The Carnival at Bray (10 page)

It was Christmas Day in County Wicklow, the rain blowing in from the sea, and by the time she made it up the back hill to Dan Sean's house, Maggie was soaked, her face ruddy with rain. She knocked once, then let herself in, as was the custom at Dan Sean's. He was sitting in his usual spot, the high-backed velvet chair in front of the enormous fireplace. Mike had strung Christmas lights and tinsel around the ceiling, and it lightened up the drab Oriental carpet, the wallpaper etched in years of dust, the pictures, brown and fading, in their frames.

He smiled at her beneath his Cossack's hat and waved her in. He was dressed for the holiday in a more dapper manner than usual, a bright green scarf knotted at the loose skin of his neck. Maggie went over to him and kissed his cheek, which was soft and hairless as a baby's.

“Happy Christmas, Dan Sean.”

He insisted on making the tea himself, and she sat with him in front of the fire for the whole afternoon, the mug cooling in
her hands. There were no arguments or whispered conversations, just the crackling of the fire, Dan Sean's whistled breathing, and the rain against the window. It calmed her. In the presence of all his years, it was hard for Maggie to feel that her problems were all that special. As the shadows lengthened outside the windows, she reached into her jacket pocket and held Kevin's compass in her palm, rolled it across her knuckles like an ocean-smoothed stone, and let her anger ebb away into Dan Sean's great ancientness. His head nodded forward on the lump of his scarf, the cat and dog stretched indolently next to each other, the fire flickered, the tinsel sparkled, and it began to finally feel like Christmas.

Mike came in after the sun went down and pointed at the hunched form in the rocking chair.

“He sleeping?”

Maggie nodded.

“We're just going to have a bit of dinner down at the house,” he said. “Dan Sean?” He put a hand softly on a corduroy knee, and the old man awoke with a jerk and a snort.

“I was just on my way, anyway,” said Maggie.

“I heard about what happened down at the Quayside last night,” Mike said. “With your uncle. Nothing like the holidays to bring out the worst in people.”

“They've never gotten along,” she explained. “It's just family stuff.”

Dan Sean stood creakily and ambled off to the bathroom.

“It's good of you to come up here and see him,” Mike said. “Poor old fella. Sometimes it's hard, with the family and the kids and all, to get up and see him as much as I'd like. I hate thinking of him up here all alone for hours at a stretch. But he won't move in with us. Everything important that's ever happened to him has happened within these walls. He says he won't leave till he's carried out in a casket like his wife and child before him, the stubborn old codger.”

While Dan Sean held onto Mike's arm and retreated slowly down the hill, Maggie walked home in the darkness. The ditches along the side of the road and the shadows of stone fences were all familiar now. She lingered, walking slowly past Rosie Horan's house where, back from the road, the sitting room windows gleamed their bright warmth. Human figures moved about behind the bright squares like moths, and Maggie walked as slowly as she dared, squinting for a sign of a buzzed head and broad shoulders.
Just to see him from far away would be enough,
she thought,
after a Christmas like this one.
But as she passed by, someone reached up and shut the curtains.

When she got home, dinner was almost ready and nobody asked where she had been. Maggie ate a little roast beef and some lumpy potatoes. The food felt heavy in her stomach and made her tired. Ronnie had gotten a puzzle for Christmas, a giant map whose pieces were every country in the world. When dinner was over, the two of them spread it on the carpet in front of the Christmas tree and split up the continents between them. Africa gave them the most problems, and they stayed up later than all the adults, who had gone to bed early to end the dull ache of their hangovers. By the time the clock had moved past midnight on Christmas 1993, they finally clicked the last piece into place: Angola, nestled between Zaire and Namibia and bordering the vast, lapping Atlantic. Then, having succeeded in putting the world back together, they went to bed.

When Maggie was a little girl, she suffered from terrible ear infections. They always got worse in the middle of the night, while her mom was out working at the bar. When she cried out in pain, Nanny Ei would come into her bedroom, lay her on her side, and squirt a medication down her ear canal that fizzed through the clogging pus, making Maggie feel like her ears were melting from the inside out. The pills she was given made her groggy and heavy-headed, and everything—her bedroom carpeting, the streetlights outside, her pink and gold bedspread—took on funhouse colors that made her reach out her limp fingers in weak wonder.

On these fevered nights, while she tossed and turned, Uncle Kevin would come into her room, sit at the edge of her bed, and play softly on his guitar. He was eighteen then and deeply entrenched in his hippie phase. He wore the same tattered pair of gray corduroys every day and had a ponytail of fat, fuzzy dreadlocks that Nanny Ei was always threatening to chop off in his sleep. When he leaned over Maggie to kiss her good night, they brushed her forehead, softer than they looked, and filled her room with their loamy smell. It still remained one of Maggie's favorite memories, lying with the pressure leaking out of her ears and the bedspread soft and swirling pink and her uncle singing folk songs to her in the darkness:
I wish I was a headlight on a northbound train. I wish I was a headlight on a northbound train. I'd shine my light through cool Colorado rain.

Kevin had a mystical hold on the memories of the people who loved him, a magnetic pull, and maybe this was the reason that although Nanny Ei had planned to stay in Bray until New Year's Day, she became anxious to get back to Chicago as soon as Christmas was over. On Saint Stephen's Day, the family took the train to Dublin and walked the holiday-abandoned streets along the path of the Liffey, which was black and oily, its concrete banks clotted with dark moss and the occasional silver of dead fish. The following day, Nanny Ei announced that she was worried about Kevin, about whether he got home okay, about whether he had gone to the hospital to get his nose set, about whether the transient women and burnout men with whom he associated were sleeping naked on her hand-patched quilts while she was out of town. There was another argument, of course, with Laura yelling and Colm shaking his head and Ronnie crying and Maggie quietly seething. Nanny Ei left the following morning.

Aíne returned from Kilkenny the same day and immediately called Maggie to put the screws to her to go on another double date with Paul. Maggie refused, until Aíne, near tears, confessed that her mother wouldn't let her spend time alone with Paddy and that she needed Maggie and Paul to act as buffers.

“You don't have to do anything you don't want to do,” she begged. “You don't even have to
talk
to each other if you don't want to. You just need to
be
there.”

“Why don't you just lie to her about who you're going out with?” Maggie asked. “That's what I would do.”

“This isn't a big city like Chicago,” Aíne sighed. “My mother's got spies all over the place. Can't you just come out with us for one night? I know the two of you didn't fall madly in love or anything last time, but Paul's a lovely fella once you get to know him. Smart, too.
Please?”

And Paul
was
nice. He wasn't bad looking either. But then there was the matter of his cold, acrobatic tongue. Kissing had
felt more intimate—more
physical
—than Maggie had anticipated. She'd been aware of the soft, mammalian puffs of Paul's nostrils, the tremor of his shaking hands. It wasn't something she thought she could fake her way through again, especially because, having experienced it, it just made her wonder all the more intensely what it would be like to kiss Eoin. Would it be different with every boy? Was kissing a boy the one true way to find out how you felt about them?

“Fine,” Maggie finally agreed. “But if you think I'm going to make out with him again, you're crazy.”

They met the boys at the carnival later that evening. The night was damp; a cold, briny wind blew in from the sea. They took shelter underneath the heavy canvas shell that protected the magic teacups from the corrosive winter air. Inside, it was dark and cozy as a tepee, the teacups immobile, skewered like huge marshmallows at the ends of their metal spokes. The hub in the middle of the ride was large enough for the four of them to sit cross-legged in a tight circle, their backs against the cold spokes, squinting to see the features of each other's faces in the darkness and listening to the wind batter the tarp outside.

“Look what I brought,” Paul grinned, pulling a small bottle of whiskey from the inside pocket of his coat. “Who wants some?”

“I don't drink,” Aíne sniffed, nestling into Paddy's lap.

“Yeah.” Paddy folded his skinny arms around her. “Keep that stuff to yourself, Paul.”

“Suit yourself, lads.” Paul unscrewed the cap and took a swig, grimacing as the liquor spilled down his throat. “Maggie? Care for a nip?”

Back in Chicago, it was mostly the rich kids who spent their weekends getting sloshed on the stolen contents of their parents' liquor cabinets. As the daughter of a bartender, and a member of the hard-partying Lynch family, Maggie had never really seen the
allure. But the events of the last few days had put her in a self-destructive mood.

“Hand it over,” she said, ignoring Aíne's disapproving glare, and took a sip big enough to make her eyes burn.

“Strong stuff, isn't it?” Paul laughed as she wiped her eyes.

“It's not
that
strong.” She took an even bigger drink, then, and forced it down with a straight face. It continued in this way: while Paddy and Aíne whispered and kissed on their side of the teacup's hub, she and Paul passed the bottle back and forth. In twenty minutes, it was empty. Maggie scooted closer to Paul, and taking her hint, his fingers crept across her back and came to rest around her shoulder.
Our first kiss wasn't
so
awful,
she thought.
I mean, it could have been a lot worse.
She experimented with resting her head on his arm. It didn't feel terrible. On the other side of the hub, Aíne was welded to Paddy with the needy grip of a skydiving pupil to her instructor. He began reciting to her some poetry he'd learned in school.

“
Te spectem suprema mihi cum venerit hora
,” he said, twining his fingers around hers, “
Et teneam moriens deficiente manu
.”

“That's Tibullus,” slurred Paul. “We're in the same honors Latin class. Don't let him impress you, Aíne.”

“But I know how to translate it, too,” Paddy bragged. He turned back to Aíne and cleared his throat, looking deeply into her eyes in the way Maggie was sure he had practiced after seeing in a movie. “May I gaze upon you when my last hour has come, and dying, may I hold you with my faltering hand.”

Aíne leaned in and kissed him. Maggie felt shot through with sudden jealousy—not because her friend had found love first, but because Aíne, for all her academic intelligence, was not the kind of girl to appreciate such poetry. What drove her was ambition, not passion. But Maggie, who had been raised on song lyrics as their own kind of poetry, felt tears in her eyes. She wiped them away fiercely. She'd die before she let them know what words meant
to her. From her slumped position under Paul's arm, she called, “Don't make me
vomit.”

“I wouldn't expect you to appreciate Tibullus,” said Paddy imperiously. “You're from a rough crowd, is what I've heard.”

Maggie sat up.

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“It means I heard what happened to your uncle outside the Quayside. Got a right belting, I heard. And broke Rosie Horan's brand-new front door in the process.”

“What do you know about my uncle, you nerdy little prick?” She scrambled to her feet, the liquor beating in her temples.

“I know he's a scumbag who likes to start trouble, and that he got what was coming to him, is what I know.”

He smiled at her, a mean, goading smile, while Aíne watched from the safety of his dorky arms. Maggie grabbed the empty whiskey bottle from Paul's hand and threw it at Paddy's smug face as hard as she could. He and Aíne both ducked, and it shattered against the red polka-dotted surface of one of the magic teacups, spraying shards of glass all over the tiny space.

“Owww!” Aíne squealed, covering her face with her hands. A piece of broken bottle had knicked her in the soft indentation right below her eye, and blood began seeping from the wound.

“For fuck's sake!” Paddy yelled, nestling Aíne's face into his chest. “Mad bitch. Must run in the family, I guess.”