The Carnival at Bray

by Jessie Ann Foley

  “I’ve got to get back in there and help my aunt,” he said, his hands still in her hair. “But when you’re going home, find me. I can steal away for a little while and walk you.”

  If, just one year earlier, someone had told Maggie that she would be spending the dawning hours of 1994 walking home along the Irish Sea hand in hand with a boy like Eoin, she would not have believed it. Just one year earlier, she’d sat sandwiched between Nanny Ei and Ronnie on the lumpy velvet couch, balancing a bowl of buttered popcorn on her lap and watching Times Square on the television while Kevin partied downtown with Selfish Fetus and Laura drank at Oinker’s with a pest control technician named Stan. Just one year earlier, Maggie was untraveled and inexperienced; love was still an abstraction, kissing was a thing that other, luckier, girls got to do, and she had never even been on an airplane. Now she knew the feeling of moving lips against her hair, of clods of Irish sand sifting into her shoes, of being noticed and admired by another human being who was not a member of her family. Life was happening at an accelerated pace, and Maggie was finally ready to keep up.

  Later, when they reached her front door, Eoin kissed her again, and she was grateful for the puffy layer of her winter coat so that he might not notice the way his kiss made her whole body tremble.

  She let herself in the door, moving the front curtain aside so she could watch him walk away, hands in pockets, dark head bowed against the wind, the perfect boy shape of him heading back toward town along the path of the perfect sea. She lay awake for a long time reliving his hands, his lips, again and again and again. At last she slept, her sweater wrapped around her pillow, straining for the last bits of his scent that clung to its fibers.

  She awoke to a gentle knocking on her bedroom door. Sunlight leaked in between her bedroom curtains. Maggie looked at the clock—it was already afternoon. She experienced the wonderful sensation of waking up groggy and remembering that the thing you wanted more than anything had really happened to you, that you didn’t dream any of it. Was this what love was—when life was better than you’d even known to dream about?

  The knock came again, and her mom opened the bedroom door, her eyes bloodshot. Maggie pulled her blanket around her thin tank top and sat up. Laura was looking at her in a curious way: Is this how mothers knew? One look at their daughters and they knew they’d fallen in love? Well, just this once, if her mom asked, Maggie would tell all. She would gush about Eoin, about their first meeting in the misty field, about how she could forgive all the moving and the strangeness and the upheaval of the past four months, because it had led her to him.

  But Laura took one step into Maggie’s bedroom, held her fingers to her mouth, and burst into tears.

  Colm appeared behind her, squeezing her shoulders. His face was ashen.

  “Ma? What’s wrong?”

  Laura began to wail in a strange keening voice that Maggie had never heard before—it was not like the bitter, quiet tears she’d shed after their father had left, and it terrified her. She noticed that Ronnie was standing in the hallway, clinging to their mother’s pant leg as she’d done as a toddler. Her eyes were huge and wet and she was staring at Maggie.

  “Kevin,” Laura finally sobbed. “Oh God. It’s Uncle Kevin.”

  “What do you want out of life?” I asked, and I used to ask that all the time of girls. “I don’t know,” she said. “Just wait on tables and try to get along.” She yawned. I put my hand over her mouth and told her not to yawn. I tried to tell her how excited I was about life and the things we could do together … We lay on our backs, looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when He made life so sad.

  —Jack Kerouac, On the Road

  At the very edge of Montrose Harbor, on the north side of Chicago, there is a bird sanctuary. On summer mornings, as the pink sun rises over the hazy blue horizon of Lake Michigan, amateur ornithologists creep along the trails of waving dune grass in search of piping plovers and American avocets while the shadows of peregrine falcons wheel above them. Butterflies, their wings translucent in the nascent light, coast on the wind. The sanctuary is part of the city and not part of it, a finger of land jutting out from the shore, and being there, amid the tall pale grass and the air crisp with lavender, it’s easy to forget that just over the ledge are acres of sand volleyball courts, kayak rentals, and a bar that serves twenty-four-ounce cans of Budweiser and all-you-can-eat baskets of shrimp.

  When the bitterly cold midwestern winter descends, people mostly stay away from the sanctuary. The colorful warblers of summer are replaced by gray mourning doves, blackheaded gulls, and stoic, unblinking owls that swoop soundlessly through frozen bare branches and stand sentinel on the abandoned volleyball poles, surveying the emptiness of the beach shanties. In the winter, the inhospitable peninsula belongs entirely to the birds. It’s as if, for a brief period of snowy time, humans no longer exist.

  When Maggie was a kid, Uncle Kevin worked as a lifeguard at the beach next to the bird sanctuary. On hot summer weekends, her family would ride the Montrose Avenue bus across the city to swim in the polluted waves of his patrol. Maggie always felt so proud, seeing her uncle perched on the high white tower along the water’s edge with a big orange buoy arranged across his lap and his dreadlocks pulled back in a gnarled tuft, watching over all the splashing people to make sure they were safe. The scar from his childhood heart surgery stood white and jagged against his tan chest, and made him look tough—like he’d lived through things. Everyone knew him there, from the neon-bikinied college girls who twitched their butts for him as they passed to the amiable schizophrenics who drifted down from the halfway houses in Uptown, pushing shopping carts full of cans and still wearing their winter coats. No matter how crowded it was, Uncle Kevin always staked out a nice spot for his family in the shade of his lifeguard chair. Maggie would rub sunscreen on Ronnie’s fat baby legs while Laura lolled in a lawn chair with a copy of People Magazine and Nanny Ei chain smoked and people watched in a skirted bathing suit and sun visor, her legs bumpy with varicose veins.

  It didn’t matter that throughout the fall, winter, and spring, Uncle Kevin was always coming home with a fat lip or tussling with the police. Here at the beach, when you looked at him high on his white tower, so young and alive, with a face made for sunglasses and shoulders square with muscle, he was somebody special, somebody important. Being related to him, being loved by him, was the closest Maggie ever came to feeling like a celebrity. Even now, the family called the place Kevin’s Beach—as if it was still an extension of him, even years after he’d let his lifeguard training lapse and been replaced with a water polo player from Northwestern University.

  Parked on the lumpy velvet couch of Nanny Ei’s apartment, weary from the seven-hour flight, Maggie sat and listened to her grandmother explain the details she’d left out over the phone: that on the night of his death, in the first dawning hours of 1994, Kevin returned to the bird sanctuary. He parked AG BULLT at the harbor and walked through the snow-covered soccer field, past the rows of volleyball posts, all the way to the frosty water’s edge. What had he seen, when he looked beneath the waves at the murky bottom, the oozy weeds twisting? Had he known even then that the heart beating inside him was getting ready to give way? Had he looked up, the sky above him like stained glass, a city boy seeing stars for the first time?

  He’d gotten home before sunrise. His unsteady key in the lock woke Nanny Ei, who’d drunk a glass of champagne, watched the ball drop on NBC, and fallen asleep on the couch. He was more talkative than usual. He told her about the New Year’s party in Rogers Park he’d gone to with some of his old lifeguard friends, about how on his way home he’d pulled over and walked through the sanctuary to sober up before he made the long drive home west across the breadth of the city. The moon, he reported, had been perfectly full, a dollop of cream in a black sky. This is going to be a better year for you, Kev, Nanny Ei had said. She’d stroked his head like he was a little boy. 1994 is going to be the year that things change.
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br />   She let him sleep it off until 3:00 the next afternoon. When she went in his room, expecting to chide him for the reek of booze sweating off his pores, she smelled something colder, sharper, and when she lifted the cover, there was no gust of warmth—and she knew. It had finally happened: his heart had stopped. “Just went to bed and never woke up,” was how Nanny Ei put it, her voice brittle. Maggie remembered him eating fries under the yellow lights of Harry and Rose’s, how awful he had looked; how sick.

  But still.

  Who dies at twenty-six? This isn’t a cancer ward or a soldier in a strange country. This isn’t a car going a hundred miles an hour on an icy road, a deer stepping out into the highway just as you turn the curve. A heart defect—what a sneaky and clinical way to die.

  At first, Laura had suggested going home for the funeral by herself. “We don’t have the money for four plane tickets,” she said. She looked so broken, slumped on Colm’s couch sipping directly from a bottle of West Coast Cooler, that Maggie almost let it go without an argument. But her own grief was so consuming that trying to sympathize with Laura was like sleepwalking through someone else’s dream.

  “I’m going,” Maggie said, taking the empty bottle from her mother’s shaking hands. “I loved him more than anybody.”

  And maybe because Laura knew that was true, she relented. She put two flights on the credit card, and just like that, the very next evening, Maggie was sitting at her grandmother’s house in front of the TV while Nanny Ei and Laura sat at the kitchen table, a box of tissue between them, picking out the readings for Kevin’s funeral mass.

  American television programming fell over her like an old blanket. She sat and flipped absently through the channels. There was Cheers. There was Golden Girls. There was local news about streets and neighborhoods she’d known all her life. Up and down she went, from CBS to NBC to ABC to WGN and back again. She thought of Eoin. Even in all the shock and heartbreak of the past twenty-four hours, her thoughts still returned, again and again, to that kiss. It now seemed so long ago. When would she see him again? Did he know that everything had changed for her? Was it okay to think about something—anything—that made her happy now that Uncle Kevin was dead? If he was up in heaven this very moment, and knew that in spite of her sorrow she still thought of kissing Eoin, would he feel betrayed?

  “Nanny Ei?”

  Her grandmother looked up from the mass booklet and took off her reading glasses.

  “Yeah, honey?”

  “Would it be okay if I went and sat in Kevin’s room for a little bit?”

  Nanny Ei looked at Laura.

  “Do you think that’s a good idea, Mags?” Laura asked.

  “I won’t touch anything.”

  “I don’t see the harm in it,” Nanny Ei said. “After all, you were one of the few people he actually allowed in that lair of his.”

  She could feel them watching her as she turned the knob on Kevin’s door. The smell of his bedroom was thick with cigarettes and Old Spice deodorant. A small stick of incense sat on the windowsill with its long, white ash still intact. His bed was neatly made. Nanny Ei had smoothed the coverlet and tucked in the sheets after he had died in it and they had taken him away. His walls were covered with music posters: Nirvana, Soundgarden, Urge Overkill. Dinosaur Jr., Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan. The corners of the room were stacked high with books. Kevin had never been a good student and had barely graduated from high school, but he was a frequent visitor to the Mayfair branch of the Chicago Public Library, which was staffed by an old Belarusian who claimed to have been an English professor back in Minsk. They often went out drinking together, Kevin and Paviel, and the old librarian would give him book recommendations: the Russian greats, of course, but also the American writers who captured, as he put it, “the Spirit of Fuck You”: Ginsberg and the Beats, Whitman, Vonnegut, Richard Wright. Kevin had once made Maggie a handwritten list entitled “Summer Reading Recommendations to Keep Young Nieces Off the Streets.” It contained subcategories:

  Maggie had tried to read one of these recommendations —Tropic of Cancer, which was listed under the category

  She had only been able to get through the first chapter. Now, on the nightstand next to his bed, she found a copy of On the Road with a pen stuck in the middle to mark where he’d left off. It was a book Kevin had talked about often, and it had appeared on her summer reading list under the simple category Essential Reads. Maggie sat on his bed and opened to the page where he’d stopped reading. A sentence was underlined in neat black ink:

  I was surprised, as always, by how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt.

  Maggie read the sentence a few times, wondering why he had marked it, whether he’d been thinking of Christmas morning at Colm’s house, when he stood at the end of her bed and said good-bye to her. The words on the page blurred with her tears.

  Before she left the room, Maggie went back and stood before his open closet, full of flannel shirts from the Salvation Army on Elston Avenue. Those clothes are for homeless people, Nanny Ei had scolded. I can buy you nice new clothes at Kohl’s. When you get your clothes at the Salvation Army, it’s no different than stealing from the poor. She leaned forward, put her face in the fabric, and breathed her uncle in. She felt him stronger than ever, then: waving to her from the wooden throne of his lifeguard tower, throwing his arm around her as they walked down Martello Terrace, leaning over the bar to talk to Eoin’s aunt Rosie as if he’d known her all his life. She thought of him standing next to her at the Metro, screaming along to the lyrics at the Smashing Pumpkins show: tell me all of your secrets / cannot help but believe this is true …

  I cannot help but believe this is true.

  She lifted one of the shirts from its hanger. It was gray and black plaid, the flannel pilled and threadbare: lived in. He’d often worn it, unbuttoned, over a ratty white T-shirt. She folded it and folded it again, stuffed it under her sweater, and snuck back into the front room. Her mom and Nanny Ei were still huddled over the funeral readings. Maggie knelt down next to the couch and opened her duffel bag. She lifted out the black dress she’d brought for the wake and placed the flannel at the bottom of the bag, gently, as if it still contained him, as if beneath the worn front pocket, she could still hear his heartbeat.

  Before the wake, Maggie painted Nanny Ei’s toenails. It was a ritual the two had shared since Maggie was in fifth grade and Uncle Kevin had forgotten to salt the icy back steps during a nasty cold spell. Nanny Ei had slipped a disc falling down the stairs and hadn’t been able to bend down properly ever since. Laura had suggested she start getting pedicures, but Nanny Ei had dismissed nail salons as cesspools of foot fungus, and Maggie had been given the job. She didn’t mind, though, because Nanny Ei didn’t have old lady feet. They were delicate and soft—size five—papered in thin white skin, and they smelled like the lemon bath salts she liked to soak her feet in while she watched reruns of M*A*S*H.

  “Honey, do me a favor,” Nanny Ei said as she stuck her foot out and Maggie began brushing a coat of fuchsia on her baby toe. “Stay away from those bum friends of Kevin’s at the wake.”

  “Okay, Nanny,” Maggie nodded, fixing a smudge with the edge of her thumb.

  “I mean it, missy.” Nanny Ei pulled her foot away so Maggie had to stop what she was doing and look up. “The last thing I need to worry about before I bury my son is Taco or Rockhead or any of those other degenerates chatting it up with my beautiful granddaughter.”

  Maggie sighed and pulled Nanny Ei’s foot back into her lap.

  “Stop being crazy. Those guys are, like, ten years older than me.”

  “Exactly! Perverts and degenerates, every last one of ’em. Except maybe that Sullivan boy.”

  “Nanny! Kevin hasn’t hung out with Sully since he quit Selfish Fetus to go to law school!”

  “Is that right?” Nanny squinted at her newly pink big toenail. “Well, if that bastard thought he was too good for Kevin, he still better show his face at the wake. You always go
to the wake, Maggie. Even when you don’t want to. Especially when you don’t want to.”

  She began to cry then, suddenly, and Maggie finished painting her toenails in silence.

  The parking lot of Cooney’s funeral home was freshly plowed, and mountains of dirty snow were pushed up as high as the chain-link fence. Nanny Ei turned off the ignition and they sat for a moment, listening to the car tick. Finally, Laura took a deep breath and looked at Maggie in the rearview mirror. Her eyes were puffy, but her hair was tied back into a neat bun and she wore a new shade of dark red lipstick.

  “Are we ready, you guys?” She reached back and squeezed Maggie’s hand. Maggie squeezed it back.

  “Mom?”

  “Yeah, babe?”

  “You look really pretty.”

  Laura’s eyes filled immediately with tears. Maggie realized, with a stabbing sense of guilt, how cruel she’d been to her mother since the move to Ireland. She reached into her coat pocket and closed her fist around Kevin’s broken compass. If anything good had come of his dying, it was that they had all chosen, at least for now, to forgive each other.

  They were the first ones to arrive, followed shortly by Maggie’s uncle Dave, his wife, and their three boring children. As the oldest child in the family, Uncle Dave was everything that Kevin wasn’t—Maggie had never seen him wear anything other than khakis and a golf polo—and for this reason, she had never trusted him. He had escaped into the Navy, married a wide-hipped woman named Marjorie, and now worked as a mortgage broker in Oklahoma City. He had three daughters—Caelynn, Taylor, and Kimberly, who were all around Maggie’s age. They all wore headbands and cardigans and spoke with voices bleached of any regional accent. They only came to town once a year, and when they saw Nanny Ei, they hugged her with cold affection and called her “Grandma.” Maggie was glad her cousins were there, though, because it was easier to concentrate on how much she hated them than to face the wave of agony that lapped at her heart when she saw the open coffin at the front of the room.