Dearest Sarah,
Your father died only a few months after Noa was sentenced. I think his heart couldn’t bear your loss. He held out long enough to see justice, and then he simply died in his sleep. I found him in bed on a Friday morning. His bifocals were resting on his nose, and he was in the middle of a Philip Roth novel. I don’t even remember which one anymore.
You and I never spoke much about this, and I know you often wondered how I truly felt, but I did love your father very much, even though I spent much of my life running from marriage. At age twenty, when my girlfriends began to get married and don housedresses to baste chickens, I was studying in France. At age twenty-two, when all of those girls puffed out like tetherballs, their cheeks bouncy like play dough, their toes swollen as boiled sausages, I gawked in fear. But at thirty-two, when my friends regained their tight stomachs and spent their mornings sweeping peanut butter onto jelly-drenched sliced bread, I met your father. He was a wonderful man, a beautiful, statuesque professor with one eye that meandered halfway between green and brown, like a graduating color chart. We could see into each other, both parts of each other: the lawyer and also the pitifully insecure old maid.
To you, I’m sure it seems implausible when I talk about this, but it’s the truth. To you, it probably sounds impossible that I even wanted children, and at first, I wasn’t sure that I did. But those doubts always existed in the attic of my mind, like a latent desire to dye my hair red or move to China—not something that I would ever entertain. Though I can admit it now, part of me was scared to have you because I thought that my life would be over. There would be no more career, no more traveling, no more independence, no more skipping out on my marriage if it no longer served my needs. There would be handcuffs to diaper rash, colic, and the smell of regurgitated milk radiating within my clothes.
Your father resented me because of that. The minute we got married, he wanted you. He wanted to love you, kiss you, spoil you, teach you, and create you in his image. And I let him. The problem is that you were more a facsimile of me than either one of you would have liked.
Shortly before he died, your father and I met with Caleb. It seems odd to write about Noa’s father in these letters, doesn’t it? But the most influential people in our lives aren’t always the most beneficial, and it was Caleb—not any professor, judge, lawyer, or colleague—who made that clear.
I spotted him outside the police station shortly after Noa was arrested. He was sobbing—for Noa, for you, for the baby, for you all—really, I didn’t know. Your father and I took one look at him and made the decision together.
Then we waited.
We waited for your funeral.
We waited for the police to begin their investigation.
We waited for the one-month anniversary of your death.
Then we waited for the two-month, and the three. We had only one shot at this, and we knew it had to work.
After spotting him outside the jail three months after you died, we invited him back to our house. At first, he was taken aback by our willingness to engage, but it took no more than five minutes for him to warm to us. After all, he was the key. He lost both you and his unborn child, and also Noa. It would be his testimony that would cement either Noa’s death sentence or her freedom or her permanent residence in the open society of a general prison population, where she would be able, if her behavior was good enough, to learn music and sculpture and writing and ceramics. Summer camp for the morally challenged, an ethically virulent gene splice in the correctional system. Quite clearly, we wanted the first alternative.
Once Caleb was in our home, glancing at the smattering of family portraits over the fireplace, we gave him some scotch, a sandwich, and a copy of the same photograph I handed to Noa less than a year earlier.
“This is your work, is it not?” I said to him, just as he opened the envelope.
Scotch nearly spilled from the glass in his hand when he saw the face in a baneful frame, memorialized in stitches from his perfectly engineered fist.
“You don’t need to answer me,” I continued, handing him another photograph. “We both know who it is.”
He didn’t reply.
“I would have presumed that you learned how to fight so well while in prison if I didn’t already know why you were there in the first place.”
“That was an accident in a—”
“—I don’t really care why you beat my investigator or why you beat another man so senselessly that he died in a bar in Ohio. Or that you organized the second-largest cocaine ring in Kentucky, or that you convinced your daughter you were in those wrong places at the wrong time all due to a dormant need to shoplift.”
He swallowed.
“I pled out to manslaughter on that first one. You know that, Mrs. Dixon. I mean, you’d know that if you looked into it. I didn’t mean to.”
“—you didn’t mean to what? You didn’t mean to hurt him? You didn’t mean to hurt my investigator, either? You’re starting to see a connection, are you not?”
I placed a coaster on the table where Caleb was close to dropping his glass—one of those mother-of-pearl ones you brought us back from Paris on your semester abroad.
“I’m really confused right now.”
Caleb looked over to your father and then back to me, his pupils expanding and contracting along with his labored breath. I handed him another photo—one of the storefront of the Little Gun and Ammo Shop on the Schuylkill.
“This is where you stole your gun, is it not? The one you gave your daughter. The one she used to kill my daughter.”
He took the photo from me and stared at it. Splashes of luminescence began to materialize.
“The owner’s name escapes me at the moment, but I have spoken with him and, it’s interesting, because he remembers you. You went in a few times to look at a particular gun, and then one week later, that gun was stolen from his shop. And that gun matches the gun that was used to kill my daughter. Not a bad coincidence.”
“I don’t understand. I didn’t steal any gun.”
“The thing is, you did. We both know you did. The owner can place you in his store a week before the gun was stolen. And with your history and his testimony—”
Caleb tore the photo in half, in quarters, and eighths, and so on.
“I have many more copies of that photo. And a promise from my investigator that he will have no problem testifying who put him in the hospital that night. He remembers it vividly. He remembers you vividly. He remembers the intricate details of Dive Bar vividly. So you can tear this little photo up as much as you want. It won’t change the fact that it exists.”
“I didn’t steal any gun,” he insisted, leaning down to put his glass on the wood. I picked it up and placed it in the center of the coaster.
“Whether you actually stole a gun or not really is irrelevant at this point. The shop owner will put you at his store. My investigator will place you at your bar when he was attacked. I am sure you are seeing the full picture that will be painted.”
He stumbled into the couch, stuttering. “What do you want from me?”
Your father and I looked at each other, and while he couldn’t understand how we got here, it was he, your father, who nodded to me to proceed. To this day, I don’t know why I was so nervous. I’d done this a hundred times before. In front of heads of state. In front of judges and wealthy landowners. In front of my own daughter when she observed me in court.
“You are currently on probation here in Pennsylvania, are you not?”
He nodded. “Uh-huh.”
“For the crime of manslaughter, correct? Aggravated assault being the first prison sentence served. Aggravated assault being what your lawyers unsuccessfully attempted as a lesser-included charge up in Pittsburgh a few years back? Clearly, they made a mistake letting you out early. In the others, too. Not just Kentucky and Ohio.”
“I … I don’t …”
“You haven’t stopped, Caleb.”
He stared at me.
“You beat up my investigator,” I continued, “and—”
“—Mrs. Dixon.”
“You scratched the numbers off the gun Noa used on my daughter just before you gave it to her.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Did you or did you not? Let’s not play games.”
“I … uh …”
“Well, did you or didn’t you? It’s a simple yes-or-no question.”
“Yes,” he mumbled, “… yes, I did, but not to use like this. Not to use like this at all. It was for protection. You know this already.” He paused, reiterating his excuse. “It was for protection. She knew that. I told her that.”
“Protection?” I laughed. “From what?”
“From … from …”
“From?”
“From people following me. From … from people in Kentucky, you know, anyone who might be trying to hurt her. I wanted her to be safe. Someone was following her,” he said, close to tears.
There was no need to look anywhere else, though. I held strong and continued.
“But you did give Noa the gun, correct?”
“Uh-huh,” he nodded, again without choice.
“And you did steal that gun from …,” I read from a little piece of paper in my hands, “the Little Gun and Ammo Shop on the Schuylkill?”
Growing rapids of breath swept out of him.
“You stole the gun used to kill my daughter from that store. Correct? I need an answer.”
“Uh … Uh-huh.”
“And the police, to this date, have not been able to trace it back to you, have they?”
Paralyzed but for the shifting of his eyes, he glanced over to your father.
“Over here,” I instructed.
His eyes returned to me.
“Have they?”
“No … no, ma’am.”
His stilted legs split in two.
“Exactly,” I continued. The couch caught him when he fell. “Make yourself comfortable. Please.”
Your father sat down, too, across from him. I’d never been more proud of him. They both looked to me to proceed—one brimming with passion and the other terrified of what I might ask. To this day, I don’t think your father truly understood what we were doing or what it would do to his heart after the trial ended, but still he went along with it.
Caleb looked to your father and back to me again.
“What we have here is a situation with an easy solution. I won’t bring this evidence to the police or to my friends down at the district attorney’s office, which not only implicates you in my daughter’s death, but will be evidence of your own set of violations, far beyond mere theft.”
“I don’t understand.”
I folded my hands and crossed my legs.
“Well, for starters, you were in possession of a stolen firearm, which, if I’m correct, is a violation of your probation. And it could, if I’m correct, which I’m fairly certain I am, send you back to prison in Pennsylvania alone. Now, of course, the other states will learn about this arrest and will likely vie for your extradition, and it’s possible Ohio will win because of the whole manslaughter conviction there, but who knows who will actually win your custody? Drug cartels are often more dangerous than accidental bar fights, so Kentucky could get equally greedy, and Pennsylvania won’t want to get left out or let go of you, given the whole ‘we found you, we caught you’ state of affairs here. It could get pretty messy.”
He looked again to your father, as if he could help him, though no bonds of gender resided there.
“So I stole a gun,” he protested. “So I got into a beer brawl that went bad. So what?”
“Well, since you ask, we both know you assaulted my investigator, who your daughter so affectionately refers to as, what was it? A shadowman? Now Caleb, even if we take away the manslaughter conviction, this new assault would add to your other two aggravated assault convictions and would send you to jail for habitual criminal activity for the rest of your life, not necessarily here, but perhaps in Ohio or Kentucky, or maybe there’s another state I’m missing entirely when you claim you merely have a history of petty theft across the country. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
Red clouds puffed across his cheeks.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. But in reality, I think it was more of a stutter. “Y … yes, m … ma’am.”
“Good,” I said, handing him the rest of the photographs. “We’re all settled then. You will do what must be done to ensure a finding of guilt for Noa.”
The blacks of his eyes shrunk like a retarding aperture. He didn’t understand a single word I was saying. I was just another lawyer reciting his criminal history for his own edification.
“You can’t ask me to—”
“You will be a witness for the state and the defense, no doubt, given your relationship to both Noa and Sarah. In that testimony, they’ll ask you about what you knew. And you’ll simply tell the truth. That Noa knew my daughter was pregnant. That you told her she was pregnant, that she was angry and hurt and—”
“—she’s … she’s …” he stuttered, pleading. “She’s my daughter, Mrs. Dixon.”
“And Sarah was mine,” I said in the same thought. “I can’t imagine you’d want to add perjury to your list of charges.”
No moments to think. No methodology of response. His tools of language got him as far as five prison sentences, two misdemeanors, six felonies, and at least two illegitimate children, so needless to say, he was without choices.
“But … but,” he sputtered, confused, “before? What about before?”
Your father looked at me, confused.
“I don’t understand,” he mumbled.
“She may be your daughter,” I said, “but may I remind you that you lost another child on New Year’s Day, due to your own daughter’s hands, and in that, we are the same. I’d hate to see you go down for Noa’s actions. Wouldn’t you?”
“But—”
“Regardless of what transpired before her death, Caleb, Noa is singlehandedly responsible for our Sarah’s death. Let us be clear on that.”
Timid nods of yes and no bent from his head simultaneously. Conflicted emotions, to be sure, but he was clearly without the skills to decipher them.
“Do we understand each other?”
“Mrs. Dixon, I can’t.”
Dirt was under his fingernails on the hand that clutched the glass so tightly that I was sure it would break.
“I’m not asking you to do anything but tell the truth. You can do that, can you not?”
He didn’t move.
“She’s my only child,” he pleaded.
“Noa will understand your actions. She wouldn’t want her beloved father risking his life on behalf of hers when there is nothing to really save. That’s the only way she’ll look at it, I promise.” I paused. “Once she’s convicted, you can say anything you want about her so-called good heart at penalty. I can take over at that point. There’s not a judge in this town who I don’t know personally. Now, I’ll ask you one more time. Do we understand one another?”
I refilled his glass, and he drank it all before I put the bottle away. I didn’t even wait for his answer.
Mom