The Execution of Noa P. Singleton by Elizabeth L. Silver

his hair violently, shoving his scalp along with it. There was nothing else to offer. His breath was heavy, and I recognized it, not from the phone calls days before, but from my own chest when I was nervous, leaking out from my mouth every night before I fell asleep.
    He held his hand to mine and opened himself outward for me to sit. It seemed as though he was still trying to remember the rules of chivalry—or whatever the rules of chivalry have been made to be when making amends with your long-lost progeny. It looked both exhausting and somewhat endearing on him at the same time. He tried to put his hand over mine. I flinched upon contact.
    “So why the hang-ups?” I finally asked, getting comfortable. “You do realize that each and every phone call was an opening scene to
Law & Order
, don’t you?”
    “Oh my god, Noa,” he said, looking down, embarrassed. “It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t like that at all.”
    “I’m not joking. I was this close to calling the police.” My fingers pinched a millimeter of space so that, from a certain angle, it looked like I was crushing his maudlin face, feigned abashed revelation or not. “People are freaked out about crossing the street next to someone strange, and you think it’s a good idea to pop into my life via anonymous telephone hang-up?”
    Spills of nervous laughter trickled out in runs, in syncopation with the cadence of my voice. His face jumped in and out of view, and when he moved, for an instant, the light from the window highlighted the skin above his mouth. A thick scar, almost the size of a pea pod, rested over his upper lip.
    “So?” I asked. “Are you going to answer my question?”
    “I just wanted to meet you,” he said before taking a sip of water.
    “Like that? It’s creepy,” I said. “Like, disturbingly creepy. You couldn’t have just sent me a letter? An e-mail? Had my mom warn me? Even just have said hello on the first call, at least?”
    “I didn’t mean to sound creepy,” he said, defensively. “I really just wanted to meet you. Is that so hard to believe?”
    I looked to the window and then back to him.
    “A little, yeah. Especially like that.”
    “I was nervous,” he said with a crooked smile that expropriated ninety-eight percent of my attention. Had I met him in a library or a coffeehouse, no doubt he would have appeared distinguished, perhaps even approachable, but in the putrid light of Bar Dive, his awkward smile was becoming distracting. “I was just nervous,” he said again. “That’s all.”
    “It’s been twenty-three years,” I said. My voice was my mother’s when she discovered that pack of cigarettes under my pillow on my fourteenth birthday. “Why now?”
    He cleared his throat in little couplets. Sitting across from me, he looked more hopeful than I could have imagined, given the circumstances.
    “I don’t know,” he said, shrugging off the suggestion.
    “Really?” I laughed. “That’s what you’ve been calling me to say? ‘I don’t know?’ Come on, Caleb. You can do better than that.”
    “I just,” he stumbled again. He drank from his bottle of water and squinted, as if he didn’t know what words to put together next. “You know, Noa, there are things that happen in this world that make you really, really want to make things right.”
    “Oh, Jesus. Not another one.” I sighed. “If I hear one more person talk about how life is precious right now, I’m gonna walk out of here.”
    Of course, I didn’t. It’s not like I was spending that much time with people rethinking their lives in the last few months. It’s not like I missed out on his presence. My mother’s Lazy Susan of stand-ins did just fine. I rarely sat in bed pondering the missing half of my genetic tree, but perhaps, in hindsight, I was curious. And he was offering. And I was there.
    “Everyone goes through a time when he realizes how much he screwed up. I guess, for me …” He paused, looking at his water bottle,