The Carnival at Bray (12 page)

Then, the accordion player closed his instrument and the fiddler dropped his fiddle to his side, leaving behind no sound but a humming in the air and the panting of the people, and before anyone could even cheer, the whistle player stood, a wiry little man with deep creases in his forehead, and he played a long, sustained note that trembled in such a way that the wild joy of only a moment ago was replaced entirely with something else, a deep feeling that was not quite unhappy but that matched the strange mix of celebration and mortality one feels at the wintry ending of every closing year. At the sound of the trembling note, couples moved closer to each other as if drawn by an invisible force, and Maggie could feel the heat off Eoin's skin as he moved into her. His close-cropped hair held a sweet muskiness. She closed her eyes to avoid her mom's ogling or Ronnie's spying, so that she could forget everything but his body near hers and the spare, sad notes of the whistle.

Rosie took her place in front of the musicians. The dancers, still catching their breath from the Siege of Ennis, eyed one
another and nodded in anticipation. Rosie began to sing along with the whistle:

A Róisín ná bíodh brón ort fé'r éirigh dhuit

Tá Na bráithre ‘teacht thar sáile ‘s iad ag triall ar muir—

The Irish words were completely foreign to Maggie but still strangely familiar, like the time only a week after they'd moved to Bray, when she had walked past a woman on Adelaide Street who wore the same perfume as Nanny Ei. She felt Eoin's body tense, straining to listen. Rosie bowed her head at the end of the verse while the whistle played on. Maggie whispered, “Do you know what it means?” He nodded against her cheek.

“Tell me?”

She could feel him hesitate for a moment, but then he relaxed and pulled her closer to translate, his lips moving in her hair: “Little Rose, don't be sad for all that has happened to you.” His hand moved up her back and she felt his warm palm through her thin sweater. His lips skimmed the ridge of her ear: “Over mountains did I go with you, under the sails upon the sea.” She no longer heard Rosie singing, only the whistle and Eoin's voice against her ear: “Fragrant branch, every mountain glen in Ireland will quake someday before my Dark Little Rose will die.”

The song ended in an eruption of applause and whistling. Rosie smiled and gave a little bow, picked up her bar rag, and resumed taking drink orders. Tom Jones came back on the speakers and the world inside the pub began to move again. But Maggie and Eoin were no longer a part of it. They stood still together in the middle of the close, smoky bar, and his lips moved away from her ear and found her lips. She felt his kiss in every cell of her body, trembling, legs weak, cheeks flushed. It was undiluted happiness, of a kind so intense she didn't think she could stand it much longer, it would break her open and
reveal all her tender parts. She pulled away and met his eyes, which were bright and shining and seemed to reflect everything she had just felt.

“I've been wanting to do that since the minute I saw you,” he whispered.

“Me too.” Somewhere far away, as if in a dream, Maggie heard her mother laughing and the Tom Jones song asking, “What's new, pussycat?”

“Come with me.” Eoin grabbed her hand and they slipped out the back door and into the cold dampness of the alley, and he kissed her again, the air sparkling around them with light snow, her back cold against the stone wall.

“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.

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.