THE FIRST TIME I SAW SARAH 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 Ns 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.
Six weeks into my Marlene-funded surveillance of Sarah Dixon, I learned about the Pat’s Pub murders. I was outside Sarah’s apartment eating a chocolate crepe from my favorite food truck while waiting for her to come home after work, when I stepped in a three-inch pile of dog shit.
A young family ambled by with an expensive stroller, snickering callously, their fingers pointed at me, reminding me of how little I fit in, in Rittenhouse. I looked around for the closest garbage can. Puffs of old ice cream cones, deli paper, and shredded napkins poked out of it like a bouquet of rubbish. I had no choice. I wasn’t going to move from my location. I had found the perfect spot: close enough to see everyone come and go, but far enough that I would blend in with the park crowd.
I grabbed the first semiclean newspaper from the garbage I could find and wiped the bottom of my shoe clean. Streaks of black snuck their way into the wavy grooves making it impossible to clean entirely. Still, it worked for the time being. I put my shoe back on and held the contaminated newspaper between two fingers as if it were radioactive waste, and then dropped it back into the can with the rest of the daily rubbish.
As my lens tightened, little black letters from the newspaper illuminated through the brown smears. Peering out at me from behind the pixilated black-and-white copy was a mug shot of my future row mate. The headline just above her photo read, GOALIE PULLED ON THIS LOVE MATCH WITH NO TIME REMAINING. Unfortunately, the journalist writing the piece not only mixed metaphors, but mixed so many sports in this headline that even I hadn’t a clue what the Pat’s Pub assailant was guilty of, apart from wanting to play better soccer, or perhaps tennis. I plucked the newspaper out of the trash to read on, but got only as far as SPORTS BAR MURDERESS WANTED A SLURPEE TOO MANY when I heard my father’s voice calling to me.
“Noa? Is that you?”
I shoved the newspaper back into the trashcan and looked up to see him walking toward me carrying a handful of white Gerber daisies.
“It is you!” he cheered, looking behind him for a brief moment, before walking over to me. My arms went limp as I allowed him to hug me. “How have you been? Where have you been?”
I nodded, emotionless, just staring at the perfect little petals on the daisies in his grip.
“What are you doing here, dollface? You haven’t returned any of my calls. I’ve been so worried about you.”
“I’m just having a crepe,” I muttered, pointing to my discarded food in the trashcan. “They have the best crepe truck in the city, so I came here for a crepe.”
He shoved his hands before me in playful surrender.
“Just askin’,” he sighed, “just askin’, that’s all. Doesn’t hurt a father to inquire about his only daughter.”
His eyes darted back and forth between me and the front of one of the high-rise apartment buildings.
“Are those for Sarah?” I asked, motioning to the flowers.
Folds of skin instantly dropped around his eyes and mouth. He reached out to me.
“Noa …”
“Don’t ‘Noa’ me, Dad,” I said, puncturing the patrimonial word. “What do you think you’re doing? She’s my age, for Christ’s sake.”
He glanced away momentarily.
“How do you know Sarah?”
“I know things,” I said. A breeze plucked a handful of leaves from a neighboring tree.
“Come on, dollface. Doesn’t your old pop get a second chance at love?”
My chest started dancing. “Love? Please.”
“Yes, love,” he insisted.
“Isn’t that what you left in Los Angeles, oh, I don’t know, twenty-three years ago?”
Again, he displayed those ridiculous jazz hands signaling faux surrender. It was enough to make me want to snap them off.
“That hurt,” he said, pretending to back off. “But I can take it. I can take it. I’m a tough man, but I’ve been told worse.”
“You’re becoming a caricature of yourself the more you talk.” I motioned over to the building. “How did you even meet someone like her? She lives in Rittenhouse, for Christ’s sake.”
He didn’t respond.
“She’s my age, Caleb. It’s like you’re fucking your own daughter.”
“You don’t have to speak that way to me.” He jumped.
“Don’t I? I’ll ask you again, how did you meet her?”
He sat down on a nearby bench. In fact, when I think back to it, it might have been the same bench near the fountain from months earlier.
“That would be nice.”
“I was looking for you when we first met. I could have sworn that she was you, before—”
“—are you kidding me? Are you fucking kidding me?”
“Let me finish,” he pleaded.
“I can’t even begin to count the ways that is disgusting. I’ll try. In fact, I’ll go alphabetically.”
“Noa.”
“Arrogant. Beastly. Criminal. Devilish. Empty and evil.” My chest climbed up and down with breath. “There’s two for E, because it’s so exceptionally, egregiously, egotistically erroneous.”
“Let me just explain.”
“Felonious. Grotesque.”
“Noa!” he shouted, quickly calming himself. “Please. It was a really hard time for me.”
“Yeah, Dad, it was a really hard time for all of us. What’s your point?”
“Please,” he said, struggling. “This is really hard for me to say.”
“Really?” I laughed. “Harder than everything else you’ve told me?”
“Fair enough,” he said in concession. Again those damned hands flipped up in surrender or passivity or perhaps his habitual submission of arrest. “I was just really nervous all the time. I had just bought the bar and was still getting my life together so I could get in touch with you.”
“Right, four years after learning about me, but go on.”
“I wanted to look for you, Noa,” he pleaded. “I did. But I still wasn’t ready. Then, everything was so crazy. People were thinking about changes to make, amends, that sort of thing. I started thinking about my life, too, you know, and what I should be, and what I promised to myself after my mom died, and I knew it was time to get in touch.”
“Get to the point,” I said.
“I was working out, running, sprinting up and down the Rocky steps, and that’s when I saw her, walking out the front door wearing a T-shirt from Penn and a baseball cap, and getting ready for a run. And I knew from your mother and from those letters that you ran track in high school, and so I thought, hey, maybe it could potentially be you, without me even looking for you. You would have just shown up magically for me,” he laughed. “But as it turns out,” he said, settling into a calmness, “it was her, and the rest, as they say …”
“Don’t go there,” I insisted.
“Well, you asked. There it is.”
“How charming. Love almost lost on a case of mistaken identity.”
He rolled his eyes, confused, and then continued with his story.
“You don’t even look alike, that’s the funny part.”
“Hilarious, Caleb.”
He looked around from right to left, and then back down to the daisies that were starting to wilt in his hands.
“We’ve been together since December.”
“December?” I asked quietly, as if it were news. “We didn’t meet until February. You didn’t even call me until February.”
He accepted this earnestly. No contest, no pantomiming forgiveness. I didn’t push it any further.
“Why didn’t you tell me about her?”
He breathed in deeply, as if he were trying to think about a plausible response that would enable our relationship to continue, but he couldn’t. I couldn’t bear to see him continue struggling or listen to whatever response he’d provide.
“Does she know who I am?”
“Yes,” he said, nodding. “Well, sort of.”
“What is it? Yes or no. It’s a simple question.”
“Yes, she knows about you. I told her about you on that first day.”
“—at least your story is somewhat consistent—”
“—and it’s really because of her that I built up the courage to call.”
On instinct, I looked away.
“Think about it,” he said, reaching his hand out to me—the one that didn’t grasp the Gerber daisies. “Up until her, I didn’t think I would be good enough for you. But if I was good enough for her—”
“—don’t finish that sentence,” I asked, placing one hand before my face. “Please don’t finish that sentence.”
The only recourse was simply to remove him from my line of vision.
“You asked,” he said, in earnest.
“Fine,” I replied, equally so, before changing tactics. “Now I know how you met. What’s it gonna take for you to end it?”
He nearly dropped the bouquet on the ground.
“I’m not ending anything with her,” he said. “You have absolutely no right to dictate how I run my life or who I do it with.”
“I get it.”
“I don’t think you do.”
“No, really,” I insisted. “I get it.”
He looked down at his watch, and then directly back at me.
“There is nothing I wouldn’t do for the people I love,” he paused. “Nothing. You know that.”
He was bouncing on his toes so heavily, it was as if a chain were pulling him to the ground.
“Go,” I said. “You obviously have somewhere else you’d rather be.”
“No, I want to be here,” he said, swallowing some saliva stuck at the base of his throat. He looked again at his watch. “But I do have somewhere I have to be. Can you meet me later? So we can keep talking?”
The manure smeared on the soles of my shoe traveled up to my nose.
He asked again calmly, “Can you meet me later?”
“No, I’m sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “No.”
Shortly after we spoke, my father vanished into the vortex of a neighboring high-rise building and didn’t come out until nearly three hours later. I waited the entire time, chewing on my fingernails and cuticles until they bled. When he finally did emerge, he was alone and glowing with what Andy Hoskins called his “cigarette recovery.” He held up his hand and with the aplomb of a heart surgeon, called the first available taxi to his side. I hailed a cab just behind him and followed as he rode east a few blocks toward the river, until we arrived at Fourth and Locust, a fifteen-minute walk from the park, and then again disappeared into a corner gift shop. I gave him a good thirty to forty seconds before exiting my own taxi so he wouldn’t notice.
He wasn’t hard to follow. For starters, my tracking skills had improved from nonexistent to intermediate in the previous few weeks, having watched Sarah Dixon from her apartment, the track, the museum, her Tuesday evening book club, and even when she took the train to go home to the Main Line. My father was somewhat inconspicuous. That is to say, his average build didn’t quite burn into the memories of passersby, but his facial tics and voice and face made him relatively easy to identify.
A few minutes later, he walked out of the store with a bottle of water. Then he strolled along Locust Street, casually pausing to look in store windows, killing time. He stopped at a corner store, picked up a single sunflower, had it wrapped in paper, and continued on until he arrived at his destination—a bluish-modern building sticking out from the architecture of the city like a mole. I looked up at the sign. It was Planned Parenthood.
He grinned with the exuberance of a first-time father and waited. As soon as Sarah arrived, he licked that pea-pod scar over his lip and smiled at her. She pulled my father’s hand to her lower back, pushing it in as if massaging out the same cramp she’s had for months, and then stretched for a few moments, bending in half so low that her head nearly touched the ground. That was when I first noticed how fragile she was. Through the distance and the oversized clothing, little bones poked out from her vertebrae like pointy pyramids. Somehow, I missed that on the track.
“Hi, dollface,” I heard him say. She blushed, and together, they held hands and walked inside.