The Carnival at Bray (30 page)

She called her mother at Dunne's and told her she was going out with friends for the night. Then, she walked the mile back into town to catch the bus to Dublin. As soon as she got off at the Merrion Road stop, she knew that something special had occurred. Outside the RDS hundreds of fans stood soaked in the spring rain, milling about and hugging each other as if at a wake. Under the dripping trees, people played guitars. Someone had brought a CD player, wedged it high between the bars of the front gate, and was blasting Nirvana albums. They were teenagers and dropouts, grungeheads and misfits, the sad-eyed faces and fringe members of Maggie's generation. The rain seeped into the fabric of their flannels, gave off the wooly smell of wet dogs. A pair of drunken boys walked around taking a poll: where were you the
first time you heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit”? That was an easy one: Nanny Ei's kitchen, eating canned chicken noodle soup in the failing light of a December afternoon. Uncle Kevin coming home from his job at the Christmas tree farm, smelling of sap and pine.
You've got to hear this song, Mags. Holy shit have you got to hear this.
Turning off
Wheel of Fortune
on the little countertop television set and plugging in the CD player. Nanny Ei saying,
Well, if that's music, then you can toss me a microphone and call me Aretha Franklin.

As the wet sky purpled into evening, the street outside the RDS took on the air of a festival. A few disinterested guards patrolled, arms folded, leaning against police horses. Smoke hung in the air; joints were furtively passed. Someone distributed narrow white memorial candles with paper lips to catch hot wax, and people pulled out their lighters, cupped palms to protect the pinprick flames from the rain. A stranger gave a candle to Maggie and she held it in her hands, a gesture as hopeless as everything else about suicide, she thought.
Maggie, if you ever feel bad enough to even
think
about doing something like that, please promise you'll tell me,
Laura had begged. But Kevin's suicide had not had that effect on Maggie. It didn't make her want to die but to live.
That's why I went to Rome,
she thought to herself.
And that's why I'm here now.
She passed through the crowd, down the block, and found the tall iron gates of Beweley's Hotel. On the other side of the gate, past the green expanse of lawn, there were warm squares of light where older people who didn't care about Kurt Cobain were dressing for dinner. Night fell in earnest; the streetlights flickered on.

If he doesn't come, I'll go back to Chicago with Mom and Ronnie in June because that is what I'm meant to do. What must be, shall be.

If he doesn't come, I won't fall apart. I won't cry. I'll have my answer. It finishes here.

Then, a ballooning panic:
Oh God, what will I do if he really doesn't come?

And the converse thought:
Oh God, what will I do if he does?

If he does, I stay. I apply to be a boarder at Saint Brigid's. Or I move in with Dan Sean. I make Bray my home, because I choose life: not convention, not convenience, not obedience. I choose love.

The faces of all the people who passed by her were blurred by nighttime. She stood against the gates and breathed the stench of cigarettes and weed and candle wax and far away, on the edge of the wind, the mossy breath of the Liffey. It occurred to her that Kurt Cobain would have hated this. Nobody here at this makeshift wake—herself included—had known him. They had only known something that he made. It was not the same thing.
In the years ahead,
Maggie promised herself,
wherever I go and whatever happens, I only want, once and forever, to be really known to someone.

Seven o'clock. Had Cobain been alive, the show would be starting. Eight o'clock. Still Maggie waited at the gates of the hotel, clutching her ticket in her palm until it was nothing but a pulpy ball. Rain seeped into her pockets.
This is dumb,
she told herself, scanning the faces in the crowd.
What am I waiting for?
But she gave it ten more minutes. Then, twenty. A half hour. At nine, she realized he was not going to come.
What must be, shall be.
She pulled her hood around her face and began to walk back to the bus stop.

All those people who stood in their flannels in the rain would always remember that on the day Kurt Cobain's body was found in a Seattle greenhouse, they came to the RDS in Ballsbridge with their meaningless tickets, to pay tribute. But only one among that crowd would remember, too, the young man with short cropped hair that turned red in the sun, who wore a Liverpool sweatshirt and old track pants, who dodged the glowing candles and the mourners who held them, his gaze leveled on the shining gates of Beweley's Hotel, running with all the power and determination of the athlete that he was. They would not remember the girl who had begun to walk away; just another grunge girl with pretty eyes drowning in too much black liner and a hood pulled around her
wet face, who, hearing her name shouted over the music and the exhale of smoke and the traffic on Merrion Road, had stopped for a moment and gazed up at the sky, mouthing a prayer, before turning around. They would not remember that when the boy hugged her he held her so tightly that she dropped her candle into the mud and it burned out with an imperceptible
hush,
and her hands grazed the prickly hair at the nape of his neck, the beautiful inverted daub between the tendons, the living parts of him, and that they kissed in the open way of people who only wanted, simply and completely, to be known to each other. She was going to stay. She was going to stay, and she was going to love Eoin, always, because that's what living people do. They shatter and rebuild, shatter and rebuild, shatter and rebuild until they are old and worn and stooped from the work of it.

As tradition dictated, the visitation was held in Dan Sean's sitting room. The big open hearth crackled with a turf fire, filling the room with a rich peat smell. A warm amber light flickered across the brown-faded pictures on the walls, snapshots that chronicled the spread of Dan Sean's life across the twentieth century. The room grew close as the neighbors gathered, buzzing quietly with tea and whispered catch-ups, while Mike O'Callaghan and his wife walked around shaking hands and accepting condolences. Then, everyone quieted and bowed their heads while Father Boyle began the rosary and the Ecclesiastes—
a time to weep and a time to laugh—
and waved curls of sweet incense over Dan Sean's casket.

Outside, they lined up on either side of the stone path. Mike, Colm, Eoin, and some of the other neighbors hoisted the pine box onto their shoulders and carried the old man's body out of the house, as he had instructed. The wind was calm, and it rained, but it was a quiet spring rain with sunshine winking between the clouds, and it made everything sparkle dewy and green. As the procession descended the mossy hill, Billy the goat stared at them with black, derisive eyes and nickered once before resuming her never-ending snuffle around the yard in search of Crunchie wrappers.

Though Maggie mourned, she did not feel sad. This sorrow wasn't hers to feel. It belonged to Sister Geneve, who trailed behind the coffin in her black pants suit, the little plastic shawl tied around the plume of her white hair, and cried softly into a handkerchief. Later, at the funeral reception, the neighbors would talk about what a surprising spectacle of emotion the stoic old nun had given. How odd that a woman who'd seen plenty of death in her lifetime could barely keep it together during Father Boyle's eulogy, sobbing like a teenage girl for a man of 101 whose death was, in the last months of his decline, practically a blessing! Only Maggie knew why Sister Geneve wept. But she never told anyone, not even Eoin.

After Cobain's death, Maggie had returned to Chicago for the summer with her mom and Ronnie. Nanny Ei got her a job working for a friend's catering company, and she spent three sweaty months standing under the tents of street festivals, manning a deep fryer and selling beer-battered turkey legs and butter-dipped corn to the sunburned masses. That July, she had received a letter from Saint Brigid's, informing her that she had been accepted as a boarder on partial scholarship—and that the rest of her fees were being paid for by an anonymous donor. Maggie knew with absolute certainty who that donor was, but no matter how many times she asked him, Dan Sean, a stubborn old Irishman to the last, would never admit to it. In September, her family heaved her giant red suitcase into the trunk of Nanny Ei's Oldsmobile and drove her to O'Hare.

“If you don't wear aqua socks in the shower, honey, you will sentence yourself to a lifetime of Plantar's warts,” Nanny Ei said solemnly as they stood in front of the Aer Lingus departure gates.

“And for the love of God, try to drink a glass of milk every once in a while,” Laura added, putting a tender hand on Maggie's cheek.

It was the closest they could get, these tough blue-collar women, to telling her how much they would miss her.

Back in Bray, the new school year began, and her relationship with Eoin grew. She shared everything with him: not just the secrets of her body, but also the quieter things that burned softer. There were weekend bus rides out to Wexford to climb the lighthouses that dotted the craggy lip of the island; there were nights when she snuck him into her tiny dorm room at Saint Brigid's and they lay sprawled side by side on the carpet, listening over and over to
(What's the Story) Morning Glory,
trying to decide if it was okay to be obsessed with Oasis when everybody else in Ireland was, too. Weeknights they sat at a back table in the Quayside, drinking Cidona and drilling each other on French history in preparation for their leaving cert exams. This is what they were doing, in fact, on a mild May evening eight months after Maggie's return, when Dan Sean dozed off in his velvet-backed chair, a copy of the
Irish Times
folded in his lap, and never woke up.

After the funeral mass, everyone went for pints at the Quayside. Eoin's mother, released from the hospital, showed up in a new dress and freshly dyed hair. She sang “The Hills of Glenswilly” at Mike's request because it had been Dan Sean's favorite. Eoin's face burned with pride when she brought the house down, and this made Maggie ache for her own mother back in Chicago, but by now she knew enough not to mistake this aching feeling for regret. Later, two fiddlers from Shankill took the stage, and Maggie danced with Eoin on the same floor where it all began for them. And when the trays of potatoes and ham were eaten, the pints drunk, the ashtrays emptied, and the sky faded to a rich, velvety purple, she and Eoin slipped away. They walked hand in hand along the strand, breathing in the fishy wideness of the sea, pausing for a moment to gaze up at the spindly hulk of the Ferris wheel. A warm breeze was blowing down from the hills and the crab traps bobbed in the water.

“I haven't been on that thing in a long time,” Maggie said.

“What do you think?” Eoin raised an eyebrow at her. “Feel like going for a ride?”

They approached the booth at the water's edge and bought two tickets.

“First riders of the season, you two,” grunted the ride operator as he pulled the safety bar over their laps. “Might be a little squeaky.”

The machine hummed to life, jerked their carriage forward, and swept them slowly toward the twilight, groaning with rusty effort.

“Is this thing safe?” Eoin peered over the side at the ground below, where the carnival workers were hoisting white tarps from the rides and rolling back the corrugated aluminum from the gaming booths.

“Who knows?” Maggie grinned. “Better hold on tight.”

She felt the warm pressure of Eoin's knee next to her own as they creaked higher and higher, the briny air dewing their faces. When they reached the top of the arc, they could see the far-off lights of Dublin glimmering beyond the darkening hills to the west, and to the east, the vast, lapping Irish Sea. They remained like that for just a moment, suspended hand in hand above the hills and rooftops, their faces flooded with sunset, before the Ferris wheel whined and jolted them back to the safe, familiar earth.