The Carnival at Bray

by Jessie Ann Foley

  She put her head in her hands.

  “He did it there so Nanny Ei wouldn’t have to see. God, there must have been so much blood. I can’t think about it. I can’t. I didn’t want you to have to think about it either.”

  A razor. A bathtub full of thinned, watery blood. A small jar of pills meant to help his heart.

  “Can you understand?” Laura said softly. “Can you understand why I thought it would be better just to lie?”

  Maggie nodded, staring at the panels of the timber floor. She could not look at her mother. Laura kept talking, crying, the words tumbling out, the explanations. But Maggie had stopped listening. Had he already decided to do it when he’d come to Bray for Christmas? Had he joked with her and chatted with her and sang for her, all the while knowing—no, deciding—that he would never see her again? No. It wasn’t possible. It was one impulsive act, made on an angry whim, fueled by drugs, gasstation champagne, and a whole lifetime of impulsive acts that had always, somehow, carried him safely into his next waking. That was the only explanation. Maybe he had experienced a moment of clear-headed panic watching the life pour out of his wrists, splashing at the tepid bathwater with weakening legs, just before he slipped away. Maybe he had been thinking, Reverse this, reverse this. I want to go to shows at the Metro and make love to blond strangers and sing my throat to sandpaper. I want to play the Double Door and start a new band. I want to live. I want to fall in love. I want to see my nieces grow up.

  But no. Because he’d thought far enough ahead to write the letter. He’d been clear thinking enough to buy an international stamp and drop it in the mail.

  This was what he had wanted.

  That night, Maggie let her mother brush her hair and make her a hot chocolate. She didn’t ask her why she had chosen to shelter her from this truth when she had never sheltered her from anything else. She let her mother tuck her into bed. She became as passive and blank as she’d been with Paul against the Ferris wheel.

  As soon as she heard the shallow snores of her mother and Colm on the other side of the wall, Maggie pulled her duffel bag from under her bed, packed her necessities, propped open the window, and climbed out. She ran up the back hill, feeling the mud ankle deep, squelching into the instep of her Converse. Oh, starless Ireland, there was no way to look up and find her way, but now she knew it by feel, past the dark hulk of Auntie Rosie’s house beyond the field, and up to Dan Sean’s. She was high enough that the clouds had wisped away and the whole cup of Wicklow was there before her, the basin of the Irish Sea, the lapping shore, the black bulk of Bray Head. She stood for a full minute in front of Dan Sean’s door, her hand wavering on the doorknob. She turned it. Locked.

  She peeked in the front window. The only light inside was a circle of dying red embers in the huge brick fireplace. Dan Sean’s rocking chair was empty, his blanket folded neatly on the velvet cushion. Even if he were to hear her ring the doorbell, Maggie couldn’t bring herself to roust a ninety-nine-year-old man from his sleep.

  In the muddy yard behind the house, a small shed stood surrounded by rusty farming equipment and bales of silage. Inside, Dan Sean’s gray-spotted goat, Billy, lay sleeping on the straw. The February wind battered Maggie’s thin jacket as she approached the shed. She crossed her arms and shivered. Never before had she felt so entirely alone. There was nowhere else for her to go: not home, not Eoin’s, not Aíne’s, not anywhere. It can’t get any worse than this, can it, Kev? she prayed. If you could just help me make it through tonight, I know things will never be this bad again. She crept into the doorway and Billy swung her head around, the moonlight glancing off her beady eyes. She nickered, a sharp, insulted blast from deep in her throat. Maggie, shushing her, reached out a hand and pet the bristly spine at the ridge of her back.

  “I promise I’ll be out in the morning,” she whispered. Billy glared at Maggie for another moment. Then, perhaps with an animal’s innate sense of things, she swung her head away and snuffled back into the hay, leaving just enough room for Maggie to curl next to her. The shed was thick with the smells of mud and manure. Maggie pulled Kevin’s flannel shirt tightly around her shoulders, covered herself with the dry straw, and snuggled into Billy’s warm animal stink. The goat’s rib cage rose and fell against her cheek, the quick heartbeat quivering beneath the spotted skin. Maggie didn’t think she would ever be able to sleep, but as the shed warmed with the heat of their bodies, the sorrow and exhaustion of the night overcame her, and the small space soon fell away into a dream in which her fingers trailed through warm bathwater, searching for the upturned faces of all the people she loved.

  Just before dawn, Maggie was awoken by a kick to the back.

  “Jesus, Billy,” she said, rolling over. “I get your drift.” The goat responded by stepping on her, its hooves digging into the soft flesh of her stomach, and strutting out of the shed into the morning. It stood directly outside the doorway, glaring at Maggie with beady, malevolent eyes, and issued a forceful stream of urine that splashed off the mud and onto her jeans. Dodging the stream, Maggie climbed out of the shed on all fours and backed away from the resentful goat. Her muscles, clenched against the damp cold all night, were achy and stiff. She reached down to touch her toes, joints cracking, while Billy wandered off to search the yard for bits of garbage to eat.

  The morning was cold and foggy, a hanging greenness in the air. The sleep had done Maggie well—she still felt shaken, but resolved. There was no going back. There was only Rome. For a month now, Maggie had been praying to Kevin instead of God, and finding that letter six weeks after his funeral and only four days before the concert made her feel like he had heard her prayers and answered them. She now believed, with an evangelical determination, that he would find a way to get her to Italy, too. She pulled his flannel tight around her shoulders, rubbed a kink at the back of her neck, and stood for a moment watching the sky lighten the peaks of the hills. Then, she unzipped her duffel bag and laid out its contents: the fifty-pound note Nanny Ei had given her at Christmas, her Discman, her Liz Phair, Nirvana, and Selfish Fetus CDs, a few changes of clothes and underwear, Kevin’s compass, a plastic bag containing a toothbrush, concealer, and black eyeliner, and finally, zipped carefully into the inner pocket, the concert tickets.

  It was enough.

  She went around to the back of Dan Sean’s house and found that someone had unlocked the back door. “Dan Sean?” she called, turning the knob. It was early, but she knew he’d be awake. He was on farmers’ hours, even now.

  He was not in the sitting room, so she went to the metal bucket at the side of the fireplace and stoked the embers with some turf. It caught, and the fire filled the room with its earthy smoke. Maggie sat on the floor in front of the blaze for a while, closing her eyes while the glorious heat burned warmth back into her cheeks. Woody, joyful at her presence, came loping down the stairs on his two front legs, the cat darting past him and out the opened door.

  “Mike?” The reedy voice traveled down the narrow staircase. “I’m up here.”

  Maggie hesitated. She’d never been up to the second floor of Dan Sean’s house before. “Dan Sean? It’s me, Maggie!”

  She stood at the bottom of the stairs and listened. No response.

  “I hope you’re decent,” she called, her hand on the railing. “I’m coming up!”

  The upstairs was cold, dim, and low ceilinged. Mass cards lined the walls of the narrow hallway, which smelled of dander and stale bedding. A candle flickered inside the bedroom door, where Dan Sean was crouched on a faded velvet church kneeler before a shrine to the Blessed Virgin. Glass votives, their wicks burning high in the still air, lined the altar. In the middle was a statue, nearly four feet tall, of the Virgin Mary in her traditional blue robes, her eyes and palms pointing heavenward. Bunches of dried lavender and rhododendron were stuffed in plastic vases at the corners of the altar, and Dan Sean was halfway through his rosary. Oh my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell, lead all souls to Heaven, especiall
y those who have most need of your mercy. Maggie hovered at the doorway and waited for him to finish, his mumbled words ticking over the Hail Marys and Our Fathers, the Glory Bes, the Holy Mysteries. For the first time, she saw him without his Cossack’s hat. His head was small and thin skinned, with bits of white hair horseshoed around his ears. He wore a pair of old-fashioned pajamas, unbuttoned to reveal a concave chest as brindled with liver spots as a horse’s hide. Hail, Holy Queen, mother of mercy, our life, our sweetness, and our hope. To you we cry, poor banished children of Eve; to you we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears. Show unto us the blessed fruit of your womb Jesus. O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary. He crossed himself, kissed the rosary, and dropped it back in its little silk pouch. Maggie went over to him. He put his arthritically puffed hands in hers and allowed himself to be helped up, but his eyes were glazed and far away. For the old, Maggie imagined, finishing a rosary was like leaving a concert was for a younger person—it took you a while to adjust back to the normal world. The religion of Dan Sean’s generation, it turned out, was still religion.

  “Put on the kettle and stoke the fire,” he instructed. “I’ve got to get dressed.”

  She went downstairs and began preparing the tea. When he came down ten minutes later, he was neatly dressed in his suit and hat.

  “Dan Sean,” she said, stirring the milk into her cup, “I’m leaving town for a bit today. I wanted to say good-bye.”

  “Not back to America, I hope?”

  She shook her head. “Rome.”

  “Ah!” Dan Sean clapped his hands together. “On a pilgrimage?”

  “Well, I’ve never really thought about it that way, but yeah.” She smiled suddenly. “A pilgrimage.”

  “Where are you staying?”

  “I have absolutely no idea.”

  Dan Sean banged his mug on the little end table next to his chair. “Go into the other room and get me my address book.”

  Maggie found the stained leather journal next to a broken rotary telephone. When she handed it to him, he fanned her away.

  “Christ above, there’s a smell off you!”

  “I know, I know,” she said, lifting the dirty cuff of her sweater to her nose. “I slept outside with Billy last night.”

  “Well, what’d you do that for? Go in there and take a bath. I’ll have this ready when you come out.”

  He pointed to the bathroom, and Maggie put down her tea and humbly obeyed, closing the door behind her. The bathtub was a simple corrugated basin, and when she turned on the ancient faucets they moaned, spilling warm water down rusty trails. She took off her clothes, folded them carefully, and huddled into the tub. Dan Sean’s small shaving mirror hung from the faucet. In its reflection, her hands reached to the wooden windowsill for the box of Borax soap and poured it into the water. Without being able to see her familiar, teenaged face in the mirror, Maggie was able to admire her body for the first time. It was like watching the private movements of a stranger. The hands cupped the soapy water and washed the white neck, the lightly freckled shoulders, and the two round breasts, entirely formed and entirely hers. Water streamed over her skin as she rubbed Borax into her hair and washed it in the shadowy light from the frosted glass window. The hands then rubbed the belly, the thighs, between the thighs, and down to the toes with their paint-chipped toenails. When she was finished, she pulled the stopper and climbed out of the bath, her skin feeling as shrunken and clean as bleached laundry. She pulled on a clean pair of underwear, letting her hands linger over the drying heat of her own skin, and combed her wet hair with her fingers. When she emerged from the bathroom, dressed in a fresh pair of jeans and a Nirvana t-shirt, Dan Sean was waving a piece of paper at her.

  “This is the address for the Chiese del Domine Quo Vadis,” he said. “The Church of Lord, Where Are You Going. This is where you can see the soles of Jesus’s feet imprinted in the marble. There’s a convent hotel nearby, the Casa di Santa Barbara. You can get there by taking the bus towards Volpi. Tell Marta that you’re my friend—she’ll give you a good rate.”

  Maggie folded the note and put it in her pocket. She hugged Dan Sean’s small, trembling frame.

  “Thank you for everything.” Her eyes stung with sudden tears.

  “You can thank me by bringing me back some holy water!” he yelled.

  “You got it, old man.” She kissed the cool skin of his jowly cheek and stepped out into the yard, where Billy stood near the chicken wire fence chewing on a Crunchie wrapper.

  “Thanks for your hospitality, Billy!” Maggie called as she passed. The goat responded by tossing her head, swishing her tail, and emitting a low, rumbling fart.

  As Maggie headed toward town, the winter sunshine warmed the crown of her wet head, drying her hair in soft waves. For the first time since New Year’s Day, she felt the heavy stone of grief in her heart begin to lift. She was scared and alone and hungry, but at least she was doing something: Closure. A pilgrimage. Nirvana.

  At the train station café, she bought a sausage roll, a soggy gray oval of meat wrapped in a sheen of greasy biscuit. Biting into it, she was flooded with hunger. She realized that she had not eaten since the previous afternoon, when she and Ronnie had shared biscuits and currant bread before she’d gone up to Dan Sean’s. Before the letter. Licking her fingers, she went back to the shop and bought a paper cup of tea and a chocolate bar—runaway food, the packaged provisions of the motherless. She bought a ticket to Dublin from the automated machine, popped Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville into her Discman, and sat on a bench waiting for the train. A hotel bellman whistled past, followed by a homeless woman with long, flyaway gray hair and a pair of young brothers in matching Limerick jerseys and hurling sticks slung over their shoulders. An African mother in yellow robes and a matching headpiece tried to navigate a stroller containing a screaming baby around the uneven pavement. As Maggie watched the woman, she realized, with a stabbing sense of possibility, how free she was. Unencumbered by family anymore, the world was hers. It would have been nice to say good-bye to Eoin, but she could always find a payphone once she got to the city. Maybe he could even come hang out with her at night, find her a place to stay, tell her where she could eat for cheap. She would only be gone a few days. Or maybe longer. She didn’t know.

  It was a forty-minute ride to Dublin. When she stepped off the platform at Connolly station, teeming with office workers and backpackers hoofing their huge multicolored packs and buskers singing Beatles songs, guitar cases opened at their feet and glittering with coins, Maggie felt the rush of urban chaos that reminded her of home, of the night Kevin had taken her to the Smashing Pumpkins show and they’d danced all night and in the morning, even the cars looked wilted and the sun was a pink wine stain across the jagged Chicago skyline, ushering in another perfect summer day.

  There were plenty of hotels constellating from the streets that surrounded the train station, and even though most were shabby with flashing neon signs and gruff cashiers, the prices they advertised in their smudged windows were enough to eat up, in two or three days, the little money Maggie had—and that was before she found a way to hustle up the money for a plane ticket to Italy. Since she had nowhere else to go, she walked around for the better part of the morning, as far out as the posh, brightly colored doors and brick facades of Ballsbridge, and back into the city center. She walked through Trinity again, under the Campanile and past the Old Library, and then around again, until late afternoon, when lowering clouds threatened rain and the soles of her feet ached inside the slap of her thin Converse. There were all sorts of nice little cafés advertising their soup and sandwich specials on chalkboards outside their front doors, but Maggie had to be careful with her money and instead stopped for a hamburger at Supermac’s. What she wanted, with an irrational pique of longing for someone who’d been a runaway for exactly twenty-four hours, was a Coke, but she asked for a cup of water instead, which was free, and which was given to her reluctantly by the bucktoothed
manager who looked at her askance as she sat, hunched over her paper bag, devouring. It made her feel like a street urchin already.

  She briefly considered sleeping in a quiet corner of Saint Stephen’s Green and waking early in the morning to find her way out to the airport, but the incessant, bone-chilling February rain that had begun to fall made her reconsider. She was about to give up, return to the train station, and find a bench, when she walked past a backpackers’ hostel, an open doorway with a garish pink sign: Nora Barnacle’s—Beds 4 Cheap. A group of twenty-somethings stood clumped around the door, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and speaking a language that sounded like blowing bubbles. They ignored her when she walked inside.

  Behind the desk, a small, Slavic-looking girl with blond hair and a yellow warm-up jacket was sitting and staring at a tiny television.

  “Yes?” She did not look away from her program.

  “Um, what are your room rates for tonight?”

  “Ten pounds. Fifteen if you want sheets and towel.”

  Maggie fingered the folded bills in her front pocket. How necessary, really, were sheets anyway?

  “I don’t need sheets.” She pushed the money across the counter and the girl glanced at Maggie’s small, threadbare duffel bag without comment. Maggie liked that. If this was a mind-your-own-business type of place, then she’d chosen well.

  “Go up stairs behind me,” said the girl, pointing. “Pick a bed that’s open. Curfew midnight.”

  Maggie, suppressing a grin, thanked the girl and headed up the stairs. A curfew of midnight was no curfew at all—her mom had always made her come home at eleven, Nanny Ei, nine thirty.

  The setup of the dorm was nearly identical to the Girl Scout camp in Galena where Maggie had been discarded for a week many years back when her parents had been, as they’d explained, “working on us for a while.” The room was a large, spare loft, with high, narrow windows and rows of utilitarian bunk beds. The open bunks were indicated by their bare, striped mattresses, and others were made up with the scratchy white sheets that Maggie hadn’t been able to afford. Some were covered with warm nylon sleeping bags that Maggie stared at enviously. Why hadn’t she brought a warmer coat?