The Execution of Noa P. Singleton Read Online Free PDF Page B

up into her bosom, kissing my ears, my forehead, my shoulders. “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.” Kiss, kiss,kiss. “I’m so, so, so, so sorry,” she continued, as if any ten-month-old could understand her muffled apoplectic utterances. But perhaps I did, because, as the story goes, I stopped crying at that point, which did anything but calm her.
    “Noa?” my mother stuttered. “No … Noa?”
    Needless to say, she was afraid I was dead.
    “Noa?” she screamed, running to the phone to dial 9-1-1. “Please be okay, please be okay, sweetheart.”
    No doubt not only the idea of my death or paralysis tackled her fears, but perhaps also the news that a year earlier, her best friend’s boss’s older sister’s cousin’s next-door neighbor accidently fell in her kitchen, rather unfortunately causing a burning skillet to fly off the range of the stove and land on the soft head of her two-week-old newborn, killing him instantly. This woman was immediately arrested for capital murder and had since been in jail in some nameless state in middle America awaiting trial for something over two years. I’d like to think that my mother was more concerned about my continued life, but somehow I’m fairly certain her fears were slightly more focused on the urban legend
du jour
. That’s what I take from her semiannual mythological reprisal of the day that changed our lives forever. (At first, she seemed almost proud of her ability to cover up for her immortal maternal deficiencies. Then I was arrested, and oh-so-conveniently, she decided to publicly blame herself and this incident in particular for how I turned out.)
    “Noa, sweetheart,” my mother screamed. “Cry for me, baby. Cry!”
    At that exact point in time, I apparently issued a guttural sound, a choke that sounded like I was releasing a gulp of seawater.
    “Noa!” my mother cried. “You’re okay. You’re gonna be okay. You’re gonna be okay. You have to be okay.”
    She reached for the phone. She still used a rotary and struggled to insert her red-tipped index finger into the pea-sized holes.
    “You have to be …” she mumbled. “You have to be.”
    She called the police.
    “Nine-one-one operator. What is your emergency?”
    My mother picked me up and patted the pillow of my arm as she spoke.
    “Yes, please, send someone right away. My daughter, she’s ten months old.”
    “And?”
    “And there’s been an accident!” she continued.
    “What happened, ma’am?”
    My mother froze, words unable to both form and swim from her. “My daughter—”
    “What happened, ma’am?” the operator persisted. “I need to know what happened.”
    “My … my daughter has been injured!” she cried.
    “How was she injured?”
    My mother kissed the windshield of my forehead with her two wide lips and continued to smother me with them, creating a path of saliva all the way down my arm, from the injured shoulder to the elbow.
    “Hello?” the operator asked. “Ma’am, are you still there? Is this a crank call?”
    She held my arm between her thumb and index finger, feeling the heat of the injury beneath.
    “Ma’am?” the operator asked, raising her voice.
    “There was an intruder,” my mother blurted, spontaneously spouting language. Any language. “I don’t know who it was, but he came in and took some of my jewelry and then left.” My mother paused. “And … and … and when he was here—he was wearing a black ski mask, so I didn’t catch his face—my baby girl started screaming. He ran … he ran … he ran upstairs to stop her, and, and then … when he got there, somehow, she … she had crawled off the top of the stairs. And … then … that was when it happened!”
    “When what happened, ma’am?” the operator asked, her voice still calm.
    “That was … that was when she fell.” My mother paused again, gasping and punctuating her tears. “She fell down from the secondstory. Oh my God, please come quickly with an