Chapter 8

Bryan opened the door and found Silver leaning over the side of the hot tub. She had her back to him and she appeared to be staring aimlessly off into the distance. Her body shook as she gasped, trying to control the sobs that rocked her body with endless tremors.

Both her hands were clasped into fists. Her left hand twirled a tuft of hair, her right hand pulled at a handful of her bangs. She twisted and tugged, shaking and rocking as she sobbed.

Bryan climbed into the hot tub behind her, sending a splash of water against her back. She didn't appear to notice his approach and continued with the sobbing and tugging at her hair. He slipped into place behind her silently, wrapping his arms around her, pinning her arms down so that she couldn't do any more damage to her hair.

She wasn't asleep, but she wasn't coherent either. He had seen this type of reaction before. She broke down and crashed when her stress level reached a certain point. She might function for hours or even days in certain situations, but the moment she relaxed she degenerated to a quivering scared little girl.

She seemed to be half-catatonic, her eyes half closed and seemingly rolled back, she sobbed uncontrollably, and her balled fists still reached helplessly to tug at her hair. Bryan leaned her back against his chest, rocked her gently, whispering into her ear. Sometimes she talked back, a dialogue that was never coherent and almost always dreamlike. Bryan had begun interpreting them as dreams and had found that there were very insightful into the subconscious levels of Silver's mind.

She began to relax, reacting to his attentions, and eventually her body went limp, completely unconscious. He knew that she would awake in a few minutes and complain that her head hurt where she had actually succeeded in pulling hair out of the follicles.

Silver was a complex woman, he reflected. Silver wasn't even her real name. She had gotten it legally changed before she had married Bryan.

Silver had been named Jessica. As a child, the second youngest of six, she had always been highly outspoken. Both her parents were only children, both so spoiled and selfish that they had never had any business being married, let alone having children together.

Young Jessica grew up in the middle of a visibly functional, yet privately dysfunctional family. Her parents were often too busy fighting, having affairs, or socializing to raise the children. As such the older kids were often left in charge, and without direction drugs and alcohol were used rampantly.

When Jessica was nine years old, her parents separated and divorced. Again, the parents were too caught up in their own lives to reassure or assist the children through the transition. For years they fought, sometimes viciously.

Jessica stayed with a maternal grandmother and her oldest sister at times. Her sister's husband took an interest to her sometime around age eleven and raped her, frightening her into submission and threatening her into silence upon fear of death.

Jessica had stayed with her grandmother after that, healed and grew hard and resolute. And sometime later, her mother had decided that since Jessica was old enough to do housework, then she could come live with her again.

Jessica's mother had contracted breast cancer sometime after the divorce and rather than treat it, simply let it go. Once it had progressed to the point where she was no longer able to work, she had stayed home and Jessica had taken care of her.

Jessica had gotten pregnant at fifteen, given birth to Maggie, and still taken care of her mother all through the pregnancy. A school counselor told her to quit school, which made her resolve to try that much harder. Working, raising a child, attending high-school, caring for her sick mother, she had never accepted her fate and never taken the easy way out as so many teenage mothers do. She had never accepted that she could not carry herself and Maggie through.

Maggie was six months old when Jessica's mother had passed away. Less than a week later, Jessica's maternal grandmother passed away.

At seventeen years of age, in many senses an orphan, with a daughter of her own to raise and no one reliable to help take care of her, she began moving into her grandmother's house. An older sister, who had found the arrangement to be unfair, decided that if she did not get to have the house, then she would make sure no one would. Having just moved into the house, Jessica's sister set fire to it while no one was home, and it burnt to the ground.

Her paternal grandparents and an older sister assisted her, helping with Maggie, helping Jessica get back on her feet. She lived in a small second story apartment, still worked and went to high school.

She met a boy near her age which she worked with. His name was Todd. Todd began hanging around a lot, despite the fact that he annoyed her. Sleeping one night, she was awakened by him one night as he jumped on top of her and forced himself on her. She screamed, struggled, and squirmed but the damage was done. She kicked him out and broke off any contact with him, but then found three weeks later that her period was late.

She called him, telling him the news. A few weeks later he took her to an abortion clinic, and then drove to a nearby library to wait until the procedure was done. The clinic sent her home on enough painkillers to erase the pain she felt in her loins, and the pain she felt in her soul at what she had done. Todd never seemed to feel anything toward her or the child, but took that opportunity to make the most cold-hearted proposal of all time. "No man is gonna want a woman with one child, and who just killed another, so we might as well get married."

Jessica stayed under the influence of painkillers until well after their wedding, but by the time that she weaned herself off of them, the damage was done and it was too late. She endured an oppressive dictator of a man, manipulative, pushy and childish. She bore him two sons whom he valued far more than he valued her.

By the time that Jake was born, she was depressed and suicidal. Complications of Jake's birth had prompted an emergency cesarean section, which brought to the doctor's attention that she had cancer.

After several months, of fighting with chemo, she relented and had a hysterectomy. After that moment Todd became even more horrible toward her. He had gotten a religious experience from a church that became well known for its repressive nature and manipulative cultist ways. And rather than his wife, Todd now referred to Jessica as his concubine, his plaything, his property. Worse still, she began to suspect that he was a repressed homosexual because he never seemed to be interested in her sexually as a woman, but used her as he would a man.

It was sometime after that, and being banned to the basement to sleep that she began to stray from her miserable marriage. An old friend from high-school offered her some physical relief, but never the emotional sustenance that she needed.

Her father was developer and he asked her to come in to answer phones. Her people skills and problem solving skills allowed her to grow into a position where she was promoted to CFO within two short years.

Completely devoid of emotional comfort, she threw herself into her work and compensated by making the men she worked with feel inferior. Holding their paychecks over their heads she was relentless in making the weak or the stupid know their place in life.

Her father had always been a ladies' man, and was seeing his assistant. He had made comments to his workers that he would like to see his assistant's husband just disappear. One of the day laborers was on parole and looking down the barrel of a drug possession charge. He concocted a plan with the state police to set up his boss by offering to terminate the man for money.

With her father in the county jail for ninety days, Jessica had to run the entire company by herself, including managing the workers. Todd told her to quit, not standing by her decision at all, and gave her that much more resolve to do things her way.

Three months later her father, now on house arrest at his business, took over and began spending erratically. Jessica held the company together, but with her control wrested away from her she began to yearn for some companionship.

She began drinking excessively, and then smoking marijuana. That summer she had an affair with a man who, though he taught her how to love, was incapable of true love himself. She eventually gave up on him and threw herself into making more projects for the company.