Conquering Darkness Memoir of the Serial Killer's Wife

by Crystal Reshawn Choyce-Lige

  42

  The Touch of Evil on Me

  FOR MONTHS AFTER THE FEBRUARY 2000 MEETING WITH WILLIAM, I tried to get in touch with him. I can only characterize my uncontrollable need to talk to him as an act of pure desperation— from an unknown source. On some level, I believe that what I wanted was to see whether William could help me understand some of the issues that I was attempting to deal with. These were issues which pertained to our marriage and the difficulties he had with being a father and a faithful husband. And even if I hadn’t had the chance to see William that time when I took our grandchild to see him, I think I would have been eternally haunted by all the “not-knowing” that went on in our entire relationship.

  In my heart, I felt that William owed me that much. Some answers, some truth. I had never been malicious to him and even though he hurt my child, I never tried to discourage a healing for the traumas of the past.

  I happened to call William right before he was arrested for the two rapes for which he accepted a plea bargain to serve eleven years. His oldest son answered the phone. I told him who I was. I could hear him in the background relaying the information to his father. I also heard William tell his son to tell me he was not in. I hung up before his son could come back to the phone. This was in 2001. I never called again. But I was still haunted by our last meeting.

  Between the time of William and my last meeting and the time he was arrested for two multi-horrific rapes in 2001, I suffered so much because I could not move beyond a past that had tormented me on so many levels. I have always been a person who has found it incredibly difficult to move forward past a painful chapter of my life without the closure that admissions and forgiveness brings. I believe William knew what I needed. He would not help me.

  43

  Please, No More Suffering!

  2001

  NO MATTER HOW I IMMERSED MYSELF IN WORK AND SCHOOL AFTER THAT LAST meeting with William in February 2000, I could not free myself from the darkness that seemed to consume me more voraciously than ever before. What is this? I was convinced that my former spouse had they key to my mental freedom. And if I could have somehow convinced myself that my thought processes about how he was affecting me were flawed, I might have moved on with my life sooner. Around every corner, there was a question mark about my past with William. This would invariably affect my ability to find peace in the future, particularly with men.

  In 2001, while William was still on the prowl, I could not sleep. His evil was riding my spirit. I know that now. It was as though I was connected to him because of our past. Maybe it was because of all the mysteries in our lives that had not been solved. Perhaps I was experiencing the emotional proposition that only healthy couples should know—true and eternal connectedness. There was indeed a flaw in this kind of implausible reality, but it existed.

  I did not know how hard I was suffering, but I would soon find out.

  After about thirty days and nights without sleep, I began moving into a state of depression.

  And at the time of this new suffering, I knew that I needed to be with someone who could comfort me and keep me from being silent when I was deep inside of my blues. I believe that God sent me a friend, Ricky L. Ledbetter. I believe he saved my life by listening to me, watching me, loving me even when it seemed such an impossible feat.

  To compound my state of worry and anxiety, my daughter, who I had never been separated from for any significant amount of time, was beginning to explore a new and permanent place where she could raise her family. I was terrified at the prospect. On top of that, my mother, who had already had lung surgery, was recovering from the complications of diabetes. I worked full time and went to school full time. And I still tried to give comfort and care to the people I loved.

  THEN ONE DAY, MY MIND BETRAYED ME— BUT NOT BEFORE GOD SENT ME SOMEONE SPECIAL.

  44

  A Good Man for Alice

  It was the summer that I had so much weighing down on me— 2001.

  DEPRESSION CAME TO CLAIM ME, QUIETLY AT FIRST.

  But I was determined not to let even one responsibility or problem slip so far away from me that I couldn’t reach out with my own determination and reel it in to be taken care of. That’s what black women do! It was my affirmation; it was implied in everything that my mother did when I was a child. It was a lesson for me.

  —

  Every warm night after I had moved in with my friend Rick, who after a number of months became my lover, was spent in his beautiful backyard. It pleased him so. I tried hard to connect with the happiness he seemed to possess, but I couldn’t. It felt like something was stopping me. The colorful annuals Rick delighted in planting each new spring did nothing to awaken me from the trances that came over me like clockwork; my mind was everywhere except inside my body.

  The music of Miles Davis, Joe Sampo and other jazz greats would be playing from a speaker sitting in the window of the guest bedroom on the back of the house on 62nd Street in North Oakland. Good music, a cold glass of white Zinfandel and the spaciousness of the outdoors wasn’t enough to help stave off the dark mood that would sit down with me day in and day out. Nothing helped. This dark, dark blues was something new; it seemed to get more momentum out of nowhere.

  But it didn’t come out of nowhere; I would learn this much before the summer would near its recess.

  Most if the time, I had been successful in keeping my mind in a pseudo-positive zone. To do this, I would think about my love for my granddaughter and my daughter and I would look forward to each special time when we could be together. I would think about how God, with his infinite mercy, had let me have my mother for so long. Affirmations, I believed, made me strong. So, each day, I would claim them as the jewels for my survival. I would also carry the books I loved around with me. I had Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Sonia Sanchez, Langston Hughes, Emily Plath and Ayn Rand. They comforted me with literary entertainment, wisdom, ways to fight battles of the mind and more than anything, I could connect with the fictional characters in most of the books that, in a strange way, mirrored the real life I was living— painful.

  —

  September was only a few month away; it was the month that I was due to complete the requirements for my first Master’s Degree. And for the past year and a half, in addition to going to school full-time, I was also going back and forth with my mother to the doctor. Although I could feel some new pressure, I tried to ignore it because there was no point in dwelling on it. I forged ahead, even with the Blues pursuing me like crazy. That’s what I sometimes called my incessant downness.

  Sometimes these feelings would catch me off-guard while I was at work and I would have to take a break to try and pull myself together. In the back of my mind, I began to wonder and worry about what was up with me.

  —

  5July: It was the night after an uneventful Independence Day. The evening was deliciously cool enough to wet my appetite for a bit of outdoor lounging. That fact, in addition to the one that I was feeling burned out by school, gave me a good reason to abandon the computer and any pending research projects. I shed my day clothes of a silk shirt and black pant that summer night in Oakland. I opted for a pair of Rick’s boxer’s and one of his soft tee-shirts. For some strange reason, I loved lounging in his clothes— maybe because I could imagine wearing him on my body, and then maybe that wasn’t it at all. But Rick made me feel safe. I had never had this feeling about William’s clothes, and I had spent so many years with him. Maybe this was just something different for me. Whatever.

  Half of the second glass of Zin that Rick brought out to me was gone. I lay comfortably on the patio chaise lounge feeling the alcohol buzzing through my whole body. It didn’t take much for me. A couple of sips and I was feeling good. Sometimes I would feel a little sensual and rather than get cozy with Rick, I opted to shed my clothes and dance around the backyard like I was the only person on Earth. It fascinated Rick. His backyard had an abundance of privacy and I felt safe dancing to Toni Braxton’
s, “You’re Making Me High.” Rick was watching, and even with my eyes closed, I could feel the energy from his stare. It was a good energy. He had wanted me to try and relax more often because he had observed that I seemed tense a lot. I cosigned on his observation and told him that I would make a conscious effort to just chill sometimes. So, I was sure that as Rick was watching me, he was simplistically happy that I had taken his advice. And sometimes, only sometimes, I think he wanted feel like he was my daddy and I was his little girl. And sometimes, I actually liked the idea.

  After the vintage Al Jarreau CD finished playing, Rick must have caught me drifting off with me eyes wide open.

  “YOU’RE DOING IT AGAIN ALI,” Rick snapped at me and then managed a slight smile. “Where is your mind woe-man?!” He had a sweet country voice, like he was born and raised in the south. But he wasn’t.

  I looked at Rick. He had been really good to me. “I’m here baby….I’m here.” He gave me the best feeling a man had ever given me. He gave me safety.

  45

  Everything Black

  AS THE SUMMER PROGRESSED, I COULD FEEL MYSELF I LOSING MORE AND MORE of the control that I could exert over my own mind. Plus, it was hard for me to concentrate on my studies; that had never happened before. I had always been able to dig myself a good tunnel to the world of academia, even if it was to just learn something new. Besides, I’ve always loved learning and I knew at an early age that learning would be a lifelong endeavor for me. But in recent days, I had found myself disillusioned about school, work and almost about everything else that defined me as a motivated person. I took a break for one semester. I felt guilty as hell. I felt like a quitter.

  Then, sometimes, I felt like I was engaged in combat with myself. It was so strange. I tried to keep aware of the fact that I had a lot going on, but sometimes I would lose perspective and find myself in a funky mood. And my only response was to draw deeper and deeper into myself and into a darkness that reached out for me to come closer and closer. AND I DID. I would only wear black clothing. I purchased a black car; other colors only offended my eyes and my blue, blue spirit.

  During these times, I remember trying to reshape the past by thinking what I could have done different to change certain outcomes. I would replay the past and imagine different scenarios that would be more acceptable. For every perceived failure of the past, I mentally held onto the one contrived thing that I could have done to make it a success. Most of my perceived failures revolved around my marriage to William. Sometimes I would feel like I was free-falling all day long as I re-spun reel after reel of what amounted to our life together. It bothered me that our marriage failed, even nearly ten years after we were separated and then divorced. There probably wasn’t a week that went by when I wasn’t haunted by the immutable thought that there was something abnormal about my marriage. Even when we were married, that thought was the halo that followed me everywhere.

  When I could feel myself wearing down that summer of 2001, I would just prop myself up and somehow I magically pulled out another ounce of strength to keep on going. It never occurred to me that someday, or in some inopportune moment, I would run out of endurance.

  Well, I did run out of endurance.

  And that’s when strange things started to happen.

  There was no siren or no bang, bang, bang in my head.

  There was nothing to warn me that I had used up every ounce of sanity and whatever else it was that kept me going.

  46

  Mirror, Mirror

  ON A SEEMINGLY ORDINARY MORNING, I FOUND MYSELF STANDING IN FRONT THE mirror in the bathroom at my boyfriend Rick’s home. It was around 6:45 a.m. and I could not remember if the lids of my eyes came down over my eyeballs during the whole night. My sleeplessness was a secret that I kept to myself. Besides, I knew that if I told Rick —who was inordinately concerned with my welfare— about my apparent physiological and maybe even neurological malfunction, I would have never heard the end of solutions that he would have prescribed for me. And at the head of those prescriptions would be the one ordering me to spend less time worrying about everyone else’s problems. Even as exhausted as I was, this was a No can do for me.

  I had learned to hate the mornings, and this particular morning, the sun had barely stuck its burnt- orange head from over the horizon. Rick was on his way to catch the BART train to San Francisco. It was time for me to get up. Since he didn’t say anything about my tossing and turning during the night, I felt reasonably comfortable that he hadn’t noticed what was going on with me even as laid next to him.

  Rick usually kissed me before he left and if he had; it was strange that I didn’t have a memory of it.

  I sat up in bed and glanced at the stream of sunlight trying to penetrate the curtains. Outside the bedroom window, I could hear the neighborhood birds singing their same old tired song with an unbreakable and nagging rhythm. I was angry at them for heralding yet another day that would drag miserably through yet another twenty-four responsibility-packed hours. That morning marked more than a month without sleep. A mania so enthralling and so poisonous would seek me out. Suddenly, I felt like I was afraid of everything, especially life.

  As I recall things, I was leaning into the mirror, feeling stranger than any other morning that I could remember waking up. Maybe I would describe what I was feeling as pure emptiness and that perhaps I was empty enough that if someone tried to pour some liquid life into me to restore me, they might have to pour all day—something like that. I guess I felt barely alive; the sensation was so new to me.

  I was breathing but each breath seemed to be impotent, not having enough oxygen to sustain good circulation in my brain. A little dizziness came to me and I thought I was going to tilt over. A few minutes must have passed as I held onto the face bowl. When I became slightly composed, and while still standing in front of the mirror, it had suddenly occurred to me, on a morning in the summer of the new millennium plus one year, that I hadn’t wanted to do any of the normal things that I usually did like putting on makeup, taking walks or sprinting around Lake Merritt in Oakland to catch a cool breeze.

  THEN—

  I couldn’t pull myself away from the mirror.

  I felt strange and weird and almost out of focus. The small world of the bathroom seemed to close in around me. My mind was all over the place, multitasking and flipping back and forth between the past and the present.

  Something strange is going on with me. This was my aching thought.

  For a few more minutes, and while I was still standing over the sink and in front of the mirror, I pondered over the origin of my lengthy and immense sadness. I wondered why my brain chose to keep taking amorphous jumps all over the place, producing an absolutely wretched feeling inside of me. I wondered, after the morning was over, how magnetic the mirror was. But there were no clues that I could pull down.

  Not yet.

  47

  Snap!!

  THEN, SOMETHING SNAPPED.

  One summer morning.

  SNAP!

  SNAP!!

  SNAP!!!

  I couldn’t help myself. Something inside of me was pushing me deeper and deeper and deeper into the mirror in our bathroom.

  My head began hurting so bad I could not move.

  I heard a voice that seemed so real. It made my eyeballs roll around to see where it was coming from.

  “…girrrrrl.” The voice seemed to hurl itself from outer space. “You know you will never laugh again.”

  I heard or thought I heard even more words. My head swiveled around abruptly. That made two times.

  “It would all be over if you were dead!”

  Then there was nothing. I wanted to believe that what seemed to be happening to me was just the voice of my own consciousness with a little microphone. It wasn’t unusual that I thought out loud, but this was different. The voice inside my head didn’t have the texture of my true personality; it was mean and deadly sounding.

  And then—

  “
…ugly BITCH!”

  It is my head again!

  I didn’t feel safe in my own skin. I froze and just stared into the mirror in Rick’s little bathroom.

  “…AND YOU KNOW YOUR BLACK ASS HEARD ME!”

  I looked more intently, as intently as I could, into the mirror.

  I turned my head slowly from right to left.

  I couldn’t believe what was happening.

  I studied my image in the mirror and it seemed to be making some sort of a change.

  Then, something I could never in a million years predict happened. In a flash my reality, my world as I knew it, changed with the turn of my head.

  What tha—

  My father’s face had rose up out of nowhere and merged into mine right in front of the mirror.

  What- tha- hell..?

  I was looking just like my father and wondering why this was happening to me.

  I snatched my head back thinking that I could shake the shape my face had obviously drifted into.

  I felt so ugly just like the words I was hearing in my head. Just plain ugly and I wondered how come I had never seen myself this way before.

  It had never occurred to me that I looked anything like my father.

  Why is this happening to me?

  I was made, as far as I was concerned, in my mother’s image. I was her mini-me, a clone of a ½ Choctaw lady, but I had a little more chocolate’-chocolate’.

  That was me.

  I wasn’t dark like my father and my hair wasn’t kinky like his.

  But there was an instant where I stood looking in the mirror, and I was the spitting image of John Swafford.

  Why?

  I studied my face.

  Everything was strange. I had always seen my father as a handsome man.

  My face!!!