Conquering Darkness Memoir of the Serial Killer's Wife

by Crystal Reshawn Choyce-Lige

  It was ugly and contorted enough to presume that only the devil alone could be behind such ugliness.

  There was pain and agony woven very delicately into my skin.

  I wondered if the sight of my ugliness had escaped the attention of people that saw me every day.

  Why hadn’t anyone ever said anything?

  Soft tremors shook my body.

  My heart began to pound and the veins in my neck were so pronounced it frightened me even further.

  I caught myself trying to make the veins pop harder. I found myself trying to force my face to look more like my father’s as if to punish myself more.

  I moved my left hand down slowly and turned on the cold water in the basin below the mirror.

  I baptized my face like I was John the Baptist going down slowly with the biggest sinner in all of the Holy Land.

  Thank you, Jesus for cold water. Thank you

  Whatever ever madness that happened to me on the thirtieth plus day without sleep was over before 7:15 a.m. I felt so unsafe.

  I checked the clock in the bedroom and was amazed that a whole day hadn’t passed before me. It surely felt like it had.

  I walked into the kitchen to get some juice because my throat felt so dry I could barely swallow.

  I went back into the bathroom, a little afraid to face the invading face and voice in the mirror.

  They were gone. ALICE WAS ALICE AGAIN.

  I listened intently for that stealthy voice that had come into my head but, thank God; it was gone.

  All day long, my thought was— what is wrong with me? I knew something had truly gone awry in and outside of my head. But I was happy that the voice was gone.

  I got showered and then dressed for work.

  The next morning came.

  The same thing happened.

  The voice.

  The irritability.

  And then there was something new. It was an incessant itching under my skin. I wanted to blame it on the rogue birds outside the bedroom window. But for them, I might not have known that morning had actually come. I didn’t want the morning to come because it brought the lightness of a new day. And then, for some strange, really strange reason, it popped into my head that Rick kept a pistol in his underwear drawer.

  I quickly tried to dismiss the thought.

  It was stubborn.

  It was on a reel.

  When I had moved in with Rick, he gave me this ‘just in case’ bit of information about the gun. He said he kept it to protect his house and that if it ever came to the point that I might need it…then… I had taken a cursory look at the gun when Rick was showing it to me. It was shineless. I filed the image and its potential to do harm away, or so I thought.

  But on this one morning, my thoughts about the gun wouldn’t budge.

  I went to Rick’s drawer and lifted the gun up from under his tee shirts.

  I knew that it wasn’t something that I was supposed to do unless it was necessary.

  But, I felt compelled, moved seemingly beyond my will to do something so contrary to who I was and what I believed.

  What’s happening to me?

  I picked up the cold steel, not expecting its heaviness.

  I ran my fingers over the ridges of the external part of the bullet chamber.

  The voice inside my head hinted what I should do next.

  Not the crazies again!

  I wanted to beg the voice to leave me alone, but actually acknowledging it would really make me feel crazy. I fondled the gun. I was half afraid and half brave to hold it in my hands and honestly, I can’t recall how long this morbid romance between my shaky hands and the gun went on.

  But before long, I was back in the bathroom just like the morning past.

  The mirror caught my eyes again. It was a perfect gotcha catch.

  “Bring the gun to your head,” the returning voice coached me.

  What the hell…? It was my silent thought that I directed at the voice which seemed to have moved into my head. My heart skipped some beats and my mouth began to pucker with painfully salty saliva that pulsed through two floating veins in my cheeks.

  I put the gun to the left temple of my head very softly. My face became distorted again and I grimaced at my own reflection in the mirror.

  Fool, are you nuts? I asked myself. Who do you think you are? Are you some kind of a black-assed Sybil?’

  Hell no I ain’t nuts, I answered myself. I tilted my head back and looked at myself again in total amazement. The whole morning wasn’t making sense. Somewhere, I think I fell out of touch with myself as the time passed.

  Before I knew anything, I had neatly placed the gun on the top of the toilet and then I tore my night clothes off and pushed my body up under a cold stream of water from the shower. As swiftly as I could, I diverted my focus to getting dressed for work and I tried to forget what had just happened to me.

  It didn’t take me long to get dressed in my black blazer and black pants. Dressing myself up wasn’t fun anymore, not like it used to be and so I had the economy of dressing down to a science. I was in a hurry trying to get out of the front door and I thought that if someone had witnessed me in action, they might have sworn that a monster was after me. But someone had noticed me as I was walking around the back of my car to get to the driver’s side. It was a woman who seemed to come out of nowhere. Our glances met as she was walking past Rick’s house. It was interesting that my first thought —after chancing a glance at the woman with the long, black crinkled hair, billowy cinnamon skin and disheveled appearance—was that she had angel-like qualities. I gave her a second glance and found it impossible to turn away from her gaze. And for a moment, we just stood looking at each other as if waiting for something to fall out of the sky to squash the awkward moment that held us both.

  “YOU’RE A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN AND GOD LOVES YOU.” The woman’s words came out with a strong emphasis on ‘God loves you.’ The words seemed to hover between us.

  “Thank you,” I said softly. I was a little perplexed. But then I thought that if the woman was going to try and ask me for money or something, I would give it to her because more than hearing anything else in the world, I needed to hear those words that came out of her mouth. ‘You’re a beautiful woman and God loves you.’

  She didn’t ask for anything. The woman only walked away like she had completely fulfilled her only obligation for the day. I found myself trying to store the memory of the woman, who seemed to come out of nowhere, in a special place in my mind.

  I started out for work in Pleasanton, CA.

  …

  Highway 580 east leading from Oakland was the safest and least aggressive freeway to drive in the Bay Area as far as I was concerned. There were few trucks and most commuters were headed in the opposite direction. A blessing!

  The thoughts of what happened to me for two mornings in a row set at the top of my consciousness. My brain fingered the thoughts and tried to make sense of what had happened. With its sovereign power, my brain would go on to tell my heart and my nervous system that there was nothing to worry about, that I should relax and try to make it to work. But I didn’t trust my brain especially after it had let an intrusive voice into my head.

  Before I arrived at 4450 Rosewood Drive at the AT&T complex, I had decided to use my cell phone to call Dr. Lang, my family practitioner, to make an appointment to come in and be examined or something. I wasn’t absolutely sure what I wanted with the doctor, but I didn’t know where else to look for help, especially after what I had been through.

  “Alice Choy-cee,” the receptionist voice called out.

  “It’s Choyce…like C-h-o-i-c-e,” I made the correction

  “Okay. What problem are you having?” The receptionist sounded like she had just graduated from receptionist school, but she couldn’t shake her damned attitude.

  “It’s personal.” I was irritated. I just need an appointment to see the doctor.

  The receptionist took my answer, sucked her
teeth, and then told me that Dr. Lang would be out of the office for several weeks. She told me that I could see another doctor in the medical group that same day.

  I agreed, although I wasn’t looking forward to seeing a doctor that I didn’t know, especially about something I wasn’t looking forward to describing to a total stranger.

  But I felt I had no choice.

  I left work early so that I could get to the doctor before 3:45 p.m. When I made it into the parking lot, something was trying to convince me that I didn’t need to be there. Not giving in to my own thoughts, I went inside the Summit Medical office building and got a ticket to validate my parking. There was a sickeningly clean smell that greeted me as I approached the elevator to go up to the doctor’s office. Elderly people were being gently pushed in wheelchairs and their auras seemed to signal that their spirits had already cashed out on life, but their bodies wouldn’t let them rise up and go free. I looked semi-intently at the presumed patients and for a moment and without warning or reason, I got scared that someday I too could be a hundred pounds of skin and bones that needed to be pushed around in a wheelchair. And as I walked to the elevator, it seemed that one fear piled on top of another.

  Then, on came the fear of not knowing what was wrong with me. And then the fear of hearing that I might have cancer of the brain and that this was the real reason I was going coo-coo without the Cocoa Puffs. One on top of the other, the fears kept coming. I shook my head slightly trying to jingle loose the sudden influx of nonsense. Quietly, I laughed at how my mind shifted into a panic mode probably as a defensive attempt to escape the thought of going up to talk to a doctor who I didn’t know —about something I probably couldn’t explain very well without sounding like I was just a crazy black woman with good medical insurance.

  …

  A voice called just in front of a soft knock. “Mrs. Choyce.”

  It was a man doctor. My heart sank.

  I wondered how come I didn’t remember the receptionist saying that the doctor was a man.

  Maybe I hadn’t paid attention. I hadn’t had a man doctor since Dr. Dolch delivered Crystal in 1976. Anyway, I was looking around a room full of hypnotic white walls while sitting on the edge of the examination table with all its crispy sounds. And there was a man doctor on the other side of the door.

  “Yes,” I answered to the voice on the other side.

  The doctor walked in with his head down. Once he was in the room, he greeted me with a slight and almost obligatory smile.

  “I’m Doctor Stratham.”

  “Nice to meet you,” I said as I crossed my left hand over my chest to reach for the doctor’s hand. It was my way of greeting strangers who seemed like they might want to know me.

  The doctor went, “So what seems to be the problem?” He tilted his head while looking at me as though he was trying to figure me out before I spoke.

  He was tall and white with a few splotches of rose in his cheeks. He had medium length black hair. I made an acronym for him; POWMD (Plain Old White Male Doctor). I pondered the irony in the doctor’s question. I’m not the damned doctor, you are! The thought was shouting out in my head. I wouldn’t dare let it out.

  There was a smirk trying to take over my face, but I suppressed it fearing that the POW MD would sense what I was thinking. “I’ve been feeling kind of strange.” The words came out, I think, before I wanted them to.

  There was an awkward moment of silence and the POW MD took his pen and pressed it to some paper on his clipboard. The doctor asked me to describe what I was feeling and I did almost without reservation because I knew that the next day might bring the same horror that I had experienced two mornings in a row and I just couldn’t face it because on the second morning, I felt weaker and the thought that the next day might bring more of the same— just traveled from the top of my head all the way down to the bottom of my cold feet.

  I tucked both of my arms right behind my back and leaned against them. I felt a little more comfortable. “I think I thought about killing myself.” It was out and I thought I heard the words clank upside POW MD’s head.

  There was more silence and it was cloaked with a kind of decency that absolutely had to exist if the doctor was going to suppress the instant fear he might feel for me.

  “Could you tell me a little more about what led to you thinking about maybe killing yourself?”

  Yeah, yeah…you see POW MD, it’s like this…I’ve always wanted to be a hit woman and so I thought, hey, why don’t I start with myself and…

  I cleared my throat and the insolent thought that crossed my mind was gone. If there was an absolute way to convey the magnitude of my pain, confusion and fear, I wanted that knowledge to come to me with the fierceness of a thousand dictionaries and thesaurus’ and grammar treatises’ so that I could share them with POW MD.

  Whew!

  What I was able to give POW MD was an intelligent account of some crazy moments in my life that terrified me because they seemed to come out of nowhere. I had to say that my terror happened while I was standing in front of a mirror in a bathroom.

  After I was done talking, I could tell that the POW MD had listened to me. He repeated some of the things I had told him almost word for word.

  “Strange voice. Strange urges. Loss of time. Confused…”

  POW MD used an instrument to look inside my eyes and he pressed gently around my neck asking me to tell him if I felt some pain. I didn’t. A soft sigh of relief escaped my mouth when I thought I detected that you’re not crazy and you’re not going to die look on POW MD’s face. We talked more about my general health. He told me that I was under weight. I had hoped that little piece on knowledge was free because I already knew that much. But I didn’t want to acknowledge (if asked) that I was part of a family who had a history of mental illness because I didn’t want any diagnosis of my condition to be attached with a flawed supposition that I had a genetic predisposition, and therefore, no further inquiry was needed. I was cautious as I could be.

  He gave me a prescription for Effexsor, an anti-depressant. The doctor explained that I had clinical depression. He then carefully noted that if I had any unusual symptoms like more thoughts of suicide, after taking the medicine, that I should contact this office immediately. He also told me that he wanted to try me on Effexsor first and see how I did with it. It was also noted that there was no precise way to determine the perfect medicine for me without testing several medicines to see which one worked best for me and which had the least amount of side effects.

  After hearing of the various reactions I could have had on the medicine, I wondered whether it was safer to just take my chances. As things stood, I was already having suicidal ideations, but I was able to combat them on some level. What if I couldn’t combat them with the influence of a medicine that by its very composition could be worse? There were a million questions floating in my head.

  Depression? I thought about how the doctor had managed to diagnose me so quickly. But my thought was—what did I know?

  Sitting in the Walgreen’s pharmacy with what seemed like a hundred other people waiting for prescriptions to be filled, made me nauseated. I tried to take discreet peeks at the people to see if I could tell what was wrong with them. Most of them looked sick, but a great deal more looked just plain desperate. There was an old, wrinkled up man with dirty fingernails trying to wheel himself with his one good arm. It was awful. Then I thought I saw someone from my old neighborhood in West Oakland. Damn, I thought. But if it was her, she didn’t recognize me. It was then that I realized, as Rick had noted—my appearance had drastically changed.

  The wait was so long at the pharmacy that I started to get annoyed and impatient. Then I felt a new kind of weakness come over me. I hadn’t eaten all day and it was after 5p.m. It had been a long time since I had felt hunger. Most of the time, in the recent past, I had just forced food down my throat and tried hard not to think about what an absurd thing I was doing. Rick hated it when I only drank Ensure. I
just did it to keep my strength up. Just going toward the refrigerator made me gag. It was an incredible observation that I made and kept to myself.

  I really had no time to eat. Most of my time was spent commuting and when I wasn’t commuting, I was working, and when I wasn’t working, I was studying for my Master’s and when I wasn’t studying for my Master’s, I was trying to see about my mother and when I wasn’t trying to see about my mother, I was trying to see about my daughter and my two year old granddaughter, and when I wasn’t trying see about my kids, I was trying to let go of a man who was no good for me so that I could try and love a man who made me feel good. Whew!

  So, in between all that, there really was no time to eat or care about eating.

  …

  “Alice Choyce,” the pharmacy clerk called me.

  By this time, I was in somewhat of a daze, watching people come and go up to the counter. I gathered my coat and purse and went to the counter. “Yes.”

  “Is this your first time taking this medicine?” The clerk asked looking straight at me.

  “Yes it is.”

  “Then the doctor would like to consult with you about your prescription.” The clerk said the words like she had spoken them a million times before. “Just have a seat and the pharmacist will call you.”

  My mind was in a fog bank by the time the pharmacist called me. I took his cautions and my bottle of medicine and I went to sit in my car. I must have sat for about thirty minutes before I turned on the ignition. I had a bottle of water in the car and I used it to take the first pill. I think I was naïve enough to believe I the medicine would work as soon as I took it. The doctor told me it would take time to get into my system, but I was still hopeful it would work sooner. I composed myself and started home.

  …

  “Hey AA,” Rick called to me as I was getting out of the car. I was in the driveway. The images in the pharmacy were still fresh in my head. I pushed them backwards.

  I looked at the man that I had come to live with the summer of the new millennium. He had taken me in, a wounded woman. But he didn’t know what kind of long-lasting pain I was in until he had fallen in love with me. And Rick loved me. I will tell anyone that Rick loved me as no man has ever loved me.