The Cowboy's Convenient Wife

by Joanna Bell

  "Your brother's a different man, too. He's a husband now, and a father. And he's had to deal with the injuries from that fire. I'm not trying to tell you what to do but I think you might find he wasn't at his best when he was in the hospital. I think the both of you might be surprised, actually. You're not boys anymore."

  Uncle Dave was right about that. Jackson and I were both well past boyhood. I wanted what he said to be true. I wanted there to be a chance to reconcile with my brother. I wanted not to have screwed up my relationship with him the way I did my relationship with Astrid, but I remembered the tone in his voice in that hospital room, the cold fury in his eyes. Jackson didn't want to have anything to do with me ever again.

  ***

  Not long after that conversation with my uncle, I bought a 5 acre parcel of land next to Jackson's on the outskirts of Sweetgrass Ridge, just north of the river. On one of my days off soon after that I drove to Billings to meet with an architect and have the blueprints for a small house drawn up. And then, one day when the house was almost finished, I gave it – and the land – to my Uncle Dave.

  He deserved it. It wasn't right that one brother ended up with everything and the other with nothing. It doubly wasn't right because Dave was a better man than Jack Devlin and I was still young enough to be bothered by the fact that sometimes bad men prevail.

  I wish it hadn't taken me so long to realize that doing things for other people and being close to other people isn't a bad thing. I wish I hadn't wasted so many years with fucked-up ideas in my head about strength and weakness and just plain old giving a shit – about myself, about other people.

  But I guess I should just be thankful I met Astrid Walker and got to know my uncle Dave when I was still green enough to change, still just about flexible enough to make a fair attempt at avoiding Jack Devlin's bitter fate.

  Losing someone you love is hard. Losing Astrid changed me. I felt her loss every day, felt her absence the way you feel a cold winter draft. But it was Astrid who showed me that life could be different. That it could be more than a never-ending quest for status and money and the 'respect' of people who secretly hate your guts. I used to spend my days lamenting the things I didn't have. And then I realized living that way is a waste. A waste of time, a waste of a life. I wasn't going to live that way. I didn't have a time machine, I couldn't go back and undo the things I did. But I did have the future in front of me, and a newfound determination not to lose the rest of my years to meaningless bullshit.

  "You didn't have to do this," my uncle said, when it finally sank in that I really was giving him the land and the house. "You didn't – Cillian, man, you really didn't have to do this."

  "I know," I replied simply. "But I wanted to."

  Chapter 35: Astrid

  I moved back to the US to start a Masters course at a well known university near Boston. My parents bought me a lovely little apartment in an old stone triplex, with a view over a small park and an ornate wrought-iron gate leading to a little communal courtyard in the back.

  And as it happened, Ava was moving in with her boyfriend the same week I was home visiting my parents before flying to Boston. When she called to ask my permission to throw the photos – the photos of Cillian with all those other women – in the trash, I didn't give it. I told myself I needed them for safekeeping. Just in case.

  Just in case what? I didn't know. Ava knew. She didn't want to give them to me but I insisted. And then, when I got to Boston, I put the envelope in a desk drawer and tried to forget about it.

  It worked for a few weeks. I met my Master's supervisor and shopped for groceries and took walks around my neighborhood, familiarizing myself with the layout. I hardly thought about the photographs of my ex-husband in various states of lustful abandon with a random assortment of women at all.

  And then, after the initial excitement of living in a new city gave way to the enormous amounts of studying and reading I had to do, and the first little twinges of loneliness started to creep in, I found myself thinking about what was in my desk drawer a little more often.

  I spent a whole weekend studiously not even looking in the direction of the desk as I ploughed my way through case studies of vaccine rollouts and nutritional interventions in developing countries. The photos remained where they were, sitting quietly in the drawer like an unexploded bomb or a big red button with a flashing "DO NOT PRESS" sign over it.

  What I told myself, one rainy evening when my reading was done and Ava was too busy to talk and the memories of my time in Sweetgrass Ridge were particularly vivid, was that I would look at them once – just once, and not for long – and then throw them out. That was my solution. Get rid of them. But, before I got rid of them: look at them.

  Just once.

  I managed 33 minutes of waiting after I told myself I could peek. And then, with my heart pounding and my palms already sweating, I crept over to my desk like a thief.

  The first photo I remembered – the brunette in the parking lot. Same with the second one, the blonde outside the elevators. A knot formed in my stomach at the sight of Cillian, of his golden hair and his broad shoulders and the outside of his condo building. As hard as I tried to forget – and I did try hard – it never did work. Not on any kind of solid, permanent basis. In Peru I would spend a few days wrapped up in an e-mail exchange with a donor or lose myself in some menial task – chopping vegetables for soup or ferrying supplies from the bush plane's latest delivery – but any forgetting of Cillian Devlin that occurred was always temporary at best.

  I flipped the second photo over and placed it face down on the table before picking up the next one, knowing it would be new. I let my eyes flicker over it, taking a breath and letting it out slowly before looking closer.

  It was Cillian again. Cillian and some girl – not the same girl as in either of the other images. They were making out in the same parking lot again.

  It's fine. This is fine. Just look once and then throw them away.

  I moved on to the fourth. Surprise surprise, my ex-husband and another random, wrapped around each other, kissing passionately. A sweat broke out on my forehead. I ignored it and kept going, moving faster and faster, dragging my eyes over each new image and then flipping it over and placing it on the pile.

  Maybe it wasn't just morbid curiosity or that inconveniently human compulsion to stare at a car crash. Boston was a new city but it was also a symbol of a new life. I left it a bit late I know but it did finally feel like I was becoming an adult at the ripe old age of 24. Maybe looking at those photos really was an emotional exorcism of sorts, a final symbolic goodbye to the first man I ever loved?

  The only problem with that theory is that it didn't make sense. If I intended my examination of the photos as a test, I failed it. I wasn't no longer the naive, sheltered girl I once was – but I wasn't yet the wise adult I so wanted to be, either. Actual wise adults know that deliberately reminding yourself of pain, dwelling on it, running your fingers repeatedly over its contours, is a bad idea. You don't ever get over the really bad stuff, I don't think. You just forget it. And your job is to aid that forgetting. To do, in short, the exact opposite of what I did that afternoon.

  When all the photos had been viewed and I was still desperately telling myself it was all fine and tomorrow I would wake up cleansed of all thoughts and memories of Cillian Devlin, I walked out onto the balcony that overlooked the park across the street. An elderly woman was leading an equally elderly Jack Russell down one of the paths. A mother was relaxing on a bench as her baby slept in a stroller next to her. It was late afternoon, just before the park got busy with kids home from school and commuters walking their dogs before dinner.

  There's something wrong with those photos.

  I dismissed the thought so swiftly it didn't even consciously register. Was I hungry? No, but ordering food would be a thing to do. A thing that wasn't thinking about Cillian and the fact that seeing those new images of him with other women felt just as bad as it did the first time.
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  How was that even possible? My poor, desperate brain scrambled for excuses and justifications. I was imagining it. I must have been. It didn't actually feel as bad as the first time, I just thought it did. I was confused. I was vulnerable in my new city, still unsure of myself, projecting new insecurities onto old hurts. I just needed a nap. I needed a long bath. I needed to eat something. I picked up my phone and began to scroll, my finger trembling slightly above the screen, through restaurants on a delivery app.

  There's something wrong with those photos.

  I had to pick a category. Did I want burgers? Italian food? Sandwiches? Pizza? Dessert? I jabbed my finger at the 'Dessert' option and began swiftly scrolling through the offerings. Donuts. Ice-cream. Cake. Cookies. Pie. Greek donuts. Gluten-free donuts. Gulab jamun. Baklava.

  There. is. something. wrong. with. those. photos.

  "Damnit!" I yelled, finally throwing my phone down and going back to the stack of photographs.

  "As if once wasn't enough!" I whispered into the empty apartment as I picked the first one up. "Why are you doing this to yourself?!"

  So I looked again. At every single one. At every single girl. They were all pretty, you know. Not a regular among them. They were to a woman glossy-haired, pert-breasted and smiling. I couldn't blame them for the smiling, I supposed. Who wouldn't, in a clinch with Cillian Devlin? What girl wouldn't look a little giddy imagining what was in store for her when he got her home – or in some cases, just up against the side of his truck?

  And after I looked at all the girls, after examining each one in order to identify the specific ways in which she was obviously prettier, sexier, more charming and just plain better than me? After them, I looked at Cillian. It was more difficult to look at him at first.

  What's that?

  Something caught my eye in one photo. The parking lot where most of them had been taken was poorly-lit. Not so poorly-lit that I couldn't tell who I was looking at, but not clear enough to make out a lot of fine detail.

  But in that one image, Cillian had a beard. He was turned slightly away from the camera but I swear it was a beard. I leaned in closer, squinting. No, it couldn't be. A beard? For how long, exactly, did Ava continue to receive those brown envelopes on my behalf? Weeks, I think she said at the time.

  How long does it take to grow a full beard?

  I didn't have any idea how long but my curiosity was piqued. I flipped through a few more photos and suddenly alighted on another one where Cillian looked bearded. And then I started looking for other details – details not of my ex-husband or his lady-friends but of the environment. In one, something in the bottom right corner caught my eye. Just a tiny detail, easily missed. I looked closer. Was that snow? Was that a little pile of plowed snow the photographer hadn't quite managed to keep out of the shot? How could it be snow? Winter was well and truly over when I flew out of Sweetgrass Ridge that first time.

  So if winter was over and the photos were taken after I left – how could there be snow?

  What the... fuck?

  I soon, now that I was looking, found another strange detail. There was a small tree planted on the border of the parking lot. In most of the photos it seemed to have been almost deliberately cropped out but in two there was a single branch visible – again, a detail so small almost no one would notice it. In the first image the leaves on the tree looked supple and spring-like. In another I swear the branch was bare except for a few dried, autumnal leaves still clinging to it.

  Eventually, I put the images down again and sat on the sofa staring into space, trying to make everything make sense.

  Cillian cheated on me. Sure, an argument can be made that the marriage wasn't 'real' in the first place, that it was more of a lark or a self-dare or whatever. But we were married. And he did sleep with other women. And it did hurt like hell.

  But if he cheated on you with those women in the spring and summer, why is there snow in that one photo? And what about the leaves? And the beard?

  I actually Googled the weather in Sweetgrass Ridge from that time, just to check if there had been some freakishly late snowfall.

  There had not.

  So, again: if the photos were taken after I left and what I was pretty sure was snow was visible in one of them – what was the explanation?

  The first explanation, as I saw it, was that it wasn't snow. That it was some artifact of the film itself, a mistake in processing.

  Before I got up from the table and wandered almost in a daze back out to the balcony, I took another look at that image in particular. It really looked like snow.

  My heart raced as I looked out over the park once more, now filled with the office workers and the kids and the dogs I had anticipated earlier. I could hear conversation floating up through the branches of the trees, the shouts and laughter and mild scolding of misbehaving pets.

  Why was my heart racing? Well, because there was more than one possible explanation for the 'snow' in the one photo. And the strange multiple-season state of the tree branch in the two others. And Cillian's facial hair.

  Artifacts, yes. Any one of those details could have been an artifact. But all of them?

  A gentle breeze lifted my hair off my shoulders and I swallowed, hard. Because one of those other possible explanations was that some of those photos didn't look like they'd been taken in the spring because they... hadn't been.

  "Oh my God," I whispered into the early evening air, as a chasm of doubt opened in my heart. "Oh my God."

  Chapter 36: Cillian

  My life was in flux that summer. I no longer spent any time at the ranch, which meant I didn't see any of my family anymore. That was by design. I didn't have anything to say to Jack Devlin and he didn't have anything to say to me – including the apology I knew neither I nor any of my brothers were ever going to get.

  I didn't see my brothers much, either. Sometimes I'd spot one of them in town or stopped at the opposite light or in the Super Mart, but we never did anything more than nod politely before moving on. You grow up with siblings and you just assume they'll always be in your life. You assume that once you become adults you'll collectively put childish arguments and petty rivalries aside, but I was starting to think it was the exact opposite. I was starting to think that without the mandatory interactions that are just part of living together, all the centrifugal forces of adult life come into play and a person has to make an actual effort to stay close to even their own family.

  And that leaves out the part where we Devlin brothers never were particularly close, even when we all still lived at home. Maybe – probably – it would have been different if we didn't lose our mother but we did, and Jack always seemed more interested in fostering our sibling rivalries rather than dealing with them. It certainly made it easier for him to pit brother against brother when the time came.

  I wondered sometimes if it was worth it. I wondered if losing any possibility of a close-knit family – and all of the benefits that come with it – was worth it to my dad. And of course the answer was probably that he didn't even think about it. He reminded me of an animal sometimes, always concerned with what was right there in front of his face – and not at all concerned with anything that wasn't.

  I didn't want to end up like him, convinced the whole world was against him even as he lived a life many would have killed for. I didn't want to end up bitter and twisted. I wanted to end up like my Uncle Dave, who turned out to have more wisdom in his pinkie finger than his older brother has in his whole body. My uncle knows the only answer to life's difficulties is doing your best. That's it, right there. The entire solution. You do your best, and you do it on the understanding that the universe doesn't actually owe you a damn thing. You do it on the expectation not that the world will reward you – indeed, you should expect that it won't – you just do it so, at the end of another day, you can go to bed with your self-respect intact.

  He never said any of that outright. I just picked it up from observing the way he lived his life. And
if he could do it, a man who had been shunned by almost his entire family – for nothing, as far as I could tell – a man who lost his wife in one of the cruelest ways imaginable – then why the fuck couldn't I do it?

  I could, obviously. It's just the difference between knowing you can do something and actually doing it.

  That's why I tried again with Jackson. I don't know what I expected that first time in the hospital. He was badly injured – and what I did to him isn't the kind of thing most people could just let go of after a single apology. And I tried again because he's my brother and because knowing – and then losing – Astrid Walker really threw what is and is not important into stark relief.

  People are important. Compared to people, nothing else really matters. Sometimes I catch myself thinking thoughts like that and can't believe it's even me.

  I found my big brother outside the hardware store one day after spotting his truck in the parking lot and just deciding to take the opportunity as presented by the universe.

  "Hey. Hey – Jackson."

  He was carrying a few 2x4s over his left shoulder. When he heard his name he glanced up, saw it was me, and immediately looked away again.

  "I'm pretty busy," he said, heaving the lumber in the bed of his truck.

  He looked good. Back to his old self. There were burn scars visible on one forearm but he moved the same way he always did, with the graceful confidence of a man who knows he deserves his place at the table.

  "Yeah," I said, approaching slowly. "I, uh – I can see that. It won't take long. I just thought I'd give it one more shot. Thought I'd try to –"

  My brother suddenly looked up at me, his expression panicked. "You didn't go to the house, did you? You didn't –"

  That part I know I deserved. I know seeing the look of real fear in Jackson's eyes – at the thought of me being anywhere near his wife or kid – was so much less than what I was owed for what I did. But it still hurt.

  "No, man. Don't worry, I didn't go to your house. I don't want your wife to put a hay fork through my chest."