IT’S A FUNNY PHENOMENON. YOU CAN NEVER VISIT YOUR OWN funeral, but if you want to see how people feel about you, commit a crime. The parade of personalities that intersects with yours over the years is a voyeuristic thrill that few people experience. And it usually begins with the earliest chapters.
For example, Andy Hoskins was flown in from California and asked about our relationship. He said that I never lived up to my potential. He claimed that I was always trying to get him to do things that broke the rules. Most important, he testified that I never told him about the baby—the first instance, they claimed, in my long and malignant line of deception. They got Andy to say things I never knew he was capable of verbalizing, let alone even thinking.
“I … I … I loved her,” he sputtered, wiping his eyes with the backs of his hands. He kept glancing over to me while he said that, as if he were apologizing for my actions. “I have five kids now. I would have loved to have had another one. I just never knew. She never told me about the baby.”
The baby. The damned baby came up at nearly every turn.
A psychologist got on the stand and testified that I had borderline personality disorder—not psychopathy as Tom Davies speculated earlier. She argued that I was a pathological liar who felt strength and superiority from telling things that weren’t wholly true. She used examples like the fact that I told a few people that I ran a marathon instead of a half marathon, or the fact that my boss from the School District of Philadelphia thought I graduated from Penn when I only went for a few months—that sort of thing, spuriously focusing on the irrelevant minutiae of my fabricated past. She also claimed that I slept with any man in my path because it was the only way I could feel whole. She testified that, while I didn’t want Sarah dead, I also didn’t want her to have the baby. It was the baby, after all, that led to the disintegration of my relationship with my father. It was the baby, after all, that separated me from him. That made our relationship—the first real one for me—broken. This and the lies led seamlessly to the Psychologist-Approved Theory in the flesh.
My court-appointed psychologist got on the stand and claimed that it was also the baby that changed me—just not Sarah’s. She argued that I had been suffering from a persistent case of posttraumatic stress disorder ever since the incident in Van Pelt Library and that I never came to terms with the loss of my baby, my femininity, or the future I’d never have. It was this, however, that caused my Jekyll personality to form. It was the trauma from losing my baby that led me to believe that Sarah, my father’s new partner, could not have one either, as it would create a fallacy of identity. Sarah, after all, was the “phantom me,” and this set me off into a rage. And there we were, face-to-face with the Cain and Abel Theory.
My obstetrician got on the stand, too, telling Lavonne, Felipe, Amir, Shanaya, Samuel, Lakeisha, Russell, Nancy, Charlie, Beverly, Ronaldo, Melissa, and Vincent about the Van Pelt incident freshman year. He talked about how painful it could be and how the type of emergency hysterectomy I survived usually strikes older women, or at least women without children. Ahh, my beloved Victim Theory. All theories presuming I did it intentionally, just trying to explain it away. Mitigate the circumstances, despite the fact that I had not yet been found guilty.
Sarah’s OB from Planned Parenthood also took the stand, explaining that she was proceeding well at nine weeks at the time of death. Not only did her baby have fingers and toes, but bones and cartilage were even starting to form. Eyelids, too, and the tip of the nose. She looked straight at me when she said that as if I could see into Sarah’s belly the one time I came face-to-face with her. But the girl was bulimic. She ran. She wore baggy clothes and spent half of her time behind a desk and the other half with an aging alcoholic who owned a bar, carried guns, and spent a majority of his adult life in prison. Most people didn’t even know she was pregnant. I didn’t know how pregnant she really was. But her obstetrician argued otherwise. She was nine weeks along. She had examined Sarah just a week earlier, and her beta hCG levels were on point with healthy fetal development. Her ultrasound was strong, and the fetus was moving around appropriately in utero. Sarah was gaining weight commensurate with the growth of her child.
The county pathologist testified with an excruciatingly high amount of autopsy photos from the location of the gunshot wound to bolster his testimony so that the pathos of Lavonne and company would align with the prosecution. (Clearly, he and Marlene Dixon had the same tactic, and it worked.) Stewart Harris kept questioning him on the cause of death. “The indictment says gunshot wound to the chest, but it didn’t talk about the baby or whether Sarah died from the gunshot wound.”
But it was a gunshot wound to her chest, and the prosecution found no discernable alternative to the killing based on its location. Stewart Harris left that one alone, too, along with the information in the autopsy report about Sarah’s heart. No theory extrapolating why Sarah suffered from cardiac arrest was properly brought to the jury, even though it was the only evidence to ascertain. Shoddy research on both sides, if you ask me. Still, it took the pathologist another thirty colored photographs to show the wound with Sarah’s skin pulled back. It took him another twelve close-ups of her torso flipped open with the vestigial heart no longer beating, so that you could see her corrosive stomach, bloated and full of blackened coffee.
“No, I can’t be conclusively certain that it was the gunshot that killed her,” the pathologist continued, pointing to State’s Exhibit Number 78, yet another photograph of her body laying flat on its back, hands spread wide open, palms up like she was meditating at the end of a yoga class, “because her heart was not normal. She appeared to be suffering from a cardiac arrest, as well. And her lungs were destroyed.”
“Is it possible that the gunshot wound could have sparked a cardiac arrest?”
“Yes, it’s possible.”
Tom Davies followed up. “Based on your training and experience, doctor, do you see many gunshot wounds to the chest that are accidental shootings?”
“Objection, speculation.”
“No,” the pathologist said anyway.
“Sustained,” the judge said at the same time.
I looked over to Harris, who, once again, stood from his chair.
“Motion to strike, your honor.”
Although the judge agreed and instructed the jury to ignore the last question-and-answer interchange, of course, they’d already heard it, so on they moved.
The police officer that showed up first on scene next tore through his police report on the stand, unable to remember anything that transpired on that memorable New Year’s Day without his paperwork crutch.
“The door was open when I got there. But there were splinters sticking out from the lock as if there was a break-in.”
A forensics expert testified later that blood on the door was a match with my own.
“It was just a slight smear, but enough to connect the defendant to the break-in.”
The paramedic who arrived first on the scene testified next.
“Ms. Dixon was dead upon arrival, and there was nothing we could do for her. Ms. Singleton, on the other hand, was suffering from severe trauma. She was sweating, her arms were shaking, and she also was bleeding from her left forefinger and right shoulder.”
“Her fingernail on her left forefinger was torn off, right from the bed. From my perspective, it appeared to be an injury from a struggle.”
“And the shoulder?”
“She was bleeding from her shoulder due to a gunshot wound that merely grazed her skin. We tended to it on the spot.”
The librarian who found me in the stacks of Van Pelt took the stand just to prove that the Van Pelt incident actually occurred. The principal at one of my schools in West Philadelphia took the stand to prove that I was in fact a substitute science teacher. The guy from Lorenzo’s took the stand to prove that I liked to eat pizza. Bobby even took the stand to prove that I was indeed found by my father a little less than a year before the murder. He also took the stand to prove, not that it was my father with whom I was developing a relationship during the time in which my personality started rusting, but just to prove that I was a liar. That I lied about that call and the meetings and everything else in our relationship. None of it was relevant, and yet Madison McCall and Stewart Harris just sat there at the table, refusing to rise, refusing to object. Nobody should have heard any of this, but they did, and in it went along with those hundreds of photographs from Sarah’s autopsy and Marlene Dixon’s proselytizing. I suppose I could have spoken up again at that point, but that would have required my taking the stand, which Stewart Harris adamantly counseled me against doing, and to be honest, I didn’t entirely disagree.
Bobby shot me a look of such hatred from the stand when he was talking about our relationship. I know that after my arrest, he was ridiculed to the point that he left the department and was only able to pursue employment as a security guard at jewelry stores and fancy boutiques on Walnut Street. (That wasn’t entirely my fault, despite what he believes.) Still, nobody ever took the stand to talk about the gun and where it came from. Nobody took the stand to talk about my own victimization. Nobody took the stand to talk about Marlene and her hatred toward my father. Marlene didn’t even take the stand until my penalty hearing, which is why she was allowed to watch the whole spectacle. It was as if a news story was formed without any of the necessary details, without any merit. I wanted to talk to a friend. I wanted to talk to Persephone Riga or my brother, but neither one was at my trial.
My father did take the stand, but did so without having spoken with me once since Sarah died. He testified to his relationship with Sarah and his relationship with me. He talked about his twelve steps to sanity or whatever he wanted to call it. He spoke about my mother and about his bar and my lost childhood. He testified that he told me Sarah was pregnant and that he saw me outside of Planned Parenthood. He spoke about pretty much everything, never once looking my way while on the stand. And when he talked about reconnecting, it was as if he wanted to both hold me and hurt me at the same time. When Tom Davies pushed him question after question after question about his relationship with Sarah, his eyes were connected with Marlene Dixon the entire time. He seemed almost apologetic about it.
“I … I don’t know what to say,” he said, finally looking toward me.
It was nearly a full day of questioning before he bothered to glance my way. I could see water forming in his eyes, and he kept touching his scar.
“Do you believe Noa is capable of killing?”
“Objection,” Stewart barked. “Speculation.”
“Sustained.”
My father looked confused, his face wandering about the room.
“How did you feel when you found out Sarah and your unborn son were dead?”
“Objection, relevance,” Stewart said again.
“Overruled,” the judge said. “Answer the question.”
He looked again over to Marlene.
“I was devastated. I felt at once like I had lost all my children at the same time.” He paused, thinking. “I did lose all my children at the same time.”
“What did you know about Noa’s actions at the time of Sarah’s death?”
“I knew she was following Sarah around. She wanted us to break up.”
The lines that Mother Nature had carved across his face were deeper now, each fold reflecting a new decade of erosion. It was as if something else was taking hold of him, corroding the skin and everything beneath, and he seemed old for the first time.
“I’m just so sorry about everything that’s happened.” He looked away from me and back again to Marlene. “And I’ll never be the same.”
I don’t even remember the closing statements. All I remember is that the jury didn’t take long to walk back into their box after deliberating for some four hours.
Marlene was sitting behind Tom Davies’s seat, holding a disintegrating handkerchief below her nose, when the judge asked if the jury had made a decision. Still draped in black, her left arm was locked inside her husband’s, and she had to unhook it in order to remain focused. She wore the same large gold locket sitting outside of her blazer even then. It lay flat between her metastasized breasts as a badge of courage.
Several of the jury members periodically glanced over to her as Vincent stood to announce my verdict. The rest of them sat quietly and tried as they might to avoid eye contact with me, as if they were just so very sorry. I remember Vincent opening his little piece of paper because he didn’t know how to memorize the word Guilty … and then … just white …