Esteban is, to say the least, troubled by Cesar's revelation of Schlatter's last words -- that Nancy was to blame for the bust and was the DEA informant about the tunnel -- and fights against it most illogically. Cesar points out that nobody said her name in front of the agent, but Esteban's not hearing it; he says essentially that he won't condemn a person to death based on the dying words of a skinless man. Cesar is grossed out by Esteban's loss of focus, and he's not alone in that, but neither of them can say it. This is an interrogation without words.
Meanwhile, Nancy sits in Till's office dutifully -- and hilariously -- giving disingenuous canned answers to canned questions about the tunnel and the bust, while ignorant Dean grandstands and pretends to be her lawyer in this pretend interrogation. Till's snarl is both real and fake at the same time, because he has no time for Dean. Another agent appears, whispering urgently in Till's ear, and he leaves the room.
Silas is in bed with Lisa, laughing about how she's still a lawbreaking pedophile until 10:47, when he turns into a man. Lisa's ex arrives, bursting into the room with Rad in tow; Silas jumps across the room in a single bound, desperately trying to hide his very distracting nudity. Lisa sends Rad out of the room, and her ex calls Silas "Twinkie," taking a picture of his naked ass and the condom wrapper on the bed, laughing over the family court leverage she's just handed him. He says that, though she got the Cheese Shoppe and the house, she's not going to take his kid. She responds that he shouldn't have left town, but his answer -- that he'll be damned if he lets her win while also "banging *NSYNC" -- is eloquent in and of itself. Of course, as in every custody battle in history, the football in play, Rad, sits out in the hallway feeling awful. Silas bumps into him and must admit that he's leaving, probably for good. Rad is sad for a multitude of reasons, none of which are his fault.
This show has never been so much about parenting, which is why this season has to be about parenting: maternity stores, MILFs, surprise pregnancies, forgotten children and reintroduced progeny, orphans, dead mothers, deadbeat fathers, blurred incest lines, the great Wonderland birth canal; the smuggling of girls. While the show's mandate leads directly to shadow economies -- if women are denied a place in the white man's economy, they have to jump to a parallel train track, whether it's drug dealing or sweat shops -- it's also true that motherhood exists in the same space: something that only women have to deal with, that interrogates and interrupts and radicalizes the engagement with the shadow economy at the same time it's making it a necessity. If you're working to pay for your kids, why are your kids paying the price?
Till returns to his office a different man, blinking back vomit. He orders Dean out of the room, threatening to throw him through the window. Nancy's comforting mutters turn to shocked silence when he tosses Dean bodily out into the bullpen; she can feel the shift in the wind. Who is this new person? How can she work him? "My partner is dead," he says; his face is a skull with candles for eyes. Her jaw drops and he continues: they found Schlatter's body hanging on the border fence, without a fucking face. She's most shocked by that, the brutality of it, the implications about Esteban and Cesar. How Schlatter got what she wants most, facelessness. And the only cost is her conscience.
Till leans on the back of his chair, staring at her, demanding again and again to know who owns the tunnel, Guillermo's boss, the "fucking animal" that did this. She swears she was firmly entrenched on "this side" of the tunnel, and doesn't know; Guillermo is hustled past in a prisoner's jumpsuit, face newly bloodied, nearly unrecognizable. Till's knuckles are covered in his blood. Till explains that he's going after this man, and he's going to kill him. After, of course, he kills everyone the man loves -- Nancy gulps -- and he's doing this on his own, off the clock. "And if I find out you made me go the long way, I'm going to kill you too." Nancy stares deep into those mad eyes and he answers her unspoken interrogation with a new twist on an earlier phrase: "He was my partner." Nancy's eyes close softly, and she breathes, and she gets it. She just traded his lover for hers, and now everybody's going to die.
Celia has found her way to Mexico in a hilarious hat; she speaks Racist Spanglish at a woman for awhile -- interrupting herself to mention to nobody, "That chicken just sneezed on me" -- and the woman gives her a bunch of carrots. Cut to Celia riding like a queen in a donkey-drawn cart, driver asking if she's Kathleen Turner-slash-Joan Wilder, and she admits that she is Kathleen Turner, but not to tell anybody because she's researching a role. (Which is awesome for many reasons. One: Moonlight & Valentino. Two: Elizabeth Perkins is Kevin Bacon. Three: Kathleen Turner has become a dangerous psychopath, while Elizabeth Perkins only plays one on TV.) On the famous actress tip, the donkey driver mentions that the donkey currently dragging them toward Celia's daughter Quinn was once an actor himself. Sadly, he was replaced when his cojones became muy droopy. Barf me out. Celia drawls, "Ah. Time is cruel..." and then spots Quinn, looking lovely and refreshed, sitting at a picnic table, smiling shyly as they drive up.
Andy's first main point in visiting Doug is to make the point that he is horrified that Doug called and got the Mermex deported. Doug says it was no more necessary than Andy screwing her, which does not make sense to Andy: "Yeah, but she's hot." Doug gets to do a funny little speech: "She wouldn't fuck me, but she fucked you? Well, fuck her. And fuck you!" Andy ignores this and points out that, even for Doug, bringing in INS was awful. (I thought it was completely typical, and in fact fell into that narrow marginal area of things Doug has ever done that I find awesome; c.f. the entire war with Celia and the Majestic Agrestic Community Police, and his relationship with Nancy for the first couple seasons.)
Doug turns it around in a very telling way -- telling both about Doug and about the way the people in this world work -- by responding that Andy broke a code by sleeping with "a friend's girl." So you did something terrible -- but that's okay, because somebody unrelated did an unrelated terrible thing. That's so Weeds. Andy points out that Doug has no room to talk, having boned Celia who is his friend's girl, technically, so Doug is the original codebreaker. And to Doug's credit, that's enough to shut him up. Andy cuts off Doug's Mermex whining by noting that he wasn't even really in love with her, but with a sad saggy-assed midlife cliché fantasy, and in fact he's still in love with his lesbian wife, so Doug totally flips the script on him; paints a portrait of him from the outside, noting the angle of the light and the trick of a smile that the subject of a portrait would never have the courage to see: "You're in love with Nancy."
Andy responds with a bewildering word salad, deaf to Doug's pointing out the elephant in the show, which is that nobody would put up with Nancy's bullshit for five seconds if she weren't Mary Louise Parker and everybody weren't in love with her. Andy weakly protests that he puts up with her shit because of the kids, and Judah, and Doug presses him. "I don't love Nancy okay shut up," he says, back on the playground, and then answers a call from Silas, who is going to need a new place to store his headcheese now that he's become Exhibit A in a nasty divorce. Doug begs him to stick around and smoke out, but he can't: "Shit's blowin' up!" Doug whines about how his shit used to blow up but now it just sits there. Andy agrees that this is tough shit, and the scene finally, finally ends with one more mumbled "shit" from Doug, toking away.
Shane's playing piano when Andy and Silas come in bearing boxes of headcheese sandwiches; Andy says they'll store them in the Botwin freezer and take them to Doug's later, whenever he decides to pick up the phone. Shane wishes his brother a happy birthday, shaming Andy, who has forgotten. Eighteen? Silas says it's not a big deal, and when Andy pushes him about it, he barks at Shane to stop playing the fucking piano. Shane finishes up with a resentful flourish just as Nancy's entering. I cannot believe -- I mean literally cannot believe -- how much I've come to love Silas Botwin. The boy who poked a hole in a deaf girl's condom so she couldn't go to college. Happy birthday. I love how he's still stuck in that in-between place, and he really just wants a birthday cake. I love how without Judah he decided to become a man on his own, and actually seems to have managed it. I love how, in an episode all about telling our fears and heartbreaks and most of all our shame, he does it better than anybody, and without saying a word.
"Look who's not in jail," Andy jokes, and Nancy assures them there's no reason she would be, since she's just a sales girl. She kisses Silas a happy birthday and tells him -- with only a tiny smack of defeat in her voice -- to have fun with Lisa at his birthday dinner date. He tells them they've broken up, once again, and he won't be having a nner date tonight: "Happy birthday to me." Nancy's sad for him and offers to take everybody out, to an Italian place, at seven. She heads upstairs to take a bath and get the DEA spittle off her face and the smell of guilt and blood and being trapped out of her clothes; Silas follows her to the stairwell. He says that a firm answer on the "small business loan" they've been discussing would make a great birthday gift, and asks point blank if she's going to back him or not. She tells him twice that this is a bad time to talk about it, and like a disappointed but professional man, he ducks his head and thanks her for giving it some thought.
Before the bath, she calls Esteban to tell him she's been questioned and released. "And?" And, um, she had pancakes for breakfast. "What kind?" There's something off here, and she can feel it. This isn't a boyfriend and girlfriend being inane, this isn't romantic interest in breakfast, this is a blank spot where you fill in the question after you've given the answer. This is a man who keeps lions, who kills men; who cut off Schlatter's face and left him on the fence. This is a man who got who knows what information out of that face before it died. "...Blueberry," she says guardedly. "You?" His response seals it: this is not what it looks like. "Yogurt, coffee and toast." She sails his words and his moods like a tiny little boat, she knows the wind and the direction of the sun on her face; she knows the lion just showed up. "Sounds like a nice breakfast..."
"I'd like to see you," he says. It's neither a question nor a request. She swallows and says she'd like to see him, too. They're both telling the truth but it doesn't mean we're not lying, here. He clarifies that he means tonight, and he's sending the car. "Has to be tonight?" she asks tiredly, and he says it does. Her face repeats, over and over, even as she's offering to drive herself, "Dammit dammit dammit." Because she's all about the gamble and the high-stakes risk, but this means she's going to have to keep a card she was happy to hold onto not only for its trumpiness but for the fact that she's spent the season ignoring it. Which is to say, sitting in Maternity World, at the end of a birth canal shooting out children day after day, talking Clinique and customers through the ups and downs, pretending to be ignorant of everything, even your own woman's body, is a lot harder when you're not allowed caffeine. But it's Nancy Botwin: would anything less than the promise of torture and murder make her admit what's been right in front of her -- and us -- all season? The smarter you are the crazier you get to be: Nancy is the table, and she always has been.
"You will come?" Her voice is almost sharp: "I said I would." She breathes it out and smiles into the emptiness: "Te amo..." Silence, as she waits and he breathes, and he answers truthfully. "Yo, tambien." She smiles: that's better. But in the TJ, he sits with Cesar and hangs up the phone, looking at the photo Cesar just produced: Nancy Botwin and Agent Till, meeting in a lovely garden. "Perhaps they are just friends from high school," Cesar facetiously suggests, and Esteban is suddenly very sad. He drops the picture onto the table. Right into the bowl of bones and stones.
Nancy, finally, sits in the bath. "Nancy," Andy says once, and she tells him to scamper. "Nancy. Can I come in." His voice is quiet and rough, worried for her, desperate to be let in. She tells him he can't come in, but he doesn't listen; he doesn't trust her because this is what she does when it's too bad to take. "I'm coming in." She opens her eyes and stares at the wall as he enters; she's very naked. He looks at her; she doesn't care. "Could you close the door behind you?" He explains that he can see her boobies, and she doesn't even have it in her to grin. "Good for you. Close the door and siddown." He sits on the toilet, a mile away from the tub, and tells her they are nice. She stares at him. "Bigger than I thought." She thanks him from an exhausted, weak place. She wasn't kidding when she said she finally realized how much he carries them all.
He breaks the spell, staring at her like a portrait, like those Sammy Davis Jr. photos, older and more real, asking if she wants a towel, or "two washcloths," and her voice saying his name, sharp finally, finally focused, brings him back. "Sorry." He remembers why he came in there to being with, and asks if she's going to jail. She says no, but can't say more than that. He says, less in protest than as a reminder, that in fact she does have to tell him. That's what their family is, what it means. That's who El Andy is now: the person she tells. She sighs and asks with a tiredly sexy smile if he'll turn the taps back on, and add some bubbles to the water. She's so desperately sad now, at the end of things. Now that she's going to die, she's allowed to be sad.
"I used to be able to rationalize the things I did, Andy." He says it's always been one of her greatest traits, and he's not wrong. "Not any more. At some point recently, everything became right or wrong. Right or wrong." She dives down, under the water in the bathtub, completely naked. There's nude and there's unclothed, but what Nancy is right now is naked. He sits at the edge and waits quietly for her to come back up. When she does, she's gasping like an infant, hanging over the side, terrified, holding on like vertigo. "What did you do?" She rests her head on the side of the tub, and tries to explain what happened and why, which means starting at an awkward place and filling in the blanks. "There was this girl, in a blue dress. She was so young. She had this bag with a butterfly on it. She kept looking at me..."
I told you before that I have a lack of faith in conventional addiction therapies, because there are as many ways to get out of hell as there are to get in. Pretty rehab didn't work, for Celia, and ugly rehab didn't work, because she's too smart for either. What happens to Celia in the revolution is her rehab, just like this is Nancy's. But that doesn't mean the Steps are wrong, or don't make sense. They're just different ways out of hell: the same truth told twelve different ways, in a certain sequence. Admitting your powerlessness is the first step towards admitting that you're not the table.
I think the God thing throws people off because it looks like the point, because normally when God comes up the person's trying to tell you that it's the point. But the God thing is just another way of telling you that you're not the table. Addicts don't have to believe in a higher power because they need to dwell on His strength: addicts have to believe in a higher power because they've convinced themselves that they're God. Their needs are the only ones that exist, their perspective is the only rational one, everyone else is a tool to feed the bear. They are the table. And on it they spread the world, and eat it bit by bit, until there's nothing left.
Somebody like Celia is going to see Amends as a step toward making everybody like you again: that it's about getting forgiveness from somebody else. That somebody else gives you permission to be a worthless shit, and they "forgive" you, and it's all about them, it's a game you can play. To apologize until people shut up about their grudges, because if they don't say it, you don't have to think about it. An addict is going to see this as the nicest step, because it takes all your problems away. Just like drugs used to.
But the other essential truth is (as usual) the opposite truth: you are the table. You are the part of the world for which you're responsible. Amends is the scariest step of all, because it takes all this internal inventory that you've been supposedly building up, and subjects it to market testing. It asks you to reforge those links with the outside world, and let them validate whether or not you've overcome yourself. It asks them to shit all over your fake healing, if fake is what it is. It helps you to understand, as an addict, that the real world and everybody in it are your control group. You let the bear eat you and the table becomes an altar, but eventually you are measured against your fellows, and rejoin the human race. Your sanity depends on integrating yourself into the integrity of everybody else; your life depends on an infinity of tables.
Andy turns the taps for her and she lies against the side of the tub, as the truth flows out of her in one unending flash flood. She paints him a portrait of the life and all the danger and the secrets; it's a sign of respect that has been long coming, but it's more than that. It's amends, to the world, to her family, to her partner. It's confession, which accomplishes the same thing on a weekly basis for some people -- see the candles everywhere? -- and it's last rites, because she's going to die. When she finishes this story, she'll be lighter than air, and then she will die. She only has one secret left. Andy listens, and watches her. She asks him a question, and thinks, and speaks again. He turns the taps on for her, to warm up the bath again. She realizes something, suddenly, cocks her head like a bird and realizes something precious. That's the gold inside the story she's telling. That's what was sitting on top of the table, the whole time, in plain sight. He nods. She weeps for her own stupidity. For the bear, and how she misses him.
Doug brushes pretzels off a TV tray and sits to write a note. "Dear Dana. I can't believe how different Ren Mar is than Agrestic; how fast things move, down by the ocean. I saw a surfer once when I was a kid, but now they're everywhere. Beach went and got itself in a big damn hurry. Found myself a crappy stupid apartment off the boardwalk. Nothing fancy, but it does the job. I have trouble sleeping. Bed's too short. I have bad dreams, like I'm falling, or I live in Africa with the monkeys. I wake up scared." Doug arranges the placement of a chair in the center of his room; retrieves a noose from a pre-tied noose-selling store. "Sometimes it takes me a while to remember where I am. Since losing you, I've lost all sense of joy and pleasure." He looks up and tosses the rope over a pipe that runs down the middle of his room. "Only one thing left to do." Doug settles his head into the noose, and tightens it. His eyes close.
It wasn't so long ago that we were talking about David Foster Wallace. I've been thinking a lot about addiction and depression, heading into the homestretch of this season, because grief and depression and addiction and fucking up your entire life kind of go hand in hand. It's hard for me to think of Doug as a person, because he is a cartoon. But I threw up when I heard David Foster Wallace died. It was very dramatic; I was alone and I haven't talked to anybody about it, because famous people you don't know dying invokes a massive anxiety about what you're allowed to feel or not feel that makes me really uncomfortable.
David spent forty-six years building up these beautiful, shimmering walls of words, these crystalline structures of just unimaginable complexity, so that you'd get so caught in the angles of the wordplay and the beauty of his thought, and that way you'd never have to look at the stuff in the middle. And apparently, neither would he. Depression is an inability to think your way around a dead engine. Not the inability to get yourself out of the handcuffs -- or a disinclination to get yourself out of the handcuffs -- but a literal inability to remember how you've gotten out of the handcuffs every time before now. It's not addiction and it's not grief. It's a bear, but it's not one you can afford to let eat you. Suicide is disgusting. It's literally, ethically, the worst crime I can think of. But honestly, that's forty-six years he beat out of the stony ground, with his fingertips, with a bear at his back. He's been sort of my guide in these recaps, because so much of my thinking about addiction and depression comes from discussing his work. I'm angry at him for making me sad.
The camera pulls back, and back, from Doug's suicide: but it's not suicide! It's autoerotic asphyxiation. Which besides being funny -- given that everything that happens on this show is pretty much solipsistic masturbation -- is pretty much an ode to life in the midst of encroaching rotting death. The passage of time there, the journey through his amends and his telling -- and every word was true, and his desire for death is real -- to Doug's response... In the face of disaster and fear and pain and complete self-annihilation, I think the only response you should ever have is something fun and funny and revolutionary. His jacking off, his orgasm, cross paths with the last of his suicide note, which turned out to be something else entirely: "So fuck you! And your lawyers! Come get me if you want, I don't give a shit! Because I'm broke, and when you've got nothing, you've got nothing to lose! Take care, Doug." When you've got nothing, you've got nothing to lose. Of everyone, I think I admire Doug's response to this episode the most. Well played, sir.
Celia thanks "Rodrigo" for pouring her some punch, and Quinn reminds her that it's "Rudolfo." She explains that he taught Poli Sci at Casa Reforma -- which apparently was the actual name of the school and not a joke -- and is now working on his dissertation... (Hey, is that? OMG, it is! Kevin Alejandro! I'm not even exaggerating when I say he's the most criminally underused actor I can think of. I first became obsessed with him when he was on Big Love one time, and now he's been on everything good at least once. Oh, man, I hope he's around year, although it seems unlikely. He gets killed almost as often as Judah.) Anyway, he's the awesomest and I wish he would be the lead on a show again. Rudolfo tells Celia that the punch is a secret recipe, courtesy his mother, and she smiles patronizingly.
Quinn asks her mother how long she's been sober, and Celia proudly hoots, "Seventeen days!" She congratulates her, and Celia explains that's what brought her to Mexico: "I'm working my steps, making amends. I came here to say I'm sorry. Very very very sorry. Really and truly sorry. So sorry..." She asks, at Quinn's replete-with-disinterest face, if she should be more specific. Because she knows that Quinn is her greatest failure, so just squeezing the words out of her like with Isabelle is not going to be enough. She needs it to be real; she has no idea how to ask for that, or to be real in her own right. She still has no idea what she's supposed to be sorry for, because she honestly thinks that the point of the exercise is to say you're sorry so that everybody else can make you feel okay about being an asshole. To paint yourself into a portrait of forgiveness without setting brush to canvas.
"We're way past that, Mom." Quinn explains that Casa Reforma was really good for her, in retrospect. She met a man she loves -- a teacher, but he just as easily could have owned a Cheese Shoppe -- and now they just live. "Humbly, simply." She swears her life has purpose. OMG she's totally been radicalized by a Mexican political science grad student! THIS SHOW SO ROCKS! Celia starts to get woozy, from the "heat," and ignores what Quinn is laying down on her: "And I'm so glad that you came here, to see me. So that I could tell you that..."
(So that you would know that I'm happy being who I am, having survived the gauntlet of your parenthood and made myself a woman from my own recipe. That your amends not only mean nothing, but are unrequired. Thank you, for giving me the opportunity to raise myself. I think I've done a good job. Celia smiles, because it sounds so much like forgiveness.)
"...And tie you up, and lock you in a room, and keep you there until I sell your ass back into suburban slavery. You fucking bitch." Celia's last words, as her head in its amazing hat goes slamming into her plate on the table? "Fucking ... what ...?" Awesome. This is so awesome. It's like they've been reading my diary. This is the coolest thing I've ever seen on TV. "Tell Daddy Dean I want $200,000. And tell him to be quick with the cash, or we're gonna start sending him body parts." I cannot believe -- I mean literally cannot believe -- how much I've just come to love Quinn Hodes. The girl who did nothing interesting, ignored Silas on her last day in town, and then disappeared. I love how she's managed to combine the revolution of all children with actual South American danger revolution. I love how without Celia she's decided to become a woman on her own terms, and actually seems to have become even more frightening and awesome than her mother. How she's managed to become what her mother only wishes she could be.
"Revolution is a very sad affair," Rudolfo lectures, "But these tears are shed in the name of greater good." But if Quinn's become who I think she ... Oh, hell yes. That's my girl:
"Yeah? Well, fuck you and your faggy revolution. I'm taking my money and I'm movin' to Belize."
Quinn Hodes just went from the most boring character to my favorite person in the history of time. I wish we could stop here.
Twenty miles from the border, Nancy is remembering that she has no gift for her son's birthday, that he's not having dinner with either of the MILFs of his acquaintance; that she's letting him down so often and so regularly that she's actually having to invent new ways to fail him. The firstborn, like Quinn; the biggest mistake, like Quinn. She fights with the 411 woman for a good long while about getting him a gift, a something deliverable, a gift basket, and finally talks her into just telling her the first thing she finds. I've tried to do this with 411 and they are mean people when you do that, but then, I'm not Nancy Botwin. "Anything for a ... son, who thinks his mother's completely failed him?"
The three Botwin boys sit around the house, realizing there's no Italian birthday dinner tonight. They remark on how you never know where she is, prompting Shane to wish that she really would get arrested, so they'd know where she is at least -- aww -- and then he suggests that they come up with a plan. A plan, to survive without her. Because it's always so close to happening. And they don't even know where she's going. Silas points out that he's now 18 and can be Shane's legal guardian -- Andy yelps and Shane says he can "still hang out" with them -- and Silas names her sins. Unreliable, unavailable... Possibly going to prison. ("Or worse," Andy muses, then retracts immediately.) He agrees with Shane that all three of them need to man up and stop waiting for her to provide for them. Are we not men? Silas's brilliant -- and so Quinnlike! -- plan is to move to Mexico, and grow a small plot. Enough to serve the clubs and some buyers, but no hubris. "No stupid expansion, no stupid mistakes. Small. Mellow. So I don't drop dead of a heart attack from the stress of trying to maintain this bullshit lifestyle."
Andy pitches in with his coyote money, and Shane asks how he can be involved. They tell him to be a little kid and he brings up Nancy, saying that he too has nothing to say to her. Andy tells them both to stop bagging on her: "We love her. All of us. Love. Her." Silas stares at him because he's being weird, even for El Andy: "In a mom-loving way [Which, rimshot, was exactly the problem]. Not in any other way," he says into the pillow, muffled and confused and a little creepy. Silas doesn't doubt the strength or ferocity of his mother's love -- again, how did he get so awesome? -- but he knows it's not the point. The point is the facts on the ground, the cards on the table. And she's not making her stake. The end. Shane offers popsicles and Andy asks for one in a cutely childlike way -- and in the freezer, he sees the headcheese and grins wildly, because he just figured out how he can contribute to the new plan, and this time the only architecture or engineering involved is the total fucking breakdown of their family in some new awful way.
"Dear Silas. S-I-L-A-S, that's my son. Dear Silas. Happy birthday. Happy eighteenth birthday. Um... Don't write 'um.' I think you're an amazing son. I'm so proud to be your Mom. 'Be your Mom' ... sounds like bullshit. Doesn't it? Um. Dear Silas. If you never see me again, I've probably been murdered. Enjoy the dried apricots and butter cookies," she laughs to herself, and Carol at Terrifically Gift Baskets interrupts to remind Nancy that butter cookies are extra with the Sterling Celebration. "Yeah. Uh, could you stop talking? For a second? Please? Be quiet. And listen. Just listen." Carol says she's listening, and you can hear it in her voice. Amends. Confession. Somebody has to be there, to hear it, so that we remember that we are not the table. Our responsibility to Silas, to Shane, to Andy and to Celia; to Doug and to Agent Till and to Esteban; to Judah. Our responsibility to Carol at Terrifically Gift Baskets, who's listening. Five miles to the border.
"Dear Silas. Uh. Thanks for raising yourself these past eighteen years. You've done a great job." She nods quietly to herself; this is admission of guilt and confession of sins. She nods to herself, hearing the words come out. Without Andy she'd never have known, how good this feels. How terrible and wonderful it feels.
After long silence: "Ms. Botwin. Are you okay, Ms. Botwin?" Nancy shakes her head and doesn't speak to Carol. She says no, but silently. It is written on her breath; it's written on her body and the way she says yes and no to the darkness of the borderlands; how they're both applicable at once. She gasps quietly.
Remember the punishment light? Remember how close she came, to admitting what the bear looked like? It was so long ago. This is a portrait of grief, for a whole life and all the lives it touches and destroys. I am the table.
"Silas. You are loved. Me. Sign it, 'Me.'" Just 'Me'? "Yeah. Me. No, 'Mom.' 'Me, Mom. '" All these little Nancys, in their little boxes. In a bowl of stones and bones. "Please, please get that to him tonight." And the saddest line in the whole wonderful, brilliant, terrifying scene: "And add the butter cookies. You can charge me extra, okay?" Moms give sons cookies, that's what moms do. Silas needs cookies. Silas needs to know he has a mother and that she tried, and he needs to taste this going down, to remember her this way, even as he's becoming a man before her eyes: butter cookies, soft and sweet and warm, like a hug. The very last hug she'll give him, if this goes down. And then he'll be an orphan. "You take care, Ms. Botwin." Three miles to the border.
The camera pushes through kids skateboarding; one of them rides up to Shane and the goth-skanks. He's not Rad, but he might as well be. He buys a sandwich and rides away.
Esteban plays with his cufflinks and tells Nancy he doesn't want to believe it, the allegations, the betrayals. His men watch; she smiles sadly, contrite, and tells him not to. That it's as simple as that. And it is, when you're Nancy. "I thought you loved me," he says, like a boy; she looks him right in the eye and tells him the truth, the thing that shouldn't be true but is, the thing that makes all of this so goddamn complication: "I do love you."
"You have made me ... so sad." She's sad too. She offers to make him happy again, with her secret; he doesn't hear the import and tosses down the picture of her with Till. Her eyes fall; his heart's breaking. She reaches for her purse and Cesar steps forward. She looks up at Esteban, and he nods Cesar off again; the look on Esteban's face gives her a sense of triumph, and of shame: She produces a picture of her own: an ultrasound. Their son's first portrait.