Every time she thought of it, Marie would count the hours since she last saw Hank. But it had been more than a week, and there was still no sign of him. She went through the motions of getting up, getting dressed, doing her day and then going back home again. For the first few days, Ramey would phone her every day or so – and Blanca Gomez, she presumed – with an update. But by the eighth day, he stopped doing that because he didn't have anything new to report. She phoned him on the ninth day, and he said so. Nothing new to report. No idea where the bodies were. They'd found Walt's car in To'hajiilee Reservation, but on a road, so who knew where it was driven from. The tribal police had followed the tyre tracks for a while, but the dirt roads around there are riddled with so many tracks, they soon lost them.
Skyler's life descended further and further into hell. She'd thought that causing her sister the worst and most permanent pain she could possibly feel was the lowest she could ever go; it wasn't. Because then she had to go out, without access to any bank accounts and knowing she was soon going to lose her house, and try to find a job. She had to try to find a job when her face was all over the news as a money launderer. She put her maiden name on her resume, and left the car wash off it, but people knew her face. They stared at her everywhere she went.
The first week, she handed out 40 resumes, filled out twenty-one applications, and got three interviews, one on Friday and two on Monday. The first one started off alright, until the company's other employees started gathering at the window of their boss's office to look at her, at which point he cut the interview short and said he'd call her. He didn't. For the second interview, the interviewer looked unsure and uncomfortable but went through the motions of asking Skyler a few questions anyway, just to be polite. It didn't go anywhere. For the third, the secretary took one look at her and said, "No way."
She turned to look at her boss, saying, "Do you know who this is?"
"Yeah," he replied. "No way."
"I'm a good worker," said Skyler. "I know the tax code off by heart, I can -"
They laughed. "Seriously?" said the boss. "You think I'm gonna let a felon anywhere near my accounts?"
Skyler changed the sort of jobs she was applying for, setting her sights lower and lower, and still got nowhere. Then there was the panic that shot through her every time she thought about losing the house, and she went to see a handful of rental properties, but she couldn't apply for any until she got a job. Without a job, she couldn't pay rent. Simple as that.
If Skyler wasn't a calculating woman who planned for all eventualities, her children would have starved in that first month. The DEA had frozen every bank account she had. When she pleaded with them that she had children to feed, they told her to use a credit card. "And spend money I don't have when my income is zero? You want me to commit my children to a life of debt?"
"You should've thought of that before you decided to run the books of a meth empire and get two federal agents killed. Crime doesn't pay, Mrs White. That's the whole point."
Because Skyler was a calculating woman who planned for all eventualities, she had her stash of illicit cash. It was ironic that she had used that to buy a car, because this car could therefore be seized just like the last one, but without a car she couldn't look for work, and that was priority number one.
She also used the dirty money, in conjunction with a credit card, in a carefully rationed manner, to pay for bills and groceries, and nobody appreciated more than Skyler the irony of that, as it meant she had to keep using the dirty money to pay for things for her family after she had been charged with money laundering and profiting from a felony.
But then, nobody else could appreciate it, because she didn't tell them.
She got very little sleep, and most nights she spent several hours crying. The only thing that stopped her curling into a ball and refusing to get out of bed in the morning was the rising panic that if she didn't find a job soon, she would lose her kids. Because they could stay with Marie, that would be no problem. But she didn't think that she could. And she was going to prison anyway, at which point she might never get them back.
She paid for cigarettes using the dirty money. They were dirty anyway. She hated herself for smoking them. But they were the only thing that helped her cope.
She was smoking her third cigarette of the evening when Marie arrived. Putting it out, Skyler answered the door.
"Did I just see you blowing smoke out the front window?" Marie's face crinkled with distaste. "Oh god, it stinks in here, what are you doing? Where are the kids?"
"Flynn's at Lewis's. Holly's over there."
Marie looked and saw Holly's crib by the fireplace.
"WHAT? She's in the same room with you smoking?"
"That's why I'm blowing it out the window."
"No! Skyler, no, what are you doing? Why can't you put her in the bedroom?"
Skyler shook her head. "She's safer here."
"In the smoke pit from hell? I don't think so!"
"She's safer here. Unless you wanna take her. I would be powerless to stop you if you did."
"Sky, not too long ago you were asking me to take her."
"I know."
Marie was living in hell. Every minute, every hour, she missed him. She couldn't smile, she couldn't laugh. She couldn't think of a future of anything other than loneliness and misery. And then there was the anxiety of not knowing, not knowing where he was, not knowing what happened, not knowing if he died quickly or slowly, in pain and afraid.
But Skyler seemed worse. She spoke in a monotone these days, barely making eye contact. The items in her once proud home were gradually disappearing as she sold them piecemeal on eBay. What was left was in a mess of boxes. At least that meant she was doing things, Marie thought.
She was still angry with her sister, bitterly angry, and more than that, bitterly hurt. But every time she went over there to give her a piece of her mind, she just ended up feeling sorry for her.
Skyler picked up her half-smoked cigarette from the ashtray and lit it again.
"Alright, enough!" yelled Marie, grabbing it from her and pushing it back into the ashtray. "Your husband has lung cancer, in case you've forgotten."
Skyler picked up her glass of wine instead. She looked Marie in the eyes for the first time. "Ironic, right? Many things about this situation are bitterly, bitterly ironic."
"Yeah, you're bitterly ironic, I don't understand you! You were so proactive in helping Walt break the law and in refusing to help Hank and making that god damn blackmail video, you were standing tall through all of that, doing it all, and, what, now you're finally rid of the guy you're just gonna curl up in a ball? A smoke ball."
"I'd do that if I could, yeah. But I can't because I have to spend all day every day looking for a job, getting laughed out of interview after interview, which is actually really soul destroying. But my soul is already destroyed anyway, so no big deal." She took a long gulp of the wine.
"Oh, come on, don't write yourself off."
"Why are you here?"
"Oh, you wanna kick me out?"
"No I don't." Skyler shook her head strongly. "But how can you even look at me? After what I've done?"
Marie shrugged. "I don't have anyone else."
Skyler's eyes moistened. There was the elephant in the room.
"So can I assume from your reaction when I brought it up the other day that the fugue state was a fake?"
Skyler leaned back on the sofa, her posture sliding down it as if it was eating her. "Yeah," she said quietly.
"Bastard." Marie sat down at the other end of the sofa. "What was he really doing?"
"I don't know. That's my problem, isn't it, I never want know these things. Not that he'd have told me if I'd asked."
"He was found buck naked in a supermarket."
"Yup."
"You're saying he did that...deliberately? "
Skyler sighed. "I assume so."
"You mean you don't even know?"
"I know shit all, Marie. You ask the DEA."
"Well where was he, what was he doing that would justify that?"
"I don't think it was voluntary. There were plenty of voluntary ways he could think up to leave the house for a couple of days. Lies he wouldn't bat an eyelid about telling. This was different, he was very apologetic afterwards, and before, something had happened, he had been poised to tell me something, maybe you even tell me the truth, and then he got a call on his phone. His second phone. And he walked out. So whatever it was, he didn't do it deliberately."
"What, you think he was abducted?"
Skyler shrugged.
"You never asked him this?"
"He wouldn't have told me even if I had, so."
"So the truth is just... Why don't you want to know the truth?"
"I don't know. At first because it was too hard to admit that he made it all up. Then because I knew he wouldn't tell me even if I asked him. And...because I was too scared and too ashamed. Because Hank went there looking for him, and I think he found him." She turned her head to look Marie in the eye for the first time.
"You think he was with that Tuco guy?"
Skyler didn't respond.
"Yeah, I've been wondering that. When he was found, he was really dehydrated, wasn't he? Like he'd been in the desert."
"Marie, I'm really sorry but you can try and piece together the facts or you want, you can mull it over in your head for as long as you like, and what you end up figuring out is never good - it's never conclusive anyway, and it's always frightening, so it is so much better if you just don't think about it."
Marie frowned.
"I don't actually know anything about it at all. I know that he took a call on his second phone and then he disappeared, and that later, after I found out what I was he was doing, I mentioned to him that I thought the fugue state was a fake and he didn't, you know...deny it. I don't know anything else. This is what I have to keep saying to the DEA and the APD. I don't actually know anything. And that's why it's better not to bother Flynn with it, because it would just hurt him for no reason, there would be no relief because I can't tell him what the truth is. I don't know what the truth is."
Filing this away into her files of disbelief and her disappointment in her sister, Marie shook her head and decided to move on. "I came because I wanna ask you about the blackmail. Because everything else… I know it must have been really hard for you to discover what Walt was doing, you said it broke your heart, and you kicked him out of the house, so obviously you weren't in favour of it, and then you said he came back against your will and he kept doing it against your will – I dunno why you wouldn't go to the police, I mean, that's what I would have done, but I do understand your argument for why you didn't, the stuff about Flynn and about, well, him, because he had a hold over you and you love him and he's very manipulative – I mean, I can't believe how manipulative that man is, he's like a puppet master. You know the reason Pinkman turned on Walt and was helping Hank? Because he found out that Walt poisoned a child in order to convince Pinkman to help him kill Gus Fring. Did you know about that?"
Skyler shook her head slowly, her expression a mixture of terror and guilt.
"I mean, I can think of several instances where Walt told me things to manipulate me into thinking other things, and even more he did to Hank – with words, you know, he's certainly a wordsmith, but to poison a child, oh my god, that is something else, the intricacy of the planning and the…the horror of the act."
"W-why…why did he?"
"To make it look like Fring did it. To make Pinkman think that Fring did it, and therefore turn Pinkman against Fring. Why would Fring poison a chi-why would anybody poison a child, it's just, it defies comprehension, but Walt, because he's the puppet master, he knew that was the thing that would push all the buttons for Pinkman, because he cared about this kid, apparently, it was his girlfriend's son or something."
"The ch…" Skyler swallowed. "The child…did…did he die?"
"No, but he was in ICU for ages, everybody thought he was going to die. So Pinkman said."
What Skyler had been hearing from the news reports and from the DEA had been getting worse and worse. What she got from the DEA made little sense, it was just horrifying snippets the agents used to try and shock information out of her during interviews, but the news was beginning to paint a clearer picture now of the sheer scale of destruction her husband had wrought. She had had no idea, no conception that anyone could be capable of doing such things, let alone someone she loved. The more she learned, the more horrified she became, and the more wracked with guilt and self-blame, but also with the gut-wrenching feeling that all the while she was pulling the wool over her family's eyes, she was the one was really being had. She was the one who was betrayed, lied to, led and manipulated more than anybody else.
She turned away from her sister, hunching forward, wishing she could stop breathing and fall straight down to hell.
"There's a lot that you didn't know, huh?"
Skyler made a strangled grunt.
"Yeah. Would you have helped him if you'd known?"
The noise was soft, high pitched, and bookended with tortured silences. But it was firm. "No."
"And when…Hank found out…He said he thought he'd come on too strong when he met you in the diner, he said that you were scared and in shock and you'd been under Walt's control for so long, so he defended you and your not helping him. He said he took his voice recorder out straight away, and I said, 'Oh Jesus, Hank, did you really? Way to put her on the spot!' We were trying to understand you, we really were.
"I was horrified to realise that I hadn't spotted the problem with you, I mean, when I knew, when I was really worried about you because you just weren't right, and I was trying to help, I wanted to make things better for you, and I just went and talked to Walt about it! I left it up to him! I hated myself for doing that, for letting him be in charge of your welfare, and when I found out the truth and found out that you were still just here, just…still with him, it made me sick to think that he was still doing it to you, all of it, everything that had messed you up, and that you seemed to not…be able to escape. I mean, we would have helped you escape, but you wouldn't listen to us. And then when we went to Garduno's, I thought…I dunno what I thought would happen. But it wasn't that."
Skyler nodded.
"I have been going through everything in my head over and over, I mean including from before we knew, everything from way back, and piecing your actions then with what you've told me now…and with Walt and what else was happening… I'm trying really hard to understand you, and I can get through a lot of it now, I can see how it happened – not why, but how - but that bit is where I trip up every time. I can't get past it, it stops me every time. I can see why Walt would do it, to cover his ass, because he has no conscience and just thinks it's fine to do things like that – in fact, for him, that was probably like kindness for him, because instead of killing Hank right away he blackmailed him first, so it was like, 'Oh, I don't really wanna kill you so I'll just blackmail you – oh, you haven't backed off, OK, now I'll kill you.'"
Marie's tone had switched from understanding to biting. Skyler slid further down the sofa, emitting a quiet sob.
"With you, though, that's the part where I trip myself up every time. I can…not understand, but figure out the rest of it….but not that. It was cold and callous and I'm still terrified that someone is going to find some copy of that DVD, and that they…" she swallowed, "They might believe it, because Hank can't defend himself, and he was out there without back-up, without having called it in, without having told anyone other than Steve, who also can't defend him because-"
"No, that won't happen." Skyler was shaking her head vehemently. "I destroyed all the copies."
"What about the camera? And the computer, you must have burned the DVD on a computer!"
"I destroyed the SD card and I wiped the hard drive of my laptop, and I ripped the back of it open and took the hard drive out and destroyed it."
"Your laptop."
"The DEA have it now, they took it when they did the search warrant, but they can't get anything off it because the hard drive is brand new. And they think I did that because the accounts of the car wash were on there. So they're not gonna question it."
"It was on your laptop." For Marie, this was another knife in her back. Another reason she might never trust her sister again. "How did you destroy it?"
"I bashed the hard drive and the SD card with a rock, then I burned them in the barbeque until they were a little melted blob of metal and plastic, and I put that in a public trash can across town."
Marie's eyebrows rose in surprise. "You went to that length?"
"Well, just wiping it isn't enough, just reformatting….isn't enough, and also… I did want to destroy the accounts of the car wash. I was in damage control too, remember. And there were a lot of things on that computer that would incriminate me."
"I thought you confessed to everything."
"Well this was earlier. Before it all blew up. After it blew up I wouldn't have been able to burn anything, they would have caught me, they-they would have known."
Marie frowned. "You destroyed the video before Hank was killed?"
"Well, there was the DVD. Walt wanted me to burn three DVDs – four, I think he said initially, so that he could hide them in different places or something, but I said no, we will burn two, one for us and one for them, and I kept hold of our copy the entire time and I destroyed it when you told me to."
"Oh, wonderful, Skyler. You were in charge of the whole thing."
"That was my condition. I said I would go along with it if I did the filming and I made the tape on my computer. I never intended to keep more than one copy, and I kept it, not Walt. I would've kept none if I could've gotten away with it, but that wouldn't have worked with Walt, he would have gone and done something else without me, and that wasn't the point – if I worked with him, I could rein him in. Limit the damage. Facts which have since come to light have revealed that I wasn't very good at that, but back then I still thought I was."
"So you never intended to use the video."
"Of course not."
"What about Walt?"
"Well he'd have needed my help to do it, I controlled all the copies. If he'd insisted, I would have just given him a blank DVD that looked the same. Or a blank SD card. He didn't know I destroyed the SD card and the hard drive."
Marie paused. "So it was Walt's idea?"
"Yeah."
"You didn't come up with the idea, and you only helped him so you could control how it was carried out."
"Yeah. But, same as you, I trip up on that every time I think about it. Well, that and not speaking to Hank in general. For everything else… I can't justify what I did but I can explain it, my reasons for it. But for that… Fear is the only reason I can…pinpoint. When Hank took out the voice recorder, he didn't know how involved I was… I was asking him for a lawyer and he was saying no. And I was afraid for myself. I'm ashamed of that, but I was, I was terrified. And… I was afraid for Walt and the kids, but… all I did was make it worse. I've always thought of myself as a very logical person, but that wasn't logical at all. As soon as Hank found out, it was game over. I knew what a good detective he was, so I should've known that. And if he couldn't find proof, well if he was any other cop, I probably could have just blackmailed him and left town and it might have gone away. But he was my brother-in-law. You can't cut those ties…and he…was gonna sink too, he was gonna lose his job. He was trying to do what he could to make that better. And he wanted to control the damage for me…and the kids… and you, particularly, and I love you, Marie, so I should have…thought more about that. But mostly I was really afraid that we would lose everything, the business and the money and the house, and that all of Walt's shit would have been for nothing, and then the children would have had both their parents in prison. And that's another fear where the logical action would have been to talk to Hank, to try and make a deal, to make the DEA think that I was helping… but I haven't been logical about any of this. Hank said that it was in my interests to come out ahead…. And I didn't."