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It’s a strange thought, that your husband goes to work and kills people, Marie knows.
She muses on the nature of killing, as she clears up the remains of the most awkward ‘last supper’ in history.
Cool sunlight glances over the table. She moves her hands slowly, deliberately, like she does at work.
Hank would joke about dead bodies over dinners past. A dinner made of dead flesh, she reasons, scraping the remains of the lasagna into the bin.
It was nasty, though, sometimes, after a few drinks.
Marie learned to tolerate it as a quirk of his personality before understanding that it was a survival instinct: Hank’s protective outer shell when with his DEA buddies.
Only she has seen his sensitive side - the one that can’t quite get a grip on how people can do these things to each other. It’s rare and mostly in shadow, like the dark side of the moon.
Marie places the remaining lasagna in the fridge. She pushes it back on the clear middle shelf, pushing it into that cool, white, alien world.
She surveys her handiwork of yesterday, when she completely re-organised the fridge, and then cried until she was sick in the sink when she didn’t feel any less confused and overwhelmed.
She shuts the door, and hears the fridge light click off as she turns away.
She has always thought of them as animals, the dealers, and even the addicts to a lesser extent; as things detached from her, writhing below her suburban world.
Ever since she found out what Walter had done, and what Skyler had covered up, it’s like they’ve burst up through her kitchen floor.
She is reminded of a film she once saw on late night TV, a slasher flick. “The call is coming from inside the house.”
She puts the dish Pinkman ate from on the side (he left most of the food) and hugs herself.
Looking around her kitchen, with its cream walls and purple appliances, she can’t see anything but Walt and Skyler, laughing at her table, dancing after a few drinks, arguing at the counter.
Some days her kitchen floor is a crime scene; others, it’s hallowed ground.
She digs her nails into her shoulders. She put on her softest shirt this morning. It doesn’t provide any comfort.
She wonders if it’s bad that this grief hurts worse than grieving her own mother.
It’s making her angrier, that’s for sure. She always knew their mother loved Skyler more. It was never a secret.
It didn’t slither, serpentine, under the floorboards or crawl inside the walls like the secrets that the Whites have kept,
Marie always privately thought of them as the Lambert girls. She thought they were closer than other sisters.
Now Skyler is Skyler White. Pure and untouchable.
Dave tells her that not everything is about her, but Marie does wonder if the reason that Skyler didn’t confide in her, is all because Marie left to train as a radiologist.
Marie left their poky house, and traded in clothes that smelled of cigarette smoke for clean new scrubs, and a married a man who painted the walls of their brand new house bright purple by hand for no reason other than he loved to make her happy.
She left Skyler to take care of their mother as she withered. Skyler’s dream to be a novelist withered alongside, rotting flowers.
Almost straight after the funeral, Skyler jumped ship to marry a failed chemist, who could resurrect dreams with just a few sentences, and convince anybody of anything.
And now she’ll defend him ‘till he dies.
Marie felt nothing for her in that moment: that awful moment in the Whites’ bedroom when Marie realised Skyler had known since before Hank was shot and still rubbed Marie’s back as she cried and smilingly paid their bills, sealing their fate.
She felt nothing at all but cold, hard, aching shock, a marble hand taking hold of her heart and squeezing. There was a similar ringing in her ears to now.
A spider crawls out from under a cupboard. It’s black legs writhe unnaturally. It reminds her of Walter.
She crushes it under her heel. The low hum of men’s voices in the room next door returns.
She understands why she is relegated to the kitchen. She’s a radiologist, not a DEA agent.
They, even Hank to some extent, see her as the highly-strung wife, worrying about silly things like death.
They don’t believe she can feel their righteous anger, that lion in her belly. But, oh, she can.
She doesn’t exactly intend to eavesdrop. It’s the name that draws her to the door. “Tuco.”
Hank’s first kill. She didn’t ask what it felt like when he unloaded his gun and the bullet hit true.
In sleepless moments, on moonless nights, when everything seems dark and mysterious, she wants to taste blood that doesn’t come from biting her tongue in a mall restaurant.
She doesn’t want to just tell Walter to die.
The door swings open a little in the dusty summer breeze, an invitation. Marie puts her eye to the gap.
“On that couch, I just kept thinking, please, God, just five more minutes. Five more fucking minutes,” Jesse is saying.
"It’s so stupid - I mean, I was smoking meth that whole time, cut or laced with God knows what, like I thought I didn’t care about dying or whatever, but,” he lets out a nervous laugh, “turns out I did, when Tuco put a machine gun to the back of my head.”
Jesse is shaking like a wet dog. Marie feels a ridiculous urge to put a towel around his shoulders.
“Wait,” interrupts Steve, “So Tuco caught on to your plan with the ricin?”
Jesse looks up, amusement blooming darkly in his eyes.
“Yeah. Obviously. He figured out we’d done something, anyway, he was screaming, like ‘tell me what you did.’ The guy was crazy, not stupid.
Y’know, he believed he could see the future. I mean, talk about a god complex. Enough to rival Mr White’s.”
Jesse’s trembling hands still. A shadow falls over his face. The clouds are churning, restless.
“Although, Mr White’s is a little more based in fact. It’s like he really can see the future - he knows what you’re gonna do before you do it. And he never fucking stops. It’s like he’s still working people in his sleep.”
Marie is transfixed, drinking in the side of Walter that slept while they had barbecues and threw him birthday parties.
“And I knew him better than anyone - how could I not, after being locked in that trunk with him, or in the RV for four fucking days, and I couldn’t see what he was doing to me.
I mean, it’s crazy. At first, it kinda felt like I was taking care of him, you know? Like, he was this old guy with cancer, trying to make enough money for his people before he went.
He didn’t know what he was doing, either. I mean, a junkyard, really?
But the second he touched that cash it’s like he fucking ascended - or descended, I guess…”
Marie feels a little faint. She can feel Walt’s phantom hands on her, like a perpetual hug goodbye.
“Stick to the topic,” Hank says.
From the angle she’s at, Marie can see nothing but the rigid set of his shoulders, and the cane leaning against his chair, casting a huge shadow on the floor.
“Right. So he, uh…” Jesse’s eyes start shining, and he jams his hands in his pockets to hide the shaking.
“He dragged me outside, and I was trying to fight, but honestly, the thing was, like, I tried to act all tough, but I hadn’t ever done anything like that before, and I didn’t know what I was doing.
I couldn’t even load a gun before I met Mr White.
He followed us, his stupid glasses all twisted, trying to get Tuco to stop beating the shit out of me and, like, not shoot me, I guess.
Tuco pushed me onto my knees, and I was scrabbling around in the dirt like a fucking animal, like prey, and Mr White told Tuco the truth about the ricin, and then yelled something about him being a degenerate and deserving to die. He was trying to distract him, I guess.
Finally, I found a rock and I hit him with it, and he dropped the machine gun in this, like, weird hole. Mr White jumped in after it, and I was wrestling with Tuco.
That whole thing is sort of blank. I mean, I remember it, but I wasn’t really thinking anything except from ‘if I don’t stop him, I’ll die.’
I managed to grab his gun from his belt and I shot him in the gut. The blood went on me, all hot, and he was screaming, real loud, and writhing around.
I kicked him into the hole, and then we were standing over him.
I thought it would feel good, make me feel like a real tough guy, but it didn’t. I just felt sc- pathetic.
I mean, I don’t know what Mr White was thinking, because the guy was pretty okay with the idea of killing people to get what he wanted from the start. Like, it never kept him up at night, or anything.
But I didn’t want to do it, y’know. I mean the dude was totally neutralised. I guess I was weak, I don’t know."
Jesse shrugs, his eyes blank.
"So then we ran, and hid, and you know the rest.
Don’t get me wrong, you totally saved our asses there, killing him. And yourself, obviously. I mean, I’ve met a lot of evil dudes, and that guy definitely deserved it.
I mean, its practically burned in my brain… when he beat his own guy to death, and he held up his fist covered in the bright blood and was like ‘look at it, look!’, or when he was snorting meth off that knife and screaming at us on the couch, his silver teeth flashing, and I was like, oh shit, there’s a tiger inside him…”
Marie sees Hank shift, and she can tell he’s glaring at Jesse, who continues quickly.
“Anyway, we started walking back, and Mr White came up with a plan.
I can’t believe the story about him going into, like, a trance or whatever actually worked on Mrs White.
Actually, have you guys checked in on her?”
Marie’s fingernails cut into her palms, leaving half-moon shaped dents.
“Why?” asks Hank, suspiciously. His voice is hard, like granite.
Jesse looks at his lap, shrugging shakily. He looks how Marie feels - this complete stranger, a junkie who’s in her house eating her food and sleeping in her spare bedroom - like he might break any second.
“I don’t know. I dunno. It’s just.”
“Spit it out, Pinkman.”
Both Marie and Jesse flinch a little at the harshness in his voice.
“I don’t know, she just gave me this look. I don’t know- like, she wasn’t alright, y’know?”
“What look? What the hell are you talking about, Pinkman?"
Jesse’s voice sinks quieter and quieter into nothing as the ringing in Marie’s ears returns.
She envies his naiveté, his compassion: how he gives a shit about Skyler when he’s in the jaws of the DEA himself. Marie, who has never touched drugs, couldn’t think more differently.
Skyler may not be an innocent victim nor a cold accomplice, and Marie may not really know her at all, but her sister made her choice. She and Marie are on opposite sides of this secret war.
The icy finality of that thought has Marie feeling just as she did stepping out into the cool breeze outside her childhood home for the last time - like a cold-hearted bitch.
Maybe she and Skyler are still sisters, because she feels a twin urge to sink herself into chlorinated water, to hide in the detached, underwater world of the pool like a child showing her disinterested mother how long she can hold her breath.
Although of course, it turns out all that melodrama was a calculated move from Skyler to protect Holly and Flynn. Not that she was willing to go far enough to really protect them by telling the truth. Her own babies.
When they were little, Skyler used to twirl her hair when she told fibs. Walter must have taught her to lie better than that.
The curtains of the window next to her flap around in the breeze, as though trying to get free. Marie turns away and shuts the window. The curtains still.
The last of Jesse’s words floating through the warm air that Marie catches before she walks away are “vamonos,” and “I wish.”
***
Marie really doesn’t intend to come back and eavesdrop again. But she wants to like wanted to shoplift again, or go to open houses and create a whole new fake life for herself - nauseously and desperately and like she might disappear into thin air if she doesn’t.
She walks down the hall. And then she stops.
Her heart bangs against her ribcage. Because Jesse is stood there, in exactly the same spot where she had stood less than an hour before.
He looks up, and clearly has a similar reaction to seeing her, because his eyes widen almost comically.
She puts a finger to her lips, and pads silently up to the door, stopping on the opposite side to him.
Steve is saying something to Hank, in a low, nervous tone. Hank replies,
“Pinkman gets killed, and we get it all on tape.”
Jesse pales visibly. There’s no breath in Marie’s lungs as she watches him stumble to the sink and throw up.
“Oh God,” Jesse moans into his hands. Then he stiffens and looks at her.
He doesn’t look like a junkie-murderer. He looks simultaneously like a scared kid, and like an ancient prisoner on death row.
He grits his teeth, and Marie briefly wonders if he’s going to attack her.
His anger is so extreme, it fills the room, palpable, and Marie tastes gasoline on her tongue.
He’s talking to her like she’s the last person he’s ever going to see, like she’s a witness to something great and terrible.
“I’m gonna live to see that bastard behind bars, and then they can put a fucking needle in my arm for all I care.”
They both know he’s lying. A tear slips down Marie’s cheek, as he sets his shoulders, bouncing slightly on the balls of his feet before he opens the door and walks inside.
The door slamming blows Marie’s hair onto her face.
And Marie does get it, she’s not naive enough to think that you catch people like Walter by rising above his behaviour.
“Sometimes you’ve got to get down in the dirt with the Devils,” Hank once said.
And yet, it isn’t what she expects from Hank - to be the next in line to put a boot on Jesse’s neck. Not her Hank.
Lately, Marie’s had this feeling, like her whole family have been attending a fancy dress party, and they’re only now taking off their costumes. And Marie accidentally attended just as herself.
She had anxious dreams about that as a little girl, as though that was the worst thing that could happen to her.
Her chest trembles, as though she’s about to start crying properly, but she doesn’t. She thinks she might die if she feels like this forever.
She looks at the ceiling, as though God exists and is staring down from her purple bedroom.
“How much longer is this going to last? How much longer?” she whispers aloud, like a child asking her mother when they can leave the party.
There is no answer.
She sits there on her kitchen floor for a long time.
And then she gets up, and starts washing dishes. The washing-up liquid stings as it pours into the cuts on her fingers from biting her nails.
It turns out, that inside “silly”, “ditsy”, “highly-strung”, “neurotic” Marie, there’s a core of steel faith in the fact that Hank will catch Walter.
She thinks of Jesse’s bright blue eyes, wide, scared despite his tough-guy stance. But only for a second. He’s not the only one cut open by Walter.
There will be justice, no matter who it hurts.