The Cowboy's Convenient Wife

by Joanna Bell

  What she didn't know was that I would have signed up for almost anything. I was desperate. I had to get out of Miami. I had to get out of my own head. I had to get Cillian Devlin out of it, too.

  "I can hammer nails," I replied, inadvertently signing up to what would become the making of me.

  ***

  Three days later, as my flight descended beneath the heavy clouds that hung over Lima, my phone chimed with a notification.

  The name on the screen? Cillian.

  I looked out the window, frowning, and then back at my phone, my finger poised to call up the message. It was one of those moments, where the course of your life seems to hang in the balance. The plane was descending bumpily into Jorge Chávez International Airport. Any minute the wheels would hit the tarmac. My next flight, to Iquitos, left 45 minutes later. In Iquitos a third flight – the 'bush plane' Carmen Martinez mentioned – would take me deep into the northern jungles of Peru.

  There's no reasoning with human hearts. Not your own, not the heart of another. There's no moment when your heart pauses its lamentations to listen to your mind's patient explaining: But you can't love this person. Look who they are. Look what they did. Look how terribly they treated you. Do you understand? This is bad for you! Please, find someone better.

  No. Hearts aren't interested in any of that. Mine certainly wasn't. My heart didn't care if Cillian Devlin screwed the entire female population of Sweetgrass Ridge. It didn't care about the way he spoke to me at the airport in Billings. It didn't care about what he did to his brother. It only cared about him.

  My heart was a fool, so I ignored it. I deleted Cillian's message unread, gathered up my things, and got ready to disembark.

  Chapter 26: Astrid

  Thirty-two hours after I left Florida a bush plane carrying me and 2 large boxes of medical supplies landed on a narrow strip of mud carved out of the Amazonian jungle.

  It rained for the entire first week I spent in Peru. I don't mean it rained like people in the United States understand rain – not even people in Miami or Seattle. I mean rain like non-stop, almost solid sheets of water pouring out of the sky for days on end.

  Eventually it stopped and I was put to work. I said I wanted to be put to work. I thought I wanted to be put to work. But I didn't have any idea what real work was.

  The small team in charge of building what was to become the only mother and baby medical services center in the entire region took their materials straight from the jungle. Enormous piles of logs lay everywhere at first, shrinking steadily as the buildings – all built on stilts – took shape.

  I didn't know anything about construction. I could barely hammer a nail without injuring myself – indeed I did just that on my second day, slamming the hammer into my own thumb when my hand slipped on the wet log beneath it.

  The camp nurse took one look at my injury, bandaged up the thumb – the nail of which would eventually turn pitch black and fall off – and sent me right back to work. The next day, I found myself transferred to stilt-hammering duty. I was given a metal contraption – something like a tall, narrow metal bucket – and shown how to slip it down over the top of a pole in preparation for simply brute-force ramming it into the earth.

  I did that for weeks. I hammered poles into the ground all day every day until my head rang with the sound of metal striking wood and my palms developed two neat crescents of calluses from gripping the handles of my pole-hammering device. I hammered poles until I got quite good at it. I hammered poles until there was no difference between my days: hammering poles, and my nights: dreaming about hammering poles.

  I hammered poles until Cillian Devlin – until my whole pre-pole-hammering life – seemed to slip away like a landslide from a cliff face.

  ***

  The project director was a petite older woman with a penchant for wearing brightly colored scarves named Maria. If you asked nicely, Maria would allow you, once a week, to use the satellite link in the makeshift office to check your emails and messages. There was no internet access other than that. There was no phone service, either. There wasn't anything. There was just the mud and the pole-hammering and a small group made up mostly of Americans and Peruvians, some of whom – like me – were volunteers and some who were paid a salary by my mother's foundation.

  After a few weeks of treading carefully around the boss's daughter – who they were not at first convinced was there to do any real work – the team slowly began to accept me. That was nice. It made me feel a little less lonely to share meals with my fellow workers even if there was a language barrier with many of them, and even if we were usually too tired, at the end of another day, to do anything more than eat and go straight to bed.

  One evening, after I had been in Peru for almost 2 months and the muscles in my upper back and arms were as toned as an athlete's, I found myself called into Maria's new office. When I got there she handed me the satellite phone and told me it was my dad.

  My parents didn't want me to go to South America. They didn't understand what I was doing. They wanted me back in Miami, where if I insisted on doing something so boring as working a job at least they could be reassured that I had a security guard and a driver to make sure I didn't suffer so much as a stubbed toe.

  "I've had the papers drawn up," my dad said that night, as the jungle insects buzzed so loudly they made it difficult to hear. "They're being sent to Cillian Devlin tomorrow."

  "OK," I replied flatly.

  I knew that news was coming. I was the one who agreed to it. It was over with Cillian. I didn't want to think about it. I didn't want to face it. I didn't want to deal with it except at the end, when everything was taken care of.

  But that's not how life works once you're a grown-up. Even if your parents are rich and you can afford the best lawyers available, you still have to make the decisions yourself.

  The distance was not just between me and my soon-to-be ex-husband, either. I felt as far away from my dad during that time as I ever have. I blamed him for the letter and the photos. When he and my mother returned from their trip to the Amazon I asked him again if he was responsible and that time, without the connection dropping constantly and the wind howling in the background, I heard his denial loud and clear.

  I heard it, but I didn't believe it. My dad didn't know I was aware of his ruthless side. He didn't know I knew he blackmailed a rival all those years ago. He didn't know I knew what he was capable of.

  When he suggested he have his legal team draw up divorce papers, though, I didn't see any reason not to do it. I had to rip the band-aid off. That's what I told myself. I told myself the band-aid ripping and the sleeping in a canvas tent and the hammering stilts into the Amazonian mud was healthy and proper. I told myself it was necessary.

  Heartbreak is exhausting. But sometimes – at least for people who share my particular combination of personality traits – I wonder how much of it is the heartbreak and how much of it is the desperate lengths we go to, to distract ourselves from the heartbreak.

  Which isn't to say it didn't work. It did. At first. In a sense. Physical exertion is a distraction – a very useful one. I told my dad to go ahead and send the papers to Cillian and then I made an excuse about needing to get back to work when he tried to ask me about my life in the jungle.

  That night, I went to sleep with aching shoulders and bloodied palms from gripping the pole-hammering tool too hard.

  I didn't forget Cillian Devlin. I tried to – I tried every day. But neither he nor the time we spent together ever really left my mind – or my heart. Work made it impossible to dwell but any spare moment – including those just before sleep and just after waking – and there he was again. There were the memories of being with him, of feeling safe and protected and loved at his side. That's why I had to work so hard. That's why my hands were bloody. Because I knew if I stopped – even for a second – I knew if I took a break of any kind, it would all come flooding back. He would come flooding back. And I just couldn't have that.
>
  Did he love me? No. You don't sleep with other people when you love someone, that much I knew. But very, very briefly, in the very beginning just after we met, it felt like he did. And that feeling was enough to show me what I'd been missing. It was enough to make the pain of missing him almost unbearable. Enough to send me fleeing south to take refuge in the remote jungles of a country that was not my own.

  I thought about myself a lot in those first weeks and then months after I left America. All day sometimes, I thought about myself. When I was working, I thought about myself. How did I feel? Was I healing? Was my broken heart sewing the pieces of itself back together? When I was eating, I thought about myself. When I was lying on the thin mattress in the hut I eventually moved into when the weather got too warm for canvas tents, I thought about myself. I thought about work, too – when I was working. You can't do that kind of work without paying careful attention to where your hands are and what your body is doing. But in the background of the work and the rhythm of waking and eating and working and sleeping and then doing it all over again the next day was: myself. And in the background of the background – so far back I could mostly fool myself into thinking he wasn't there at all – was him. Cillian.

  ***

  Some things about my old life I got over very quickly. Within a couple of weeks of arriving in the jungle I was more accepting of a level of personal filth than I ever thought I would be, for example. Some days I had time to bathe in the river, some days I didn't. On the days I didn't I would fall asleep caked in actual dirt. Dirt between my toes, dirt under my fingernails, dirt in my hair. The first few times it was disgusting. But when you're as tired as I was those days, you quickly learn that the most important thing is sleep. As long as you can sleep, nothing else really matters.

  Others aspects of my old self were harder to let go of.

  It's easy to change your environment. It's especially easy if you're rich. And it's easy to get over minor trials and changes if your basic needs: food, shelter, company – are met. Inner change is slower, more difficult. Mine began with a phone call 2 days before the first phase of the new clinic was set to open.

  I was in the office when the phone rang, and I immediately stuck my head out the door, looking for Maria – looking for anyone who could speak Spanish. No one was around. The phone kept ringing. It rang for a good 2 or 3 minutes before I finally picked it up.

  "Hello?"

  A stream of panicked Spanish immediately filled my ears. I had no idea what was being said, but it sounded bad. Bad enough to send me running down the muddy path outside the office, yelling for help. When Maria was nowhere to be found another volunteer ran back to the office with me.

  A woman was dying. That's what the midwife, calling from a village over 3 hours away, told my colleague. A woman was in labor. Her husband had managed to get her to the village but none of the midwives could help. The baby was stuck.

  It took me awhile. Ten, fifteen – maybe twenty minutes. But eventually I realized that in Maria's absence – where was she? – the other volunteers and workers seemed to think I was in charge. They knew I was the founder's daughter and there was an awful moment when I found myself in the middle of a group of people all looking to me to make a decision on what to do about the woman in a village 3 hours away.

  "But there's no road," I said, as someone translated my words into Spanish. "There's no – there's no road. How can we –"

  Someone spoke quickly and my co-worker translated it back into English for my benefit.

  "He says we have to help. We have the equipment here now, and someone can call the doctor on the satellite phone."

  "I know," I replied. "I know we have the equipment. But how can we get her here? She's 3 hours away. How can we get her here?"

  It was the first time I ever found myself in a position where my efforts, my decisions, really mattered. I could feel the tension in the air, the desperation to help. But I did not understand how I was supposed to magically get the pregnant woman to our camp.

  "We have to help," came another translated sentence. "We have to help her!"

  "I know!" I yelled. "But she's not here and there's no road! What am I supposed to do if she's not here? How can we –"

  "You have to go get her. You have to bring her here."

  It took a few minutes of back and forth to realize what was being proposed. The team knew there was no road. They knew we couldn't send a vehicle to bring the woman to us. They were proposing that we hike the 3 hours to the village and physically carry the woman back to our camp, where hopefully the doctor would have arrived by the time we returned.

  It sounded completely insane. For one thing, it was going to take 6 hours. At least 6 hours. Did the woman in labor have that long? A second phone call included the sounds of her screams in the background.

  "Six hours?" I asked, when the small group that had formed around me agreed that yes, that was how long it would take to bring the woman back to camp. "Six hours?"

  As soon as my words were translated the responses came back: what else could we do?

  And in the end, I did get it through my thick skull that the answer to that question was: nothing. There was nothing else we could do. We had to go get the woman, even though I had a terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach regarding our chances of saving her or her baby.

  I am used to having options. I am used to a life where if you need something and you can't get it one way, you get it another way, or another or another. It took some effort to get my brain to accept the concept of there simply not being another way.

  "OK," I said finally, extremely worried about being appointed – without my consent or any qualifications – the responsible party. "OK. Uh – I guess we have to go get her?"

  That was all the signal anyone needed. They just needed me to say it was OK. When I did, everyone around me flew into action. Bags were packed, sturdier footwear for the hike was donned and within 10 minutes a group of 6 of us was ready to go, with 2 staying back to organize the equipment and try to get a doctor on the premises.

  I didn't want to go. It was in the office that Ariane, another volunteer who was around my age and could speak English, found me.

  "Are you coming?" She asked, touching my shoulder gently. "Come on, we're leaving."

  "No," I replied, shrugging her hand off and refusing to look her in the eye. "No, I'll stay here. I'll try to –" I swallowed – "I'll keep trying to reach the doctor."

  "No," Ariane shook her head. "You have to come. Maria isn't here so you're the boss. No one will go if you don't come."

  I almost laughed out loud from sheer terror. Who did those people think I was? Hadn't they seen me stumbling around camp for weeks, so incompetent I had to be taught how to hold a shovel the right way when it came time to dig ditches – and then still couldn't get it right?

  "But I –" I started, before Ariane grabbed my wrist and began physically dragging me out of the office.

  "We have to go now!" She yelled, pulling me towards the group waiting on the north side of camp, right where a narrow path led into the thick, dark jungle. "Astrid! Now!"

  So I went. I had to. A woman was dying and I couldn't call my mom or my dad or my lawyer or my driver or 9-1-1 to help. I couldn't call anyone. Whatever needed to be done had to be done by us alone.

  Halfway to the village I developed a blister between the first and second toes on my right foot, from the crappy plastic sandals I wore around camp and had not thought to change before we left. I tried to keep going but it eventually became so painful I had to take the shoe off and continue with one bare foot.

  When we arrived and found the woman and her husband in a midwife's wooden hut, she was barely conscious. I stood back from the rest of my party as they lifted her onto a makeshift stretcher, horrified at the sight of fresh, bright red blood on her bare thighs.

  The woman's name was Lucia and she was 23 years old – the same age as me. Her husband, Emilio, told us it was her fourth pregnancy. He walked
behind the stretcher during the return journey to camp, holding his wife's hand as she slipped in and out of consciousness.

  We were tired before we even began the hike back. Someone stumbled on the first steep, slippery hill, and Lucia almost tumbled to the ground. She moaned a long, low moan that rose and rose until it turned into a scream and I watched a few drops of her blood drip down from the bottom of the stretcher and disappear into the mud.

  It didn't become real until I saw her. It didn't sink in that she was dying until I heard her screams in person. Everyone else knew – I don't know why it took me so long. But when reality finally did hit, sometime around the start of the hike back to camp, saving Lucia and her baby's lives suddenly became the only thing that mattered. I moved from the back of the single-file group to the front because others – who had realized far sooner than me what was actually at stake – were flagging. When one of the men holding the front of the stretcher began to stumble every few feet, I took his place. When my second foot also blistered in the exact same place as the first one, I simply kicked my shoe off without a pause or a second thought and kept going.

  An hour before we arrived back, when my arms was screaming for relief from carrying the stretcher, Lucia lost consciousness completely. Her howls and wails, already weakening by the time we found her in the village, ceased entirely. Her husband began to weep. After a few minutes, so did I. I kept walking, though. Even as great, heaving sobs burst out of me, I kept putting one foot in front of the other along that endless path, convinced Lucia was going to die and all of our efforts would be for nothing.

  Besides Emilio, though, I was the only one who cried. Everyone else kept their heads down, walking in silence. They already knew that sometimes things just go wrong no matter what you do. They knew that the concept of the happy ending is mostly bullshit.