The Carnival at Bray

by Jessie Ann Foley

  On the way back to Bray, Eoin slept, his head bouncing against the window. Maggie sat and stared out beyond him, at the gray sprawl of suburban Dublin. She thought about her own mother. It never occurred to her that she should be grateful for the screaming matches that had become, in the last year, a staple of their relationship. Eoin sighed in his sleep, nestling against the window. Beyond him, Maggie’s face hovered in the reflection of the bus window. Earlier that day, in the steamy bathroom at Colm’s house, she had wondered what Eoin could possibly see in her, an unremarkable girl who had been ignored by boys for most of her life. But maybe it isn’t about being pretty, she thought, as the bus picked up speed on the N11. Maybe it isn’t even about boys. After all, it wasn’t a “boy,” that foreign creature of big feet and low-pitched voice, who had come to her door on a Saturday morning and shown her the Book of Kells, who had sat on a bench under a beech tree and told her about the worst thing that had ever happened to him. It was a person. Eoin. And the sum of him was more than all the illusions and romantic notions she’d had in her early days in Bray when she went out for open lunch in search of “boys.” She leaned her head on his shoulder, and he stirred to near waking, fumbling, in the darkness, for her outstretched hand.

  In February, the eastern coast of Ireland experienced a rare event: a snowstorm. There were dire, apocalyptic warnings from the weathermen, people rushing off to buy canned goods, nervous talk on the streets. What ended up falling was a slushy four inches—mild, by Chicago standards, but the town council still closed the schools for three days. Maggie spent most of the unexpected vacation in her room. On the first day, she daydreamed about Eoin and listened to every single CD in her collection while the snow fell on the hills outside her window. On the second day, she daydreamed about Eoin and made progress on Kevin’s list of Excellent Books with Excellent Sex Scenes: which is to say, she foraged through Ragtime and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, looking for the juicy parts. On the third day, she daydreamed about Eoin and leafed through Kevin’s copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which she’d taken from his room on the night of his funeral. There, underlined lightly in pencil, she found the following passage: “He put his face down and rubbed his cheek against her belly and against her thighs again and again.” The memory of Eoin’s kiss came to her for the thousandth time, the feeling of his hand at the small of her back, and she began wondering what it would be like if Eoin were to kiss her belly and her thighs again and again. But then she remembered that this was Kevin’s book, marked by Kevin’s hand, and she slammed it shut, cheeks flushing, because those wavy pencil marks made her feel like he was in the room with her, listening to her secret thoughts and watching in affectionate disapproval: Mags, you’re supposed to read the whole book, not just the sexy parts, ya little perv!

  It was all too much—the grief for Kevin, the longing for Eoin, the overwhelming power of words. She needed air. She threw Lady Chatterley’s Lover aside, pulled on her Wellingtons, and went out the back door to pay a visit to Dan Sean.

  After three days of wet, heavy storms, the ground beneath her boots felt runny. Little rivers had appeared in the rocky hills and ditches, and even though it wasn’t raining, Maggie’s pants were saturated up to the thigh by the time she made it up Dan Sean’s hill. He greeted her, as always, by motioning her into the high-backed chair next to the fire and hobbling over to the sink to put on the kettle. Woody, the dog, settled his dingy warmth across Maggie’s wet lap while Dan Sean poured the tea and handed her a cup. Then, he humphed back into his chair.

  “Some weather,” he said, bringing his trembling cup to his lips. By now, Maggie understood the farmer’s custom, and they spent ten minutes or so discussing the temperature, the cloud cover, the levels of precipitation, and whether cattle could be let out in this rain, before moving on to their real conversation.

  “So,” Dan Sean said, “how’s your beau? The Brennan boy from up the road?”

  “I need your help,” Maggie said. “So I told you about how we went to Dublin and I met his mother.”

  Dan Sean nodded. “Shame what happened to that poor woman. What is it she’s got?”

  “Schizophrenia, it’s called. Anyway, since then, we’ve hung out three times.”

  Dan Sean leaned forward in his chair and glared suspiciously at Maggie over the thick rims of his glasses. “What do you mean—hung out?”

  “Dan Sean! It means, like, spent time together. Or, I don’t know, courted or something.”

  “Good.” He settled back into his chair. “I won’t have you behaving like these young girls on television.”

  “What young girls?”

  Dan Sean adjusted his Cossack’s hat. “You know. The ones who get up the pole.”

  “Trust me, I’m not pregnant. We’ve spent time together, and that’s all. Which is kind of the point I’m getting at.”

  Dan Sean held up an arthritic hand. “Where?”

  Maggie began ticking off on her fingers. “Well, once, we went to Elvery’s so he could buy a new soccer jersey; once, we met at the chipper after school and went for a walk along the water; and another time, I went to see him while he was working at the Quayside, and it was dead in there, so we sat at a booth and worked on our French homework together.”

  “French homework?” Dan Sean jabbed at the fire with a long iron poker. “Why have they got you studying French? An bhfuil Gaeilge agat?”

  “Huh?”

  “Exactly.”

  She sighed, and Woody snuffled in her lap.

  “Dan Sean, you’re getting off topic here! I have a problem. Don’t you want to hear it?”

  “Well, get on with it, then! I’m old—I haven’t got all the time in the world.” He poked the fire again, and a shower of sparks sizzled on the sooty hearth.

  “You’re so cranky sometimes.” Maggie rolled her eyes. “Okay. So, me and Eoin—we laugh, we talk, we even touched knees under the table while we were doing our homework—I hope that doesn’t make me a strumpet, in your book—but he hasn’t tried to kiss me! Not since that night on New Year’s Eve. He hasn’t even looked like he was thinking about kissing me—and I’m beginning to think he just wants to be, like, friends.”

  Dan Sean listened to all of this wordlessly, blinking periodically behind his black glasses. He folded his gnarled hands around his mug of tea. His Cossack’s hat stood atop his small head like an exclamation mark. Finally, he spoke:

  “So, he won’t kiss you, is it?”

  “That’s right,” Maggie said, running her hand along the dog’s greasy back. “He won’t kiss me.”

  “Well, that isn’t good at all.”

  “I know! This is why I need some advice.”

  “It’s a very simple problem to solve.”

  “What do I do?” She leaned forward, and the dozing dog tinkled his collar in annoyance.

  “Wear perfume.”

  “What?”

  “Perfume. It’s simple. Men like women who smell good.”

  “But is it really that simple?”

  “The problem with you young ones,” Dan Sean sighed, “is that you overthink things.”

  While Maggie rolled this piece of advice around in her mind, she heard the crunch of gravel outside the window. An unfamiliar car was making its way up the driveway. It was an olive-colored Peugeot, with patches of rust and bald tires. A small old woman with a square of plastic tied around her white hair emerged from the car. Colm had warned Maggie that everyone in Bray knew each other, but she was still sort of shocked when she saw her English teacher coming up the walk.

  “Oh, hello, Maggie!” Sister Geneve smiled brightly, untying the small knot beneath her chin. “I was hoping I might run into you up here. Dan Sean tells me that he’s struck up a friendship with one of my Saint Brigid’s girls.”

  “Maggie,” Dan Sean yelled, his Cossack’s hat quivering, “meet my niece, Geneve!”

  “Your niece?” Maggie was incredulous. Sometimes it was hard to remember that not all old people wer
e the same age.

  “Well, technically speaking, I’m not his blood niece,” Sister Geneve said. She went over to the sink and poured herself a cup of tea. “Dan Sean’s wife, Nora, was my mother’s sister.”

  “God rest her soul,” Dan Sean mumbled, and the two of them paused to cross themselves. Maggie, hastily, did the same, and she remembered that winter afternoon when the old nun had cried reading the Yeats poem. She was more beautiful than thy first love, / But now lies under boards …

  “But how …” Maggie trailed off. She remembered Nanny Ei’s advice: never ask a woman her age, her weight, or her political affiliation.

  “Dan Sean’s ninety-nine,” Sister Geneve said, reading her thoughts. “And I’m sixty-nine. Why, I’m a spring chicken compared to this old man!” She patted him affectionately on the arm and settled into a chair. “Would either of you have a little more tea?”

  “I actually was just on my way out,” Maggie said, lifting Woody to the floor and fumbling with her jacket. She stood up, her jeans sifting dried mud. “I have to help my mom with dinner.”

  This was, of course, a lie. The thing was, Maggie really liked Sister Geneve. But this was too weird. It was bad enough that her only friend was a ninety-nine-year-old farmer, but if she started socializing with teachers, too—nuns, no less—it was bound to leak at Saint Brigid’s.

  “Remember,” Dan Sean called as she opened the door to leave, “perfume.”

  When Maggie arrived home, she found Ronnie parked on all fours in the sitting room, rump in the air, working on one of her puzzles.

  “Eoin called you,” Ronnie informed her. “He said to call him back at the Quayside. Is he your boyfriend?”

  Maggie stood over the puzzle, squatted down, snapped a piece into place.

  “Wouldn’t you like to know. What time did he call?”

  “Like twenty minutes ago. You smell like dog.”

  “Love you too, Ron.”

  She went into the kitchen and dialed the number, praying that Eoin’s aunt wouldn’t answer. It was embarrassing at the best of times to have to talk to the adult family members of the boy you were crazy about, but Maggie was quite sure that Auntie Rosie considered the Lynch family a bunch of drunken hillbillies after they had destroyed her bar on Christmas Eve.

  “Hello, Quayside,” the voice was soft and low and made Maggie feel happily adrift.

  “Hey, Eoin.”

  “Maggie, how are things? Did you survive the snowstorm?”

  “You’ll have to come to Chicago with me sometime—I’ll show you a real snowstorm.”

  “I’ll have to take you up on that offer. In the meantime, what’s your plan for this evening?”

  “Don’t have one.” She twisted the phone cord around her fingers hopefully.

  “Well, one of my mates just got his driver’s license. Want to meet me here at the pub around seven? We’re going to drive down to Greystones, maybe do a bit of bowling.”

  “Cool.” She hung up, gave a happy little leap, then showered and dressed, brushed her hair loose around her shoulders, and smudged a thin strip of dark eyeliner against her lashes. She peered at the troubling acne that persisted on her chin and dabbed some concealer over it. There was only one last thing to do.

  Hi, Kev, she prayed as she padded in bare feet into her mother’s bedroom. You met him once. I know you would approve. Please, please let him kiss me tonight.

  Her mother’s mirrored dressing table was a mess of lipstick tubes, pots of eye shadow, nail polish, face creams, a package of Nice n’ Easy Cocoa Brown hair dye. There was an ashtray in the shape of a seahorse that she was using as a jewelry holder, and curling school photos of Maggie and Ronnie stuck around the mirror frame. There were magazines and coupons and unopened mail. And there were several bottles of perfume. Maggie picked them up one by one, spritzing small bursts of jasmine, vanilla, and coconut into the bedroom, trying to find the perfect scent to make Eoin want to kiss her. When she picked up the last option, a squat, cheap-looking vial in the shape of a daisy, a plain white envelope beneath the clutter caught her attention—the fragment of her own name.

  The envelope was hidden beneath several other papers. Weird, Maggie thought. I barely ever get mail. She moved aside the stack of papers that obscured the letter. It was postmarked December 31, 1993. She picked it up. When she saw the handwriting, that distinct boyish scrawl, the trembling slants and randomly capitalized a’s, her legs went weak.

  She hid the letter under her shirt and locked herself into the bathroom. Trembling, she sat on the rim of the shower. Someone had already carefully opened the envelope with a knife. Maggie unfolded the notebook paper.

  Two tickets, printed on thick orange cardboard and paper clipped together, slipped out of the envelope and onto the bathroom floor. Maggie leaned down, her hands shaking, and picked them up. Nirvana, at the Palaghiaccio di Marino. Rome. February 22, 1994. In four days.

  The air ticked. A single song thrush twittered on the drooping electrical line. What was that wake, then, but a giant cover-up? Stay near me, Maggie. Don’t talk to those bum friends of Kevin. I never liked them. It made sense, now. Rockhead, Taco, Jeremy, even that blond girl from the Smashing Pumpkins show—they all knew. They all knew, and I didn’t. Me. His goddaughter, his niece, his Maggie. I was the only one who didn’t know. And those bum friends of his would have slipped me the truth. How had he done it, then? A rope? A razor? A small, determined step into the ice-frosted waters of Lake Michigan? Why did it feel like she was losing him all over again?

  She went back into her mother’s room. The perfume she’d sprayed hung thickly in the air: a funereal smell. She wandered, numb, into her own bedroom, crawled under the covers. She wanted to call Eoin and tell him she could not go bowling, but she didn’t trust herself to speak, or even to leave her room. Ronnie came in, once, but Maggie turned to face the wall and pretended to be napping. She played Pearl Jam’s Ten on her Discman from beginning to end and stared at the faded rose vines that crawled up and down her wallpaper. She waited, calm and singular of purpose as a sniper, for her mother to come home.

  Around dinnertime, Maggie heard the key scrape in the lock. She placed her Discman next to her pillow and looked up at the ceiling.

  “I will not cry,” she said out loud. She threw her covers off and walked out into the sitting room, where Colm stood at the door untying his work boots.

  “How did Kevin die?”

  Colm froze. He looked up at her, his dark hair falling over his eyes.

  “He died in his sleep, Maggie. You know that.”

  “No. Twenty-six-year-old men don’t die in their sleep.”

  Colm kicked one boot off, then another. He stood there at the door, looking strangely defenseless in his socked feet.

  “It was a heart defect, congenital. He had it since he was born. You know that—you saw the scar. Sometimes … these things just happen.”

  “Is there an autopsy report?”

  Colm lined his boots neatly at the door, then sat down heavily on the couch.

  “Look, Maggie. I am trying the best I can here. I know you are hurting. But it’s not my place to—I wonder if maybe you should talk to your mother if you really want to sort out the details.”

  “Okay, then. I’m staying right here and I’m waiting for my mother to come home. I swear to God if she doesn’t tell me the truth, then I will leave and never come back.”

  Colm sat there, his mouth half open, and raked his hand through his thick hair. Finally, he put his keys carefully on the end table.

  “I’ll let you wait for your mother, then. I never thought any of this was quite right.” He got up, closed the kitchen door behind him, and made a hushed phone call.

  Ten minutes later Laura arrived home, panting and flushed. She was still wearing her Dunne’s apron. She hovered at the doorway as if deciding whether to face her oldest daughter, who sat like a small dark fortress on the paisley couch, or to run.

  “Maggie.”

  “
How did Kevin die?”

  “Honey.”

  “Don’t lie to me.” Maggie’s voice was all threat. “How did he die?”

  Laura walked slowly toward her daughter, kneeled in front of Maggie on the sofa. Maggie reached beneath her sweater and thrust the letter out in front of her like a shield.

  “Mags,” Laura said. “Honey. You don’t understand.”

  “No,” Maggie said. “You stole this from me. He wrote it to me. Don’t lie to me again.”

  Her mother’s hands, damp with sweat, gripped Maggie’s knees and black mascara tears leaked from her green eyes.

  “I didn’t want you to think of him that way, honey. I didn’t want you to feel like he abandoned you. I didn’t want you to admire or—or romanticize—what he did. Or to think that doing that is a way out when life gets hard. Because life is always going to be hard.” Her mother was sobbing now, her shoulders shaking, her breath ragged. Maggie was aware, somewhere in the house, of a door closing. The soft burst of an engine coming to life. Colm shuttling Ronnie off somewhere, to spare at least one daughter from the truth. “Maybe it was wrong to lie to you, but I was trying to protect you. Me and Nanny Ei both. You’ve got to try and understand that.”

  “I want to know how he did it,” Maggie said.

  Laura dragged herself up, pushing off Maggie’s knees, and sat on the couch. She breathed deeply, gathering herself to tell the story.

  “He went to a party that night,” she began, her eyes glued to the cloth bowl of apron in her lap. “He was drinking, he was doing drugs. He left the party and went home—everything that Nanny Ei said about that part of it was true. He went to the bird sanctuary; he saw the full moon. He told Nanny Ei about it and kissed her good night, and she went to bed. But what he did then—” she stopped.

  “Tell me.”

  “He grabbed his blood thinner meds—you know, the stuff he takes for his heart. He went back to Jeremy’s house and he took the whole bottle of pills. The party had mostly broken up by then, so no one was around. He locked himself in the bathroom. Jeremy broke down the door the next day and found him in the bathtub with his wrists cut.”