A Better Man by McLaren Leah

Author:McLaren, Leah [McLaren, Leah]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781443441582
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2015-07-07T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

Ambergris Caye, Belize

The first day on the beach, Nick reads a magazine, drinks several sweet rum drinks and feels the tourniquet of muscle between his shoulder blades begin to loosen incrementally. “I haven’t been this relaxed in years!” he tells Maya over his second plate of conch tacos, before falling back on the sand. On the second day, he reads some more, drinks some more, feels his body relax some more and his mind begin to wander. Not in a meditative way, but in a restless, muttering search. A loyal dog seeking its master or a junkie in need of a fix. By the third day, the thought of spending another minute in that lounge chair listening to the surf makes him want to pull at his face and howl at the blazing sun.

It’s not that everything hasn’t been perfect—the sun, the surf and the saltwater breeze are all around them in abundance. The hotel, a twenty-room eco-resort he’d found on a travel website recommended by his assistant, is just as advertised: secluded without being remote, luxurious without being ostentatious, simple without being austere. The beach is warm and white and devoid of hawkers selling cheap shell necklaces Maya would never wear. The room is airy and stylishly appointed in a crisp, hippy-chic fashion—bowls of bleached shells and a four-poster bed with billowing white linens. At night Nick lies awake in it thinking how great he feels, how fantastically chilled out he is. How if he weren’t here, he’d be up all night on some awful set, sitting behind the first camera and stuffing his face with cheap sushi, drinking can after can of Diet Coke, wishing the script girl would just shut the fuck up so he could concentrate. Joking around with Mitch, his long-time first AD, and trying to convince a fretful Larry that a little bit of triple overtime never killed anyone—certainly not the client. Yes, thank God he isn’t working. Better to be here, thousands of miles away, paying $800 a night to lie around and imagine what’s happening on set.

Nick’s thoughts of work carry over from night to morning as they eat their holiday breakfast of papaya, passion fruit and mango with lashings of yogurt washed down with black espresso. For the first time since they arrived, Maya seems just a tiny bit uneasy. She keeps glancing at him over her coffee cup and scratching at the hair at the nape of her neck.

Ever since she got the news about her new job, she’d been in an unassailable good mood. Chatty, easy, devoid of gloom. There were still signs of the old Maya, though. In addition to the detailed menu plan and daily activity schedule for Velma, she’d created a hand-illustrated book called Mommy and Daddy Are Going on Holiday for the twins. It told the story—in coloured-pencil drawings—of how she and Nick were going to bid the kids farewell and hop on a plane that would take them to a beach filled with sunshine and palm trees.

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