The Carnival at Bray (16 page)

“How long has she been in here?” Maggie asked as they waited for the elevator.

“This time around, been about two weeks. Since right
before Christmas. Holidays are not optimal times for people with mental illness.”

“Holidays are not optimal times for most people,” Maggie observed. The elevator dinged, the doors slid open, and a nurse wheeled out a balding, jaundiced man, who was hunched over in his wheelchair and muttering to himself “One, two, three! One, two, three!” over and over again. Maggie's heart began to pound: she'd never been in a hospital before. Eoin remained stoic, but in the empty elevator, he stood closer to her than he needed to.

They stepped out of the elevator into a clean, carpeted hallway. A signpost on the wall read: FLOOR 8 PSYCHOSIS. Unmarked doors stretched in two directions. Eoin marched to the one on the left and pressed the buzzer. He waved at a small camera hanging from the ceiling and the door clicked open. Maggie hesitated.

“Come on,” Eoin said, reaching back to grab her hand. “They don't bite. Well, some of them do. But they keep those ones in a different ward.”

Maggie laughed weakly at his joke and followed him toward the sound of a bell-sweet soprano that was drifting down the empty corridor. The voice was singing “Raglan Road,” perfectly on pitch, clear as rainwater, without the accompaniment of so much as a harmonica.

The door was ajar and Eoin knocked gently before pushing it open. His mother was sitting in a plastic chair, facing the window. She was dressed in a beige tracksuit, her thick back and large rump spreading across the seat. She wore a pair of gray socks and Adidas sandals, and her hair was tied up in a ponytail. The ponytail part was showgirl blond, but the roots were a faded, dull brown.

It was only when she stopped singing that she seemed to feel, as mothers do, the nearness of her child. She whipped her head around, revealing a once-pretty face gone droopy and stretched with rapid weight gain—the bloated side effects of
steroids or heavy meds. A sheen of sweat stood out at her hairline and upper lip, where a faint mustache was apparent in the sunlight that slanted in through the barred window. Her star had fallen, that much was clear, but Maggie could see that Eoin's mother still possessed a faded glamour, the imprint of a memory of what she once was. She passed a hand over her lips as if ashamed at their chapped state, and pawed self-consciously at her hair. But if she was surprised or unhappy to see them, she didn't show it. Her smile was genuine, maternal:
normal.
She didn't look like the type of woman who could be capable of strangling her child.

“Hi, Mammy.”

“Eoin, darling.” She rose from her chair and wrapped him in a hug. He collapsed into her just a little, pressed his cheek to her hair. Touching his mother, Eoin's eyes fluttered closed. Maggie picked up a week-old issue of the
Irish Times
that was folded on the nightstand and pretended to read.

“Mammy, this is my friend, Maggie,” he said.

“Hello, Maggie,” Eoin's mother bowed her head politely.

“Hi, Mrs. Brennan,” she said shyly.

“Oh, please! Call me Mary. You make me feel old. Please, sit down! You'll have some tea.” She pointed at the bed, and Eoin and Maggie sat next to each other on the edge of it. She went over to a small dresser next to the sink and flicked on the electric kettle.

“How are you feeling, Mammy?”

Mary sat down heavily in her chair, sighing deeply.

“I'm good, I'm good,” she said. “Everyone here is very nice. Except the night nurse, of course.”

Maggie wanted to know more about the night nurse, but Eoin changed the subject quickly.

“We heard you singing when we came down the hall. Your voice is top-notch, Mammy. Sounds like the good old days.”

She pulled nervously at her ponytail, girlish and pleased.

“D'you think so? I've been putting lots of lemon and honey
in my tea, trying to get my voice back. And I even gave up the fags. Haven't smoked in three days! The doctors here have arranged for me to put on a little concert this evening. Nothing too glamorous, of course. Just a little singsong in the canteen for the other patients on the ward.” The kettle clicked off and she stood up and began to pour the tea.

“Well, that's great!” Eoin's voice had taken on an artificial quality, as if he was talking to a child prone to tantrums.

“Well, it's the least I can do for these poor people,” she said, handing them their tea in thick paper cups. “You should see them—shitting themselves, wandering the halls half-crazed, babbling to themselves. It's awful. They're pure lunatics, most of them. But even a mad man can appreciate a bit of music, and as Jesus teaches us, we're meant to shine our light with the world—”

“Not hide it under a bushel,” Eoin finished. “I know, Mammy. That's one of your favorites.”

Mary beamed, reached over, and patted Eoin's cheek.

“My good boy,” she said. “You always
listened
to your mother.” She turned back to Maggie. “You see, I treat these little concerts as practice. I've got to keep my voice in shape for the bigger venues. Why, only next month I'll be giving a show at the Cork Opera House.” She stopped, struck with an idea, and clapped her hands together. Her nails were long and pointed, and smeared with chipped purple polish. “You know what? The two of you should come! I'll call Eddie Naughton and get him to reserve you some seats!”

“That would be great!” Maggie said. “I've never been to an opera before.”

“It isn't opera, though,” Mary explained. “I sing traditional music. They've got Luke Kelly to accompany me on the banjo.” She sipped her tea gleefully. “Can you believe it? The great Luke Kelly!”

Eoin, who had been twisting his hands together on his lap, began cracking his knuckles loudly, one by one. His Adam's apple
bounced like a Geiger counter. He glanced at Maggie and shook his head nearly imperceptibly.

“What time's your show today?” Eoin asked with that same bright tone he'd been using since they'd arrived. “We'd love to stay and watch. I'd love for Maggie to hear you sing.”

“Well, that would be lovely!” Mary smiled broadly. “What an unexpected treat. The show goes on right after supper—in about an hour. So you'll have to clear out for now. Even if it's just a practice gig, I need my privacy before I go on. I need to practice my scales, put on a little makeup and all that.”

“Well, we'll leave you then, so.” He put his cup on the dresser, leaned down, and kissed her quickly on the top of her head. “And we'll see you in the canteen in about an hour.”

Mary walked them to the door. She put a hand on Eoin's cheek, searched his face with a pair of blank, gray eyes.

“My good boy,” she said again, and now her voice was trembling, and she threw her arms around his neck. He hugged her back, and Maggie watched with a growing sense of shame.
How can he still love his mother, who almost killed him,
she wondered,
when sometimes I hate mine and I don't even know why?

The hospital canteen was filled with late-afternoon light. It had high, arched, Plexiglas windows. The patients, murmuring quietly, were shuffling along the food line with their dinner trays. Young women in hairnets scooped turkey and parsley sauce, potatoes, and mashed turnips onto their plastic plates.

“I'm excited to hear your mom perform!” Maggie said, as she stepped into the canteen. “Will we eat dinner here, too?”

Eoin took her arm gently and held her back.

“There's no concert in the canteen,” he said. “And no concert in the Cork Opera House. Luke Kelly's been dead for ten years, and my mother will probably never sing again for any crowd, not even this sad bunch.” He waved a hand at the dining room. The patients were seated together at long tables, high school cafeteria
style, but most ate with their heads bowed, content in their solitude, and Maggie was struck by how deeply lonely the sound of a fork scraping a plate at a silent table could be.

“I've found that the best way to keep her happy is to humor her,” he said as they waited for the elevator. “We smile at each other and tell polite lies—and that's how I save our relationship.” He shook his head. “I know it sounds funny, but you don't know what I would give to have a knock-down-drag-out
fight
with my mother, like a normal teenager!”

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?”