The Carnival at Bray (27 page)

Maggie returned to school the next morning. She refused her mother's offer of a ride, and left extra early to walk the mile into town, hoping that she might run into Eoin in the quiet chill of the seaside morning when the eyelids of corrugated aluminum were still pulled down over the storefronts and the Saint Brendan's boys gathered on the misty football pitch to practice their drills before school.

“You'll meet someone else,” Laura had said after the hearing, smiling at Maggie apologetically over her West Coast Cooler. “I know it doesn't feel that way, but you will.”

But to Maggie, love was like art—you went after it with a singular ferocity, like the monks on Iona, scratching away at their illuminated pages. You didn't just move on to some other thing.

She arrived to school before most of the other girls in her class were even out of bed, gathered her books, and headed toward her French classroom. The teachers began filing in, carrying umbrellas and cups of instant tea. As she sat in the hallway and waited for Ms. Lawlor to unlock the classroom door, Maggie daydreamed about where she and Eoin would move one day when high school was finally over: somewhere anonymous and huge where no one knew who they were and no one cared. Tokyo, maybe, or Rio, or Mexico City.

“Well, hello, Ms. Lynch.” Ms. Lawlor smiled blandly down at Maggie as she turned her key in the lock, balancing a file folder in one hand and a sausage roll in the other.

“Hey, Ms. Lawlor.” Maggie scrambled to her feet and slung her bag over her shoulder. “You want some help there?”

“Thanks.” Ms. Lawlor handed her the folder and her napkin-wrapped breakfast. “I trust you can ask a friend in class to catch you up on what you've missed?”

“Of course,” Maggie said. There was no point in explaining that she had no friends—that kind of personal over-sharing would only come off as cringingly American. As she followed her teacher into the empty classroom, she was struck, as she had been many times since Kevin's death, with the cruel, odd truth that when your life implodes, it shatters nothing but your own insides. Ms. Lawlor, with her hair-sprayed bun, chalky rouge, and ill-fitting wool pants, looked the same as she always did. So did the posters on the wall declaring
“Je parle le français pour dix bonnes raisons!,”
the pictures of the Champs-Élysées, the framed reproduction of Renoir's
Girl With a Watering Can.
All of this was a realization to Maggie that her life was its own tiny matter, and that the rest of the world carried on, oblivious and impervious to her aftershocks.

She sat in the back row and took out her notebook, waiting anxiously for her classmates to arrive. When the bell rang, Aíne and her new friend, Bea, were the first to walk through the door.

“Good morning, Ms. Lawlor,” their bright voices called in unison. When they saw Maggie, they stopped short. She lifted her hand in a small wave, but the girls sat on the other side of the room, as if Maggie's delinquency might infect them. Class began at 8:00, and Maggie took notes furiously, not just to catch up on her conjugations but to keep her mind off the gossip that bubbled around her.

That was how it went, from French to physics to history. Maggie kept herself busy taking notes, ignoring the stares of her classmates. In her free moments, she doodled absently in the margins of her notebook and wondered where Eoin was, what he was doing, whether he had returned to Saint Brendan's, whether was thinking of
her. The morning dragged by, and as she headed to the canteen for lunch, Maggie realized that she was about to become one of those high school clichés she'd always just managed to avoid: the pariah who eats lunch by herself. But just as she was about to sit down at an empty table next to a row of garbage cans, telling herself to keep her head up and show them how little she cared, the unthinkable happened: she was approached by a smiling Nigella Joyce.

Maggie had been a student at Saint Brigid's for six months, and in that time had never been even a remote blip on Nigella Joyce's radar. And why should she? Nigella was the most popular girl in her class. She always led the charge to town in warmer months when the hunt for boys was on, and rumor had it that she was not a virgin. This fact no longer impressed Maggie, who, after Rome, could quietly count herself among that crowd, but Nigella was reported to have slept with at least four boys, one of whom was twenty-three and a star halfback on the Kilkenny County hurling team. But because she was so stunningly beautiful—endless legs, bouncy, vivacious hair, and heavily made-up eyes that somehow conveyed both innocence and distilled sex, Nigella was exempt from the high school judgment machine. Unpopular girls who were reported to be promiscuous were dismissed as “slappers” or “hoors.” But someone like Nigella seemed endowed by the Creator to have fingers inside her, hands in her hair, mouths on her thighs. For her, sluttiness wasn't a source of shame, but a birthright.

“Maggie, where are you going?” Nigella demanded, her rose-cheeked face pouty and concerned.

“I—I was just going to sit down to eat,” Maggie said, putting her tray down on the empty table.

“Come sit with us!” Nigella said, slinking in the direction of a table where the powerbrokers of third class were opening their lunches.

Maggie hesitated before picking up her tray and following the pert flap of Nigella's skirt, reminding herself that she'd been
among
real
women—in Dublin, in Rome—and she didn't need to feel so grateful for this sudden and unexplained act of goodwill from a girl who was, at the end of the day, just another high school teenager with good hair and polished nails. But she had just come so close to the bottom of the social food chain, a lonely misfit bowed over a limp ham sandwich, that despite her best efforts at cool nonchalance she tripped along behind Nigella's heels toward the popular table like an eager puppy. On the other side of the lunchroom, Aíne and the other honors girls watched sourly.

“So,” Nigella asked as they took their places, “is it true you ran away to Rome with some fella who works at the Quayside?”

“Well, not exactly,” Maggie said, peeling the crust off her sandwich. “We didn't run
away.
We went there for a Nirvana show.”

The girls tittered.

“That is
so fantastic.”

“So,” Nigella said, “did you two fuck or what?” She propped her chin on her hands expectantly. Maggie looked around the table at their glittering, greedy eyes, the word
fuck
a piece of bloody meat dangled in the water.

“No,” she said quickly. “It wasn't like that at all.” That word didn't come close to describing what she and Eoin had done together. And besides, her memory of Rome was not something she was going to waste on these girls.

“Well, I just think it's so romantic,” said Fiona O'Connell, biting into a shiny pink apple. “So
chivalrous.
The way he sacrificed himself for you!”

“What do you mean?” asked Maggie.

“The
deal
they offered him,” Fiona said impatiently.

“What deal?”

Nigella Joyce leaned in even closer, so that Maggie could smell her lip balm.

“Wait a moment—you don't
know
about it?”

“No.”

“They offered him the same deal they offered you—but he refused! He said they couldn't tell him who he could be with or who he should love. So they kicked him out of Saint Brendan's!”

In unison, the table of girls sighed at the romance of it all, drooping over each other like wilting flowers.

“I'd steer clear of those Saint Brendan's boys if I were you,” Fiona warned. “You're their enemy number one right now. It's not so much that everybody loved Eoin Brennan—but he was one of the best footballers on their team.”

Maggie didn't care if every boy in Bray despised her. It only mattered whether Eoin did. She thought about running to the nurse's office, pretending she needed to call home, calling the Quayside instead, asking Auntie Rosie if it was true. But if it was, then Auntie Rosie probably hated her now, and so, most likely, did Eoin. After all, she'd gotten him caught up in the drama of her life, and as a result, she'd shamed him and derailed his future. That night in Rome, as they lay together under the blankets, skin to skin and listening to the rain, she'd read him Kevin's letter. Her only hope was that he would remember it now and understand why she'd done what she'd done. Pressed up against the ancient walls of the Coliseum in the rain, he'd told her he loved her. Did he still? He'd forgiven his mother once; could he forgive her now?

In the seven months that Maggie had lived in Bray, she'd grown to love Dan Sean O'Callaghan and his little cottage on the hill. It had become an emotional monastery for her; a place where she could sit across from the old man with a mug of tea or hot port in her hands, the dingy cat on her lap, the turf fire blazing and the clouds low outside his curtained windows. He always gave Maggie the best advice—he was so far removed from his own teenage years that he was always able to look at her problems with perfect objectivity and healthy perspective. When it came to romance, he explained, the old ways are usually the best ways. When five weeks had come and gone and the only place Maggie had seen or spoken to Eoin was in her daydreams, Dan Sean advised her to write him a letter. “Short, plain, and honest,” he told her. “You can give it to him at my birthday party.”

Because, of course, Eoin would be there. Everyone would be there. Dan Sean was everybody's friend and neighbor, but he was also a holdover from an older time, a protector of the old ways, from long before modernity had roared across Ireland with its cranes and its cable TV. His hundredth birthday party was a celebration not just of Dan Sean but of all the things that had transformed the island in his lifetime—and no one in town was going to miss it. On top of that, one of the perks of growing old in a country as small and familial as theirs was that every citizen who lived to be a hundred received a government check for one
thousand pounds on his centennial birthday. Dan Sean had already divided these proceeds into three accounts: one, for a summertime pilgrimage to Lourdes; the second to the parish church, and the third, to pay for a party with Guinness, champagne, and a three-course dinner at the Beaufort Hotel. Nearly everyone in Maggie's corner of Bray was invited: and that meant that she would finally get her chance to tell Eoin how she felt.

A few days before the party, while she sat sprawled on the carpet, slogging through her physics homework, someone knocked softly on Maggie's bedroom door.

“Yeah?”

Laura stuck her head in the room, holding a white package close to her chest.

“Can I come in, honey?”

“Sure.” Maggie looked up from her notes.

“I got you a dress from Clery's.” She put the package on Maggie's pillow. “Thought you might want something new for Dan Sean's party.”

“Cool. Thanks, Mom.”

“You're welcome.” Laura lingered in the doorway of Maggie's room. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and she wore a Chicago Bulls sweatshirt over an old pair of jeans. She'd put on some weight since they'd moved to Bray, a result of fried breakfasts and sugary wine coolers, and the extra pounds had made her face moony and round, a little slack around the cheeks and neck.

“Mom?” Maggie said. “You okay?”

“Maggie, I need to talk to you.”

“Okay.”

“About something important.” Laura sat down on the carpet and began fiddling with the zipper on Maggie's backpack.

“Okay.”

“I want to be honest with you from here on out. I learned my lesson.”

“Okay,
mom.” Maggie kept her voice casual, but she could feel her heart pounding. Serious talks were never good.

“Honey, I know you've had a lot on your mind lately, so I wouldn't expect you to notice what a mess I've been these last few months.” Laura took a deep breath and began flapping her hands in front of her eyes. “Sorry. I told myself I am
not
going to cry, and I'm not! Okay. Restart button.” She stuck a finger to the side of her head, as if she was turning on a computer.

“Mom.”

“Okay. As you know, your father took off when you were very young—when we were all very young. And it wasn't easy, raising you and Ron on my own.”

“Well, you weren't
really
on your own, Ma. You had Nanny Ei to help you out. I mean, she lived right upstairs.”

“Maggie, you of all people should have realized in these last couple months that a mother's love is a blessing, but it can't be a stand-in for the other kind of love. And when I met Colm last year … he was so
good
to me. He just
loved
me so damn much. I think it's safe to say that we both got a bit swept away. And we've been
trying
to make it work out here. We really have. But he's younger than me, you know. I don't know if he was really ready for all the responsibility that comes from marrying a woman with two kids. And then we lost Kevin. When something awful like that happens, it just makes you
think.
About the importance of family. I mean, Nanny Ei's all alone in Chicago now. Uncle Dave is in Oklahoma City and we're here, and well, it's really the responsibility of the daughter to look after—”