The Carnival at Bray (5 page)

“What was your wife's name?” she asked.

“Hah?” Dan Sean squinted, leaning forward.

“Your wife's name?”

“Hah?”

“Your
wife.
Her
name?”
Maggie shouted, not knowing whether Dan Sean couldn't hear her, or just couldn't understand the nasal cadence of her Chicago accent.

He shrugged, shaking his head so forcefully that the Cossack's hat drooped down to a jaunty angle and perched on the rim of his glasses. He didn't seem to take any notice, so Maggie got up to gently reposition it. The potency of the booze kicked in the moment she stood up, and she lurched toward him on sea legs.
Bending down to fix his hat, she could smell embedded smoke, shaving cream, and very faintly, the vinegar dribble of urine. She felt a sudden tenderness for Dan Sean and this tiny house, filled up with a half century of loneliness. She kissed the furry top of his Cossack's hat. It took three careful steps for her to return to her own chair, and when she sat down, she saw that he had fallen asleep.

Maggie sipped her drink with the cat draped across her lap and the dog curled at her feet. The only sounds in the room were the crackling of the fire and Dan Sean's shallow snores. There were no CDs to play, no radio, no television. There was nothing. She was just sitting there in silence, getting drunk. It occurred to her that a person's first drunken experience should be in the basement of a friend's house, in a forest preserve, behind the bleachers of a football field. Certainly not in the company of a sleeping ninety-nine-year-old man. She giggled a little and wondered what Uncle Kevin would make of it. “Hot port?” he would say.
“Very
impressive, Mags. I would have thought you'd be more of a wine cooler type of girl.”

Swallowing the last of her drink, she lifted the cat gently to the floor and tiptoed over to the sink. She washed her glass, put on her jacket, and opened the front door slowly so that its creaking hinges wouldn't wake Dan Sean. Stepping out into the fog, she reached back to close it behind her when the old man's eyes snapped open behind his thick glasses.

“Nora,” he said. “That was my wife.” Then he crossed himself, a gesture that, for him, seemed as autonomic as blinking, and fell immediately back to sleep.

Maggie descended the dark hill on unsteady legs. The fog blotted out the sounds of the town below; no airplanes flew overhead. Animals peeked out of wooden lean-tos and hens pecked along behind chicken wire, watching her with idiot interest. It could be any year, any century. It seemed suddenly possible that
a world of horse-drawn traps and the cries of tubercular babies could not be far away, could not, even, have passed on. In the month she had lived in Bray, Maggie had felt pockets of this—this slowing down of time, these reverberations into the past. In America, everything was replaceable; old stuff was thrown away quickly and entirely to make way for the next thing. But in Ireland, the ruined castles that dotted the landscape, the crumbling stone walls that crisscrossed long-held family fields, these all provided the sense that the past drifted, but did not disappear. It was all around you, like mist.

As she neared the bottom of the hill, Maggie began to wish she had gone home with Colm. Night had collapsed on the countryside; the air was pitch black, cold and brackish on her cheeks. She had an awful thought: how close was the water from here? Where do all these green slopes lead? What if in this darkness she walked straight into the ocean, the seaweed filling her shoes, her liquor-heavy limbs immobile and useless? Of course, she thought, stumbling down the path, of
course
this is how it would happen. Just when I'm starting to like it here, I accidentally drown.

It was at this moment—when she was really starting to freak out, when the dulling effects of the alcohol were burned off by fear, when she could no longer feel her toes inside her sodden Converse—that in this empty field, blotted from sound as if in a great, green closet and seemingly out of nowhere, the vision appeared.

“Hi,” said the vision.

Maggie hiccupped.

“You lost?” He was about her age, maybe a little older. It was too dark to tell if he was cute or not.

“Um. Maybe? Do you know how close we are to the ocean?”

“You don't live around here, do you?”

“I just moved here. My mom married Colm Byrne. We live near the Strand Road. I'm Maggie.”

“Oh! Right. I heard about that. I'm Eoin.” He peered down the hill. “You going for a swim?”

“No,” she said. “I was coming home from Dan Sean O'Callaghan's, but I lost my way.”

He stepped closer and squinted at her. He smelled of laundry detergent, and he was cute. Extremely cute, actually.

“Was Dan Sean the one pouring drinks?”

She nodded and hiccupped again. He smiled a little so she saw a crooked set of teeth that gleamed white in the darkness.

“The man's dangerous with the pours,” Eoin said. “You're not the first visitor to get lost on the way home from a night up the hill at Dan Sean's. If you're living up on the Strand, what you need to do is head back where you came and turn right at the water pump. That's Strand Road.” He placed a hand on her back, a warm pressure beneath her shoulder blades, and nudged her gently in that direction.

“Thanks,” she said, already beginning to walk, concentrating on her sobriety and the water pump. “Thanks, Eoin.” Her tongue felt grotesquely thick in her mouth.

The fog thinned at the bottom of the hill, breaking off into ethereal wisps that snaked around her shoulders as she neared home.
Home.
It was the first time she had thought of Colm's house, which stood white and inviting at the end of the gravel road, in that way. She went in through the unlocked back door. The house, as usual, was empty—Colm and Laura had probably made a pit stop at the Quayside, while Ronnie was over at one of her many new friends' houses. But Maggie was grateful, because now her stomach, knowing that she was safe, staged a revolt. She barely made it to the bathroom before spraying the toilet with burgundy red port puke. Afterward, she brushed her teeth, peeled off her smoky clothes, and got into bed. The headache that crippled her felt like a pulse in her temple: “Eoin. Eoin. Eoin.” It bothered her, the way he'd touched her without being asked. Is that what
boys did in this country—just touched you moments after they met you? She pulled the pillow over her head, embarrassed for herself. Why did she even care? It's not like it had meant anything. It was as meaningless as a handshake or a stranger bumping into you on the bus.

But meaningless as it was, as Maggie lay in bed before drifting into the heavy black block of sleep, the imprint of that hand, the spread fingers on the sodden cotton of her jacket, was all that she could feel.

By November, Maggie had struck up a friendship with Aíne, a bookish girl from her French class who had perfect handwriting, organized notebooks, and an obsession with getting maximum points in her leaving cert and moving to Dublin to study pharmacy at Trinity College. For the time being, though, she was stuck sharing a bedroom with three younger sisters in one of the damp, shabby estate houses that butted up against the carnival grounds. Aíne's mother was a haggard, lumpy woman with rosacea and veiny legs, and her father drove a taxi, selling loose cigarettes from the trunk that he'd bought for cheap on a trip to Romania. It was clear from the start to Maggie that Aíne was ashamed of her blue-collar family, and that she was fiercely determined not to grow up to become like them. She wore her brown hair tied tightly at the nape of her neck in a stern, pretentious bun and her face was forgettably pretty save for the thin white scar that ran from her left nostril to the top of her lip, from a cleft palate surgery she'd had as a baby. Maggie wondered how Aíne felt about the scar, which wasn't detectable from far away but which a boy in kissing distance would be sure to notice. She couldn't ask, but she was sure that Aíne, too, had never been kissed. The thought of this plain, serious girl allowing her mouth to be explored by the worming tongue of a Saint Brendan's boy seemed somehow profane. Theirs wasn't a friendship that involved giggling over boys.

But even if Aíne wasn't exactly a lifelong soul-mate kind of friend, Maggie was glad to have
some
one to escape with when her sister's eleventh birthday rolled around. For the occasion, Ronnie had invited five of her new friends over for a “slumber party,” an American phrase that had enchanted her classmates and terrified Colm, who had fled to the Quayside shortly after the first eye-shadowed pre-teen knocked on his door, leaving Laura alone to deal with the pack of national school girls who, by nightfall, were hopped up on chocolate bars and Club Orange and shrieking along to the 4 Non Blondes. Just after they finished their sing-along to “What's Up,” a redheaded girl in a hot pink tracksuit, her cheeks awash in glitter, sashayed past them on her way to the bathroom. Laura began rummaging for a wine opener.

“You sure you want to leave me here with all this?” She raised a dark eyebrow at Maggie, cranked open the wine, and filled her glass nearly to the brim while treble-pitched arguments about what to play next drifted from the sitting room. The synthetic crooning of pop radio indicated a decision had been made.

“Can you imagine if Kevin were here, what he'd say about this dance party?” Laura said.

“Oh, he wouldn't say anything,” Maggie laughed. “He would've left for the bar with Colm the minute this thing started.”

Laura paused, took a sip of wine. “No,” she said finally. “Kevin and Colm wouldn't be going anywhere together. There's no love lost between those two.” She peered into her glass, avoiding Maggie's eyes: a classic Laura Lynch evasion tactic.

“Care to explain?”

Her mom shrugged, lit a cigarette, and shook out the match. The smoke curled into the corners of the kitchen ceiling.

“Not particularly.” She looked at her watch. “You better get a move on, sister. This Aíne character sounds like the punctual sort.”
As she crossed the footpath over the river Dargle, Maggie found her bearings by scanning the sky for the Ferris wheel. It hovered above the pubs and hotels and the sea to the east, and to the west, on the other side of Main Street, stood the stony hulking tower of Saint Paul's Church. Maggie knew that if she stayed between these two landmarks, she was on the right track to HMV. She had always been terrible with directions: earlier that summer, when she'd taken the wrong train home from the dentist and ended up marooned out in Oak Park, she had to call Kevin to come pick her up. He didn't make fun of her cluelessness, as Maggie had expected. Instead, as he pulled up to the el station, he declared, “Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he'll eat for a lifetime.” They got a bagful of cheeseburgers at White Castle and spent the rest of the night driving around the city so he could teach her the grid system. AG BULLT rumbled up and down the length and breadth of Chicago as Kevin pointed at street signs and barked out their coordinates: “Western Avenue, 2400 West! Kedzie Avenue, 3200 West! Belmont Avenue, 3200 North!” Up and down and up and down they went as the Clash blasted from the beleaguered speakers and the cheeseburgers dwindled.

“When a city has a grid system and you take the time to learn it, it's impossible to get lost,” he explained. “But Ireland is old and mountainous, and it's probably going to be a bitch to find your way around there. Before you go, I'll give you the compass I have left over from my Cub Scout days. For a Magellan like you, it might be your only hope. Now: Division Avenue is located at what-hundred north?”

“1200!” Maggie shouted. “Wait a second—did you just say you were a
Boy Scout?”

“No, I said I was a
Cub
Scout,” he said, tossing a cheeseburger wrapper out the window. “I quit before attaining the level of actual Boy Scout. And you can laugh all you want, but there's only one person in this car who knows Morse code, and it certainly ain't you.”

Maggie reached into her jacket pocket now and held the scratched little brass compass. It was nearly twenty years old, and when Kevin had fished it out of the recesses of his closet, they'd discovered that it no longer worked. But she'd brought it with her to Ireland anyway. She didn't know why. She guessed maybe because it was one of the only gifts Kevin had ever given her, and just having it in her pocket, holding its cool, round weight in her palm, always made her feel less lost. She was still angry at her mom for locking him out of the going-away party and denying her a chance to say good-bye, but in the course of three months the anger had calcified into a dull, throbbing resentment—a resentment that was only part of a larger anger at her mom's flightiness and immaturity, for the way heartbreak never seemed to teach her anything, for the way her search for romance was always disrupting their lives. For their part, Laura and Kevin, like many brothers and sisters, could forgive each other as quickly and easily as they condemned each other, and both seemed to have forgotten about the incident at Oinker's. He called the house fairly regularly, and Maggie had talked to him about once a month since they'd arrived in Bray. The last time they'd spoken, Nirvana had just announced its European tour dates, and Kevin frothed with excitement about the prospect of the band from Seattle tearing their way through the staid cities of Western Europe.