Good at Being Alive(22)

Lars jogs to her side. “Let’s try this again. Maybe something slightly more normal? Talk about the waterfall, the trip as you’d package it for clients, your marriage. Let’s just avoid penises entirely.”

The camera moves behind us as we near the waterfall and Rebecca points at it. “That’s roughly how wet it makes me when I think about our divorce getting finalized. We should bring clients.”

She’s the worst. I have no idea why I’ve got this desire to laugh. Instead, I tell her to move out of the way so I can take a picture of the waterfall without her in it.



* * *



? ? ?

Our next stop involves climbing a glacier, followed by yet another drive before we take a boat out into a lagoon, surrounded by chunks of melting icebergs.

Rebecca has not slept a wink since sometime yesterday, and when she removes her sunglasses, there are circles under her eyes and yet…she’s glowing, pink-cheeked, delightful. During our downtime, she engages the crew. She grills Katrina about her childhood in Paris. She video chats with LJ’s children and gets into a long conversation with Jon about how he should propose to his girlfriend. She gets Sean to explain how he’ll organize the thousands of digital files that will result from each of these shoots.

She’s just as open and uninhibited on camera. That should worry me, although now that she’s given us a false pregnancy scare, implied she’s cheating, and discussed shocking a corpse’s penis to extract its sperm, I doubt she could get worse.

She asks the boat captain about melting patterns and how the volcano impacts the water temperature. She has what appears to be an intelligent conversation with the guide about the land sinking near the divide between tectonic plates and with the driver about the close relationship between Icelandic and Old Norse. She asks him how to say various things, though it’s mostly profanity.

It’s surprising that she’s so good at this, so capable, but…should it be? Jessie always made Bex sound a trifle slow and more than a trifle lazy, but she single-handedly convinced Emil to do this show, after all, armed with nothing but a phone, she hasn’t missed a single meeting, and she wasn’t late for the flight. She hasn’t actually been late for anything aside from our wedding, and even I’m not such a monster that I’d hold five minutes against her.

I no longer believe she’s incompetent, but I think she’s extremely good at pretending to be incompetent. And I’m starting to wonder why.

We arrive at our hotel and are given exactly thirty minutes to rinse off, change clothes, and be back downstairs to eat.

A buffet has been set up for us in the hotel restaurant—fish and potatoes and rye bread, plus a red meat I avoid because there’s a strong possibility that it’s horse. I load a plate while Caden loudly tells some pretentious story about going on a yacht with “Leonardo and the boys.” Given the way he keeps looking at Rebecca as he says it, it’s pretty clear who he’s hoping to impress.

She’s sitting by the fireplace, ignoring him as she rubs her hands over her arms trying to get warm. That she’s cold again doesn’t bode well for the hours we’re about to spend outside tracking the northern lights. That Caden keeps trying so hard to win my wife’s attention doesn’t bode well for his longevity. Even if our marriage is fake, it’s just…disrespectful.

He crosses the room and takes the seat beside her, at which point I’ve bloody well had it.

I carry my plate to where they sit and loom in front of them. “Excuse me, Caden, I need to speak to my wife.”

“You remember it’s all fake, yeah?” asks Caden quietly as he rises.

“You remember it’s not supposed to look fake to everyone else, yeah?” I snarl, letting my shoulder knock into him as I take a seat.

“Settle down, bro,” he mutters as he walks away, his indifference entirely feigned. I could snap his neck like a twig if I wanted.

Well, I already want to. If I chose to.

“That took more testosterone than I thought you possessed,” Rebecca says.

I scowl at her. “I’m not going through all this just to have that little prick blow it.” I put the plate between us. “Eat. We still have hours of filming ahead.”

She shakes her head. “I’m just trying to get warm.”

There it is again…my worry, the irritation that follows it. Except some of that irritation is actually guilt. I’m the one who insisted on our insane shooting schedule. I’m the one who said that if we absolutely had to get to Iceland before May, we’d need to do it in under two days. And now, because of me, she’s freezing cold, exhausted, not eating.

When the crew gets up to start heading to the van, I pull Lars aside. “I was wrong about the schedule. It’s too much for Rebecca. She’s going to get sick if this keeps up.”

He glances over. “She seems to be hanging in there.”

“By a thread, at best. She’s had no sleep, she’s not eating, she’s freezing cold. So however you want to space out the other shoots is fine. I’ll work around it. Let’s just make sure it’s…reasonable.”

He glances from me to her. “You’re acting like an actual husband.”

“No,” I say, pulling up my hood as we walk through the door, “I’m just trying to act like a decent human being.”