FOR TWO DAYS, TOM DAVIES PROCEEDED TO CALL UP MEMBERS of my former life before the judge in order to reveal a carnival of savagery that would rival Lizzie Borden. My mother was called to the stand early in the hearing. Tom Davies subpoenaed her, and even though Madison McCall tried to sway her to my side, she was unable to perform at the requisite caliber. Her acting skills failed me in the one performance that mattered most.
“I blame myself,” she kept saying, like she actually meant it. “If I was around more. If … if …”
Tom Davies handed her a tissue, and she patted the bottom of her nose with it, shamelessly flirting with him while under oath. She never cried once when I was arrested or when she visited me in jail (only the one time early on in my arrest). As soon as all her money ran out, she found me just as guilty as the rest. And not once during the entire prosecution—guilt or innocence, or punishment—did she bring up my missing father in a bathtub and a knife, or all those times she was late to pick me up from Persephone’s house because of a commercial audition for Tide or Clorox or some other laundry detergent. Or the time she left me to my woes to romance Paramedic One. Or caught me in bed with Andy Hoskins and almost gave me a medal. She left the stand without once saying that she loved me.
One of the earlier witnesses called by the prosecution was Officer Woodstock. He held up his right hand to the Bible and swore to tell the whole truth, so help him God. Dressed in his freshly ironed suit, he would be taken as seriously as any other person in a position of authority. Tom Davies questioned Officer Woodstock about my attitude upon arrest. He claimed that I was contentious. He used that word so many times in his testimony, you would think he was following a script written by a playwright with an achingly limited vocabulary. “She didn’t want to comply with our interrogation. She was,” he paused, “contentious.”
“Can you explain what you mean by that?”
He folded his hands together and then breathed in very loudly so that, against the microphone, it almost sounded like a plane was taking off.
“At first, she kept trying to question us. And then, when we pushed her further, she pretended to pass out so we would stop questioning her. I’ve seen that before. It’s an attempt at undermining our procedure, to try and circumvent the natural order of things. By policy, we must stop questioning the witness and issue medical attention. In reality, it retards the process.”
But McCall never questioned Woodstock on cross about my attitude. Instead, McCall just kept examining him about holding me unlawfully in a cell for half the night, ignoring the very purpose of the penalty hearing itself—a circus in which to turn my picture of Dorian Gray into the blackened canvas in which it lay. He talked about giving me water and a Three Musketeers bar as my only nourishment for twelve hours of interrogation, despite the wound to my shoulder.
They next called in the guard assigned to my wing to testify as to my perfunctory performance in jail. He claimed that he had to move me three times to avoid altercations within the walls because I was so contentious. I don’t think he looked that word up, because I was clearly anything but. He enunciated each letter in that word—even the silent ones. Con. Ten. Shus. Evidently he had the same thesaurus as Woodstock.
Davies also called in an expert on prison society. In order to keep me from a life sentence without the possibility of parole, the state needed to prove that I would be a continuing threat to society, that I would be a future danger to all those who inhabited the Camelot of incarceration. According to him (and later the jury), my industriousness, my anger, and my long-standing apathy toward human behavior were all directed at my inability to cohabitate even within the prison walls.
The kid I beat up behind the bleachers in fifth grade took the stand claiming he had nightmares for weeks because of my fist. Tom Davies convinced the judge that it illustrated depravity of heart and was essential in the jury’s determination of future dangerousness. So in it went, along with every bad act I had ever done, regardless of proof, conviction, or bias.
“She terrified me, even then,” the man cried.
“She’s a pathological liar,” a girl I knew from middle school said on the stand. “She told me her mother was a doctor. I didn’t know that her mother was waiting tables while putting on dinner theater at night.”
“She used me to turn in fake homework,” another classmate said. I didn’t even recognize this girl’s name or face.
Again, Bobby was called in to show my manipulative tendencies. “She used me to get background information on people.”
“She used me for free pizza,” testified the guy from Lorenzo’s.
“She told me she graduated from college,” said the principal at one of the schools where I worked.
“She never told me she was ever pregnant,” Bobby said again. “She made me use condoms as if we needed them. And then she lied about her father.”
“I was scared of her when I first met her. I don’t know. It was just something about the way she spoke. The way she looked at me. Like I knew I could be her next victim,” said my freshman year roommate, who lived with me for all of five minutes before moving out. “She said she was pre-med, but I never saw her study or anything. Everyone I knew who was pre-med spent all their time in the library, if you know what I mean,” she said. But how could she know what I did or did not do? I hadn’t lived with anyone since high school, and this one requested a room transfer within a day of living with me. Maybe she saw early what even I tried to cover for years. Or maybe she just wanted a single bedroom, barely remembered me, and was eager for her fifteen minutes.
Even Paramedic One was subpoenaed. He was asked about my predilection for getting my baby brother in trouble when I was a kid. He sat up there and claimed that I was the one who ran him out of the house. That it was my fault he left my mother, stranded with two young children, and not the stewardess he was screwing three nights a week in Burbank.
Even the arresting officer from my five-year-old shoplifting misdemeanor was flown in to testify to the sole demerit on my rap sheet. “She stole a pack of gum and a bra from a department store,” he said. “Stuffed them in her purse and tried to walk out the front door as if nothing was wrong.”
The very existence of that rap sheet, however, was one of the larger weights the state used to prove my predilection for a life of crime—specifically those of so-called moral turpitude. I had done it before and would do so again if given the chance.
At one point, between all the witnesses from California and Pennsylvania, I think I saw the accountant’s face. In an instant, the Xerox machine flashed over my body while I sat at the defense table, as it did all those years ago over the breakfast table. So many people were there, and clearly, since my back was facing them, I couldn’t count the number nor discern familiar faces. But for a brief moment, I thought I saw him, the caterpillar ’stache, the accountant, the second man with whom my mother tried to run off. His glasses had changed to a more modern style—plastic, squarelike, and still meaty—and he had shaved his mustache (at least mostly). In its stead was a thin five o’clock shadow dotted all across the lower half of his face like a Seurat painting. He was there only one day and was seated next to a young man, a student perhaps, in jeans and a vest, with his hair parted in the middle. I kept glancing at the two of them together as if they came in a pair.
I had presumed that every individual from my past would be there, from Persephone’s family to the valedictorian in my high school class to my favorite pharmacist, Bob, but they didn’t show.
The final witness for the prosecution in the penalty hearing was Marlene. During the entire trial, she sat beside her husband with textbook compassion. His name was Blayne Dixon, and every so often, he would glance at me, trying to frown. He had eyelids like meat patties, slight flaps of creamy skin folded over his lids like a blanket tucking his pupils in. He failed miserably at connoting any sort of emotion save pain from old age. I want to say that his eyes were blue, but in all honesty, I could hardly see their color, what with a handful of flimsy white lashes sustaining the folded skin above them. How hard it must have been to see past it; past that roof of old, spotted skin drooping down into his line of vision.
Marlene untucked herself from his loose grip, stood, and walked toward the stand, slowly, as if it were her personal plank of justice. Her smooth head had adjusted to its alopecic display by this point, and she looked less like a cancer victim and more like an aging singer-songwriter at a funeral. The black pantsuit was a bit tight around her waist, and she flaunted the fact that the top half of her blazer flopped loosely without anything to fill it out. That golden locket still dangled between the open spaces of her chest like a rope swing. And in her hands was a canary legal envelope, at least half an inch thick.
“Can you state your name for the record?” Tom Davies requested, kindly, after she sat in the witness stand.
She leaned over to speak softly into the microphone as if this were the first time she’d opened her mouth in court—in public, no less.
“My name is Marlene Dixon.”
“What is your relationship to this case?”
“Sarah Dixon was my daughter. My only child.”
She didn’t crack a note. Her voice was as sturdy as if she were in court for any other case in her long litigious career. She looked over to her husband. With each new statement she uttered, though, he seemed to dissipate. True, he was old, but he was also delicate, the way an old rocking chair is delicate. Push on it too hard, the joints will break, and it’ll fall apart into dozens of fragmented limbs.
“You are under no obligation to testify,” Tom Davies continued, “but you wanted to testify today. Why is that? Why do you feel as though you must take the stand?”
She looked to me and then back to Tom Davies.
“Because I want the jury to know what she took away from me and from the world. She took away a stunning, intelligent, creative, innocent soul, who was just beginning her exploration of this life.” Tom Davies nodded his head, allowing her to continue. “And we will never recover.” She looked over to the judge. “She has to know who she took away.”
“Did you bring some photographs with you?” he asked.
She nodded.
“Yes, I did.”
Tom Davies walked back to the witness stand, gently opened its wooden door, and escorted Marlene down the two steps to the courtroom floor. She stood, slowly, and taking his hand with her free hand (the envelope was still in the other), walked around the witness box directly before the jury box. He placed a chair in front of the jury box and helped her sit down.
Hundreds of edges peeked out from the clean fissure of the envelope when she opened it. She grabbed a handful and spread them out on her lap as if counting a poker hand. First she chose one in faint sepia enlargement. A baby photograph—Sarah, chubby as a troll, with a scrub of fuzz all over her head. Parts of it wilted into curls by her ears. From my angle, though, she looked a bit like a boy. Marlene held it out to the jury like she was beginning story time for kindergartners. Lakeisha smiled. Shanaya cooed. Melissa clutched her chest.
The next photo skipped to Sarah’s tenure in the Girl Scouts. Marlene forced her through Brownies and Girl Scouts, enabling her industrious sale of Samoas for three years, just until she would be able to put it on her college applications. Marlene selected a photograph of Sarah, missing one of her front teeth, her tongue pushing through the gap as she grinned widely, saturated with chocolate and charity. Beverly wiped a tear that was rolling down her nose.
In another, Sarah was sitting in a pool with ten other girls, giggling and contorting her face in girlish camaraderie. And another photo was Sarah on her first day at Penn, hair pulled back, wire-rimmed glasses resting on her nose, and her thick backpack weighing down her feeble bones. Yet another of Sarah in her old school uniform from middle school, brown and yellow checks covering the pleated knee-length skirt. And still another of Sarah with Marlene, both swathed in the professional habit: conservative navy suit, eggshell blouse buttoned up to the neck, hair parted ever so slightly to the side and then pulled into a low-reaching bun at the base of the neck. I knew this photo well. Marlene handed it to me when she first initiated our relationship. In it, Marlene was smiling as if she were in front of yet another camera, perhaps for publicity or perhaps for a client. Her lips were spread wide, covered in an opaque collection of rusts and wine colors. Her bleached teeth were glimmering from the flash in perfect synchronicity—but there was nothing behind the eyes. No sense of accomplishment or pride, no expression of joy that was supposed to match the mouth. Simply a woman wearing her designer smile without the ability to fill it out properly. Sarah, on the other hand, was unable to feign joy, which I presume is part of what made my father like her, at least from what I’ve garnered thus far. Next to Sarah’s, Marlene’s head looked awkward, like they were two business colleagues forced to share a photograph for a marketing pamphlet.
At first, I wondered why this was the photo of their relationship selected and framed for display. Their heads were turned away from each other and their arms hung primitively to their sides, but when I watched Marlene pass the photograph around from jury member to jury member, allowing their twelve greasy sets of prints to pollute the front, I knew. It must have been the only image of the two of them that existed beyond childhood.
Madison McCall could do nothing but watch in awe as the jury members—one by histrionic one—voted against me in unanimity. He felt it, too, I know. He was equally privy to the daggers within their eyes, their anger and hatred coming to a boil as they were forced to watch Marlene and her silent picture show. In fact, Madison McCall might have gotten even more bitter glares than me. After all, he was the one who chose to represent me. He had a choice in this entire production. Tom Davies was employed by the state and was just doing his job. Marlene played her unwilling part. And I, well, we know why I was there.
By the time Tom Davies asked Marlene more questions, she had returned to her seat at the witness stand. She was adjusting her microphone as she listened to him, ready with her prepackaged answer.
“Why do you think the defendant should be sentenced to death? Why should she be punished without life in prison without the possibility of parole?” It didn’t even sound rehearsed.
She bent over to the microphone, and I could hear the manufactured weakness in her voice splinter the quietude like white noise.
“I’ve known the defendant,” she stalled, no doubt preparing her thoughts. Tom Davies said nothing for the record, though his face read confusion. She quickly corrected herself. “If it were not for her, then not only would my Sarah still be with us today, but she would be in graduate school, married, with a family. All of those things were taken away from her by a virulent, destructive woman. Nothing will stop her from taking another person as prey. Inside prison or out.”
She looked over to my father and then directly at me when she finished.
“The death penalty is 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. No person more suitably fits into the suit of a deserving body of that precious designer as does Noa P. Singleton.”
By the time it was my turn to put on a defense of character, only one reluctant witness remained. My father. Not even my brother could be bothered to fly in for the trial. After twenty-five years of childhood, adolescence, straight A’s, surgeries, a life without a single speeding ticket or DWI, my father was still the only person who was willing, albeit unsympathetically, to take the stand tearfully on my behalf. Maybe he wanted to do it out of guilt or maybe because it was the right thing to do. I’ll never know. All I know is that I refused to let him speak. I refused to offer any mitigating evidence. I refused to put on any defense of character. I was found guilty. There was no point in furthering the charade at that point.
In the recess shortly before he was scheduled to testify, my father visited me. He walked directly into the holding cell and stood silent, his upper lip twitching in syncopation with his blinking eyes.
“You’re not going to say anything?” he asked, confused. “You’re not going to put on any defense of your life?”
Impotence was the first word to come to mind. Sorrow was the next.
“Why are you here?” I asked. “You, above all people, should understand why I’m doing this.”
He shrugged. It was as if he had so much he wanted to say, but his tongue had been plucked from his mouth.
“That’s it? You’re just going to … shrug?”
He ran his hands through his hair, which didn’t seem to have been placed under water in weeks. There was dirt under his fingernails, and a stain on his jeans. Even when he came to court, the man couldn’t be bothered to clean out the dirt from under his fingernails.
“You’re not going to fight? We can fight this,” he said, louder. “We can do it together. I can say something.”
My right hand gripped the metal bars between us. I shrugged.
“Now you’re just shrugging?” he asked.
“It’s supposed to be this way,” I told him.
“What are you talking about?”
“We both know it’s supposed to be this way, Dad. You and I both know that.”
My hands twisted within the handcuffs searching for my diamond bracelet.
“You’re not going to appeal?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“You’re really not going to appeal?” he asked again. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” I sighed. “I guess … I don’t know. I guess if I fought it, it would seem like she died in vain. You know?”
He was tearing skin off his lower lips, flaring his nostrils, and looking like a caricature of mental instability. I did this to him, too. I didn’t need to do anything more, whether he realized it or not.
“I told myself I’d fight the charge through trial. But now it’s done. I lost.”
“Done?” he said. “It’s not done, dollface.”
“It’s done.”
He started to slip into nervous laughter, but aged tension held it back.
“Okay?”
He nodded, slowly, dropping his hands from the bars and wiping the excess moisture on his jeans. He couldn’t even look at me.
“I’m so sorry, Noa.”
I had waited to hear those words since the day I met him. And now I had.
And then, I told him not to testify.