon has recently started a nonprofit organization called Mothers Against Death and doesn’t feel that even the cruelest of killers deserves to be murdered by the state. I’m one of the attorneys volunteering with MAD.”
The four syllables of her name continued reverberating in the telephone wire between us like a plucked string on a guitar.
“Mothers Against Death?” I said, forcing a laugh.
“Uh-huh,” he said.
“Mothers Against Death?” I said again, this time, actually feeling the humor flush through my voice. “You’re kidding? MAD? Mad, like, you mean, like, angry?”
Oliver Stansted swallowed and looked back down to his lonely feet before pulling out a stack of papers. “Well, yes, M-A-D.” He spelled out the acronym, pausing between each letter with perfect diction. It must have been that trusty Oxbridgian education. Pygmalionesque right down to the pronunciation of the English language.
“Isn’t that a drunk driving group? Has she been sued yet for copyright infringement?” I laughed. “Oh, wouldn’t that be poetic.”
“That’s Mothers Against Drunk Driving. MADD,” he corrected, punctuating the extra D with discernible effort.
“MADD,” I recited, enunciating the monosyllabic word as clearly as possible. “MAD,” I tried again in the same inflection, as if articulating the difference between their and they’re. “They sound the same to me.”
“Please,” he said, rather impatiently.
“So what is it that the formidable Mrs. Dixon wants with me?” I finally asked. “Last I checked, I’m fairly certain she wanted to witness the execution. She testified at my penalty hearing, you know.”
I couldn’t tell if he already knew this or if he was still waiting on that memo to arrive at his desk.
“I believe she said that she thought the death penalty was the single most profound form of punishment to grace our nation’s system of justice, and one that should be reserved for only the most egregious of crimes and the most horrific of people who could be stopped by no other means than deactivating their path of terror.” I paused, flipping through the library of scenes in my mind. “And, if I remember correctly, she declared that, quote, ‘no person more suitably fit into the suit of a deserving body of that precious designer as did Noa P. Singleton.’ Closed quote,” I dictated.
Oliver Stansted pulled out a legal pad, clicked the top of a ballpoint pen, and placed them both on the table.
“Did she tell you that?” I asked.
“Well, things have changed for her since then.”
“Have they?”
“Like I said, she formed this organization—”
“—right, you said. Mothers Against Drunk Driving—”
“—and she no longer believes, as you say, that the death penalty is the most profound form of punishment.”
Mr. Stansted, refusing to acknowledge me, continued as if he had planned this speech for days and would get through it no matter the cost.
“She now believes it to be archaic, barbaric, and contrary to any goal that can be found in your country’s history and purpose.” Oliver stopped speaking for a full fifteen seconds before he continued. “Are you following?”
“Oh yes. Perfectly. But what if I believe in the death penalty? What if I actually believe in ‘an eye for an eye’?”
He stared directly back at me as if he believed I was lying. As if his beliefs were superior to mine, merely because he had an accent and, once upon a time, I had a tan.
“You don’t really believe that, do you, Noa?” He folded his arms, the right on top of his left. “I know you don’t actually believe that.”
“Mr. Stansted, come on. I’m not looking for sympathy.”
“There are so few statistics from appeals for executions that have been turned down at this level—at the point of clemency, the absolute last moment to save a life,” he pleaded. “We have to do it. We need to do it. Whether it works or not, we need to know the pattern of the governor at this point in the process. If groups like MAD and others can’t see and document patterns—the patterns of the judges and juries for sending inmates to death row, the patterns for the appellate courts for affirming those sentences, and now this final pattern of governors who deny final requests for clemency—it will be harder to present a proper image to the public of how egregious this system is. Without those statistics, the government is never going to realize what sort of laws it perpetuates. This barbarism, this ancient form of punishment that offers no deterrence whatsoever to …”
Once more, I stopped listening. Sadly, it seemed as though I was turning away just at the point at which Oliver Stansted was, in fact, hopping into the pages of Harper Lee; but my head ached, and I couldn’t listen to another speech. My mind scorched from words pronounced more properly than I’d heard for a decade. It seethed from blind ambition, from unrequited hope. And again, my head began to wobble, the heavy weight jiggling on my neck like the old throwaway toy that it was. I wanted to say something life changing to stop his proselytizing, but he was going so fast that he seemed to stumble over his words on his own until he eventually just stopped himself.
“So what do you say to all of this?” he asked. “If not for yourself, then for the system. For other inmates.”
He didn’t know any other inmates, and if he did, he certainly would want to do anything but help them.
“Look, Mr. Stansted, do you really think this is the first time I’ve thought about clemency or another wad of appeals? I’ve been through this before. Are you in here to torture me? Give me some additional hope when I’m nearly done?” I tried not to chuckle when I said the word hope. It’s so melodramatic. So Shawshank. “Whether it works or not—no thank you.”
“Oliver,” he said softly, unaffected. “Call me Oliver.”
“No ‘Ollie’?”
He didn’t reply.
“Fine, Oliver,” I said. “You do realize that clemency’s pretty much reserved for retards or those who really are—”
“—well, those who are actually innocent hopefully won’t still be in prison six months before their execution date, and those who are impaired mentally are not even death eligible.”
“Spare me your legal sermon.”
“The reality is that I’ve only just begun to look at your case, and I think that we have something. The victims, the weapon, the evidence, the motive. It is all so bloody unclear.”
“Let me get this straight. You want to get my hopes up for what? A statistic?”
He shook his head. “No.”
“You don’t want to get my hopes up?”
“No, that’s not what I said.”
“You want to use me for other inmates? Is that it?”
“No, Ms. Singleton,” he said, elevating his hand to his brow.
“Relax,” I smiled. “It’s fine. It’s fine.”
“We just believe that, with Mrs. Dixon’s new position on the death penalty, the governor might actually look at your case differently.”
“Why?” I laughed. “Because Marlene Dixon is going to, let me make sure I understand you, plead for my life?”
As Oliver continued to lecture, my eyes drifted just beyond his mouth to a veiled backstage door from which only echoed sounds emerged. From my muffled chambers, I heard it as a high-heeled shoe tap-tap-tapping against the floor, visceral and stentorian, like listening to thunderous hail hit the surface from under water. It appeared to be a low navy-blue pump, pygmylike and broad around the heel; the type that middle-aged women wear once they no longer care about the sensual curve of their calf.
“Oliver,” I said, trying to stop him. “I’m sorry. I know why I’m here. I don’t need to recount the stages of my guilt, yet again, for another ambitious attorney who gets his kicks off of visiting convicts like me.”
“If we could just talk about what happened,” he said, overpowered by the metronomic clicking of thick old-lady shoes behind him. Her gait was so loud, I could hear it in the background through the receiver. Ollie bounced with each step, as if dancing along with the beat until she arrived in full view at the visitor’s booth. Through the Plexiglas divider, I saw her say something inaudible to Ollie, but caught enough of a reaction that my soon-to-be-mulish-boy-attorney stood instantly to greet her in an obedient bow of respect. Just as Ollie was developing a twinge of fortitude, down he came in doglike hierarchical surrender. There it was. I almost lost my appetite.
“Hello, Marlene,” I whispered, tapping my receiver against the glass partition. I made sure that I spoke first, and with pinpoint precision. I didn’t mean for it to sound creepy, but I suppose there’s no way around that. Maybe I just want to give people what they want when they come here. I don’t think that’s such a horrible thing to do.
I said it again, this time with theatrical elocution.
“Hello, Marlene. I didn’t realize you needed to send in an opening act.”
A subtle tic flew through her face, and she flinched. Mute before me, she removed a clean tissue from her pocketbook and wiped the mouth of the receiver. Only then did she lift it to her ear.
“Hello, Noa,” she said, clearly struggling to say my name.
That wasn’t so hard, I wanted to say. Instead, I told her that she looked well, and she did look well. She had dyed her hair again, a formal practice she’d abandoned during the trial for obvious reasons. It was now a pleasant deep blonde; that same luminescent color that most over-fifties take to in lieu of allowing the gray to broadcast reality. I have to say, though, it did look good on her.
I glanced over at Ollie, who was holding Marlene’s briefcase as she settled into her seat. Then he sat down beside her and picked up the extra receiver so he could eavesdrop on our sacred reunion. The more I think about it, he really wasn’t so terrible a palate cleanser. Then again, perhaps that’s just the illusion of incarceration.
“So, I hear you have a new execution date,” she finally said. Her long bony fingers brushed through her bangs, and she tossed them like a teenager.
“Yup, November seventh.” I switched the receiver to my other ear. “What are you really here for, Marlene? You can’t actually be in favor of keeping me alive.”
Marlene glanced at Oliver once again and then clutched her heart with the same bony hand. She cleared her throat, dancing the waltz of hypocrisy through her lilting, nuanced tilt of the head, tender and decisive placement of her hands, and preprogrammed vocal strum.
“Well, yes I am, actually.”
My eyes narrowed at their edges, pulled upward by invisible strings until my face settled into one of those allegedly humble smiles. God, my timing was perfect. I mean, it wasn’t like she was looking for happiness or mirth or gratitude or remorse, or who knows what else, but she seemed genuinely overjoyed—of course in subdued discomfort—that I seemed happy. I could never tell her that my response was actually more from humor than hope.
“Why?” I finally said. “Why do you suddenly want to help me?”
“Oliver discussed this with you, did he not?”
I nodded.
“Still …”
“I have my reasons, Noa. You above all people should understand that.”
“Come on, Marlene.”
She straightened her chair to face me and pressed her lips against each other as if she was smoothing out her lipstick. It must have been blood red when she initially applied it, probably hours earlier, and now was faded into a rustic mud. No doubt she ached from the inability to reapply inside these walls.
“You really won’t tell me why you want a do-over?”
Marlene ignored me. Instead of answering, she momentarily put away the receiver so that she could lean down to pull out a stack of folders from her monogrammed leather briefcase. As soon as she came up for air, she dropped the folders on the table with a loud percussion. She wasn’t going to answer me. Fair enough.
“So, what’s the deal with MAD?” I asked, playing along. “You couldn’t come up with a better name? You were bored? You were kicked out of Mothers Against Drunk Driving after you were cuffed with a DWI?”
She picked up the receiver again, still searching through her files.
“I’m going to presume your ignorance is a direct result of your confinement, Noa, and I will no further entertain your curiosity about my participation in your clemency petition as I will discuss the details of my daughter’s funeral with you.” She finally looked up to me. “Is that clear?” She was the first visitor outside Ollie S. not to offer me candy or refreshments from the vending machines.
“Sure,” I sighed. “I don’t get it, though. What can your coming here even do?”
“Oliver should have explained this to you,” she said, without turning her head a quarter of an inch to her right where he was still sitting motionless. “I explicitly told him to tell you about this. Besides, haven’t we already gone through this?”
“He did, he did,” I said, forcing an empathetic smile toward Oliver. “And yes, we sort of went through this. Still, I don’t understand the sudden change of heart.”
“It’s not a change of heart, Noa,” she said, staring directly through the partition. “It’s owning up to the one I’ve always had.”
I had never known Marlene to possess even a quarter of a heart, let alone a full one.
“What? Now you’re speechless,” she half-laughed. “That’s never been your problem, Noa.”
“I’m sorry, Marlene. I don’t mean to offend.”
“You didn’t offend me, Noa,” she said. “You just still haven’t grown up. After all these years. You’ve bled through all of your appeals at the state and federal level without so much as lifting a finger to help your attorneys. And yet,” she stalled. “And yet …”
She never finished her sentence. Not then. Not over the next six months.
“I suppose I deserved that,” I said, looking over to Oliver. He quickly turned away.
“Look, I want to help you, Noa,” she said, her voice slipping. “I want to talk to the governor about you. But if I’m going to use my influence to speak with the governor and tell him that, as the victim’s mother, I cannot live with this execution, I need something—anything—from you that tells me that you have changed. That you are a good person now. That you never meant to do what you did. That you are a worthwhile asset to this earth. So just talk to me, prove it to me.” Her lips were dry. She wet them with her tongue before continuing. “Life is not my choice or the state’s choice to end. I believe that wholeheartedly now. But with even greater urgency, on a personal level, I want to believe it to be true with you.” She patted the sagging skin under her eyes with a single index finger. “Does any of this make sense to you?”
“You have changed, but I don’t think that there is anything I can tell you that will make you change your mind about me.”
“Do not insult me,” she commanded, and with that tone, I could tell just exactly how she’d become so successful. Before the trial and, even more so, after. “Do not waste my time, Noa.” It was still monotonous and shiveringly potent, but now so calm. Calm like the eye of a tornado calm. Calm like a millionaire who walks by a street bum calm. Just confident calm, you know? So with that, my muzzle finally unclipped, and without her suave coercion, I was finally able to say it.
“I’m … I’m sorry.”
It wasn’t even that hard. That was the most surprising part about all of it. I couldn’t say those words for the duration of the trial, and here, they slipped out, like extra change falling through a hole in your pocket.
She exhaled and her flattened chest puffed outward.
“I just want to know you. I want to understand.”
Oliver and I shared a glance when she stopped speaking.
“Why did your parents call you Noa?” she asked. “What is your favorite food? What colors do you like? Do you,” she paused. “Excuse me, did you listen to any specific types of music?”
No acknowledgment to my apology. But again, I played along.
“Okay,” I said. “I used to like sushi, really, before it became so popular. I have a thing for show tunes, Broadway musicals, especially Cabaret, Carousel, Chicago—the one-word C ones, not necessarily the prison ones. And, well, I guess it’s not even that I liked them, just, I listen to them mainly because of my mom,” I quickly corrected. “Sorry. Listened.” I stalled. “Hmmm, what else? I like green, pretty much any shade of green. Forest green, lime green, plain old green-green, grass green, hunter green. I did actually complete a half marathon once.” I looked at her attentive eyes. “My name,” I asked. “Really?”
“Don’t feel compelled to talk about only those sorts of things, though,” Oliver interjected.
Marlene twisted her neck like the top of a soda bottle opening and stared Ollie down so much so that his chair pushed away—almost on its own—and squeaked like a subway mouse. The chair actually did the job for him, both verbally and physically. He dropped his receiver and quickly picked it back up again as to not miss anything. I had almost forgotten he was even there. That’s the kind of person Marlene Dixon was—pre-radiation and post. She just sort of eclipsed everyone else in her presence. Perhaps that’s why she never liked me. I didn’t allow her that narcissistic luxury.
“Really,” she nodded. “I want to know.” She paused again, forcing concern. “Why Noa?”
She made no pretenses about anything, really: her desire, her pleas, her appearance. Dressed extravagantly in that tailored suit, pitch-black and flowing loosely over her widening hips, she was the complete opposite of every other woman in my life. Ruby studs poked through each of her sagging earlobes right at their heart. A long golden chain hung over her blazer, sinking down between what would have been her breasts if they hadn’t been removed in the publicized double mastectomy that ran concurrently with my trial. (I know that my verdict had nothing to do with that, but I can’t help but wonder—even now—what would have happened if the jury members never knew about her health problems.) At the bottom of the chain was a stout locket, approximately two inches long, that I’m sure housed a portrait of Sarah at birth, and of course, college graduation.
“Fair enough,” I said. “I can’t really explain what my mother was thinking, but I was fairly certain she wanted a boy, so she gave me the boy’s name of Noah. It’s pretty much that simple.”
“But you spell it N-O-A,” Marlene continued.
“Are we back to spelling words out now? It’s not an acronym for anything.”
Still she persisted.
“Look,” I said, “when I got to high school, I dropped the h because I thought it sounded cooler. More original.”
Ollie perked up. “They gave you a middle name.”
“No middle name.”
“But the record.”
“I gave myself a middle name, Ollie,” I said, raising my voice. “Imagine getting bored with parenthood before you even finished naming your own kid.”
Ollie didn’t respond. Marlene did not look pleased.
“It’s fine,” I said, lowering my voice. I cleared my throat before continuing. “It’s just that you can’t do anything original or memorable if you’ve got a boring name. That’s all. Middle name, hyphenated name, polysyllabic ethnic name or not, know what I mean?”
“Well,” he said, thinking to himself. “What about Bill Clinton? Or Jane Austen? Or Jimmy Carter?”
“Flukes,” I concluded. “They slipped through the cosmic cracks.”
Marlene finally spoke up again. Ollie had taken a few too many lines for her taste. “The thing is, the way you spell your name,” she said, “it’s a Hebrew name. A beautiful Hebrew name for women.”
“Hebrew, eh?” I inquired, as if I didn’t already know. People are always coming in here telling me things as if they’re the first to bestow the obvious on the incarcerated, as if they like to feel like they are telling me something I don’t already know. A stamp of righteous superiority by virtue of prison seat selection.
“Really?” Oliver asked, like I had just told her that Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel or that Jesus was a Jew. Really, Marlene. This was the best you could find?
But while I was talking and Oliver was taking notes, I could tell that something was changing. A sudden drop in temperature in the visitor’s room. A slowing of the clock. A stalling of a pulse.
“I wanted to name my daughter Noa,” Marlene confessed, “but my husband didn’t like it.”
“I didn’t know,” I said after giving her time to mourn this farce of a loss.
She lifted the stack of folders in her hands, placed them upright, and tapped them until they fell into alignment. “Well, things don’t always turn out the way we plan them, now do they?” She then leaned back down to her briefcase and put away the folders. “Thank you for your time, Noa. We’ll be in touch.”
After Marlene and Oliver abruptly left, just as abruptly as they came, Nancy Rae (my sometimes favorite prison guard—she works only three days a week) cuffed me and walked me back to my cell in my own version of the correctional institute Walk of Shame (or, in our case, Walk of Fame).
It never takes long, particularly because, in recent years, I’ve come to be a model citizen on the Row. When they shout “Hands” immediately after finishing a visit, I walk backward to the door like the queen of England is before my personal Plexiglas court, cross my arms behind my back, and slip them through the opening in the door, where Nancy Rae (or someone slightly less resembling an institutionalized caricature) cuffs my wrists. They don’t apply them with care, and for about three months into my incarceration, I would often return to my cell postvisitations with a scattered sanguinary design, not too dissimilar to those bangle bracelets I used to wear in the ’80s or my favorite diamond tennis bracelet anteincarceration.
(One of my former neighbors, Janice Dukowski, who was convicted and sentenced to death for paying someone to kill her husband, used to try to kill herself at least once a month by slitting her wrists with her fungal toenails, and you could never pick out the scars because her bloody bangles always covered them up. But I digress.)
I, of course, am nothing like that now. I always allow my arms to be locked and always hold my head high during the Walk of Fame until arriving back at my cell, where I sit for another twenty-three hours for a single hour of recreation or until another journalist or lawyer wants to come and speak with me. Really, it’s that simple.
I lie down so much in my bed that my body can’t always handle the mere act of standing upright. Sometimes, when a guard comes to my door and lets me know that I have a visitor, like with Oliver and Marlene, I stand from my bed, and instead of walking toward the bars, I fall to the floor instantly, my muscles atrophied, my limbs bereft from activity, my bones hollow and echoed. Once, I gave up my daily hour of recreation because I was so upset with my mother after she stopped calling and writing for two weeks that I lived within that six-by-nine-foot cell by myself for upwards of five additional weeks, only standing up to urinate and defecate. I found out later that she was on a Baltic cruise with a fireman named Renato, whom she met while at a support group—not for parents of the incarcerated—but for single mothers slash actors sans equity cards. By the time she got in touch with me again, the five weeks were over, and I had to spend another ten trying to redevelop my muscle mass by pushing up from the cold floor forty times an hour.
Now, though, I take advantage of my recreation hour (often sprinting for fifteen feet at a time, watching television, or selecting new reading material), and I sashay with correctional humility when I’m walked between the visitation booth and the cell as if my handcuffs are actually diamond bracelets, Nancy Rae is my secret service officer, and my cocoa-brown prison scrubs are cashmere shawls.
At least once an hour, I’m woken up in my cell. Most people wake up midslumber because of nightmares or to quash their dreams or to use the bathroom. I wake up because my current neighbor screams hourly for her lover. She killed him in Harrisburg, allegedly in self-defense, but the truth is quite contrary. I remember it vividly because it happened before I got here. She was robbing a convenience store when she shot him in the head. “Him,” of course, was not, in fact, her boyfriend or lover or husband or friend, but a guy named Pat Jeremiah, who was the owner of a local sports bar she frequented. He had gone out to pick up some cigarettes when she followed him inside the convenience store to get the cigs for him—of course free of charge. She pulled out a gun when the convenience store clerk wouldn’t oblige but, not knowing how to use it, accidentally set it off toward the door where her stalkee was exiting. She was so fraught with fear and heartbreak that she shot the convenience store clerk as well and ran away. All of this was caught on surveillance camera and played on the news at the time I met Sarah, so she has a special place in my heart. But the point of the story is that she screams at twenty-one past each hour, the time of death for her beloved “Pat” of “Pat’s Pub.” It keeps me aware, at the very least, though. I don’t have a clock, and the only way I know the time is by my neighbor screaming, “Pat, I love you, Pat! I need you, Pat. I miss you, Pat!” in triplicates. In truth, I don’t know that she even has a clock in her cell. Presumably not. Maybe it’s not actually twenty-one past the hour each day when the conductor taps her baton. But something tells me her internal hour stings at that moment daily, so I trust it as much as I’d trust a sundial. She’s reliable and omnipresent. I like to call her Patsmith in homage to the olden days when your name indicated your vocation, like a blacksmith or silversmith. In this case, she was a lover-killer, a Pat-killer, a Patsmith.
The other fifty-five minutes of each hour are occupied by contemplation of my past, of my crime, of the spiders that build their homes in the corners of my cell. I can’t speak with any counterfeit personalities that purportedly live in the cell with me, and I don’t think that anyone wants to hear my singing voice. My neighbors speak with themselves rather than through the wall to me. And I’d rather remain silent than confess, yet again, through a wall with bars and eyes and ears and microphones.
I’m in prison, for Christ’s sake. It’s literally a vacuum into which people are sucked to clean up the outside. I live inside this vacuum that is my own universe, and I think about me (and Sarah and Sarah’s child, and occasionally Marlene and my father and my childhood friends). That’s why, when I get a visitor, all I can do is talk. Talk and take in what the visitor is wearing or saying or not saying. Observation is my only remaining skill. If they or anyone else (be it Oliver or even Marlene) want to claim that I was self-absorbed before I got here—fine. But not now. Now I obsess over image because that is what people obsess over with me. What I look like, what I say, what I did. I obsess over the fact that I’ll never become middle-aged. I obsess over the fact that I’ll never be able to change my hair color to cover my experience. Or counsel younger versions of myself.
Then again, every once in a while, a person will come into the vacuum to bring me something new to ponder. Oliver certainly didn’t. At least not yet. But there was something seductive in his innocence. For hours after he and Marlene left, I pictured him looking at me through the Plexiglas divider, smiling a smile stretching from Alcatraz to Sing Sing. In that hour, he was a politician, a TV game show host, a weatherman, selling me on his authenticity and his reliability. He was also a fifteen-year-old boy who had just graduated from middle school and this was his first assignment. No, he was a twenty-four-year-old young man who had just graduated from law school, and this was his first appointed case—the case, in fact, that he felt could inform the rest of his pathetic career. But he was too young to do anything. Too untested. Too unsure of who he was going to become to devote his time to anyone like me.
Then he came back alone the day after Marlene gifted me with her presence and brought with him an empty pad of yellow legal paper. He pushed a loose strand of hair behind his ears (where an unexpected tuft of gray sat like a bird’s nest) and pleaded to me, just like Stewart Harris and Madison McCall and all those lawyers pleaded to the jury so many years ago when they convinced me to fight the charges in court.
“Let’s look at you as a person,” he said. “Let’s look at Marlene and what she has to say. Victim impact testimony is precisely what makes this case different from others. And because of Marlene, we can approach clemency from the inside out. We can allow her to spearhead everything. A clemency petition, a declaration from the victim’s family, an affidavit with her signature and with her plea for you to live, all directed to the governor’s desk for his immediate review. Let’s see what the governor thinks. Does he really want to let you go to the gurney without a fighting chance?” Oliver said to me, as if begging me to grant him clemency. “People are what matters now. It isn’t the facts. It isn’t the law. It’s compassion. It’s people.”
It was clear that I was Oliver’s first client in here. And who doesn’t want to be somebody’s first anything?
Still, even though the taste of being someone’s first something (even while incarcerated) seemed delectably irresistible, I did resist. He wasn’t offering anything new for me. It was the other way around, and quite frankly, I was exhausted from giving. Then he reminded me about Marlene.
“She doesn’t believe in the death penalty anymore?” I asked. “Truly?”
Oliver shook his head.
Clearly there had to be more to it than just that, but in an instant, my head dropped to my chest in defeat. To Oliver Stansted, though, my acquiescence was a vigorous nod of compliance. And almost on cue, he picked up his legal pad in his right hand and pushed on the head of the ballpoint pen with his left.
“Do you mind if I take notes?” he asked. It was his first moment of willful determination, and I couldn’t help myself. I wanted to spend my final days with Atticus Finch. I wanted to be charmed by Mark Darcy before I ate my final meal. I wanted to speak with Clarence Darrow. Instead, I settled on Ollie Stansted.
“No, I don’t mind.”
I’m sorry for agreeing. In retrospect, I wish I never had. I’m saying it out loud so it’s quite clear: I wish we had never started this.