The Carnival at Bray (19 page)

“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?

She found an unclaimed mattress near the windows and sat down. Scattered about the room were travelers poring over guidebooks or drinking beer, young people from all over the world. A few beds down from where she sat, a heavyset man with a perfectly shaped bald head and skin so smooth and gorgeously dark it was nearly blue—Maggie finally understood why the Gaelic term for
black man
was
fear gorm,
which translated to “blue man”—was sitting before a small audience, ankles crossed, his back curved over his guitar. He was playing “Brokedown Palace,” a Grateful Dead song Maggie recognized from Kevin's hippie phase. She sat on her lower bunk with her bag in her lap and listened.
Fare you well, my honey, / Fare you well, my only true one …
They'd had to dig his grave with pickaxes, once the funeral party had been shepherded away to the warm banquet hall. Terrible enough if it had been visited upon him by fate, by a failed heart. But how could he have wanted that for himself?
All the birds that were singing have flown / except you alone …

“Are you okay?”

Maggie looked up into the face of one of the most beautiful women she had ever seen. The accent was American, and hearing that nasal enunciation after months of Irish lilt gave Maggie a jarring flash of homesickness.

“Sorry,” she said. “I was just listening to that guy play.” The woman, who looked five or six years older than Maggie, had long blond hair that hung in tangles down to her waist, with pieces loosely braided throughout. She wore a soft-knitted sweater, the kind everyone back home called a drug rug. She glanced in the direction of the music and sat next to Maggie on the bed.

“That's Ehi,” she said. “He's a friend of mine. Pretty good, huh? You play music?”

Maggie shook her head. “But my uncle does.”
Did.

“Well, Ehi can probably teach you some chords, if you're interested.” She stuck out a hand, the fingers long and tapered, elegant. “I'm Ashley.”

“Maggie.” She shook the soft hand.

“I'm from California. Santa Cruz. Been traveling all over. Asia, Eastern Europe, North Africa—that's where I met Ehi. He's from Ghana, but when I met him he was a student in Cairo on semester break. I convinced him to extend it. We've spent the last six months backpacking Europe. Ireland's one of our last stops—we've got a couple more days here—then it's over to Scandinavia. Then, I guess, home.” She looked over at Ehi, smiled absentmindedly. “I suppose that's where he and I will part ways.”

“Is he your boyfriend?”

Ashley shrugged.

“As much as either one of us has ownership of the other, I guess. I haven't told him I'm headed home yet.” She sighed dramatically. “I'm dreading it.”

Ashley pulled a pack of Silk Cut Blues out of her sweater pocket and offered one to Maggie. Maggie didn't really want one—she'd grown up in a house of smokers, so the act had never
seemed particularly rebellious—but Ashley, with her beachy hair and debutante's nose, had a quality about her that made you want to accept whatever it was she offered. Maggie took the cigarette and Ashley pulled out a Zippo and flicked open the flame. The foul taste filled Maggie's lungs, but with an iron will—and a lifetime of secondhand smoke—she suppressed a cough and exhaled in a gray cloud.

“So. What's your story?” Ashley asked, lighting her own cigarette.

“Me?” Maggie's mind raced, pausing on several different lies before settling on one that she thought Ashley would believe. “Well, I'm from Chicago. But I live here now—I'm just down in Dublin for a couple nights to look at colleges.”

“Colleges!” Ashley laughed, exhaling smoke like a mod girl from a sixties movie. “You look like you're about twelve!”

“No, actually I'm eighteen.” The cigarette had made the air buzz, and Maggie felt giddy and sophisticated. She
felt
eighteen.

“Well, I'm probably not the right person you should be talking to,” Ashley said. “I dropped out. I thought I'd get my education through travel. I've been to over forty countries.”

“What was your favorite?”

“Morocco, without a doubt. I grew up watching
Casablanca
and being there, I actually
felt
like Ingrid Bergman, you know?”

Maggie didn't, but she nodded encouragingly. It was so nice to have somebody to talk to—an American, no less—and she didn't want Ashley to leave.

“So, you here by yourself?” Ashley stretched her legs, which were long and tanned and covered with downy blond hair, and put them on Maggie's lap. She had chipped red paint on her toenails and a gold ring around her middle toe that tinkled with tiny bells.

“Well, for tonight,” said Maggie. “But my boyfriend's going to meet me in a couple of days.” She liked the way the word
boyfriend
felt on her tongue, even if it was a lie.

“Well, you should come out with us tonight, then,” Ashley said. “There's nothing more depressing than sitting alone in an empty hostel on a Saturday night.” She ran a hand through her tangled hair. “Meet us downstairs at the bar in an hour, okay? I'm going to go take a shower. I just had sex and I need to freshen up down there, you know?” She winked and sauntered off toward Ehi's bed, and in her departure Maggie was left to process this stunning bit of candor.

Maggie had an hour to make herself look eighteen, and the concealer and eyeliner she'd brought in her Ziploc bag weren't going to cut it, especially not with this crowd. She rushed down the stairs and out onto the street, where she found a small pharmacy a couple doors down from the hostel. She bought some cheap black mascara, a compact with blush and eye shadow, red lipstick, and a little vial of drugstore perfume.

Back at Nora Barnacle's, she stood before a shattered mirror in the communal women's bathroom and attacked her teeth with a glob of toothpaste. She tarred her lashes in the mascara, rubbed the gray shadow along her lids, swiped blush along her cheekbones and painted her lips a deep red. She put on the black cotton dress she'd packed for the Nirvana show and pulled on her boots, stuffing her money and her concert tickets into the ankle. On her way downstairs, she paused to look at herself in the bathroom mirror again. The makeup and the tight black dress made her appear not just older, but dangerous and urban. She felt that this was a self that she could inhabit, a person she could become. She tied Kevin's flannel around her waist. Her pilgrimage had begun.

Ehi and Ashley were already drinking at the hostel bar with a small, eclectic crowd of Europeans.

“Beer?” Ehi offered, his voice booming over the thin pop music that streamed from a speaker above the bottles of whiskey and rum. Maggie nodded shyly and he called to the bartender, who put a Heineken in front of her. She'd tried wine and port
before, and even whiskey, but this was her first-ever sip of beer. It was awful.

Ashley appeared at her side. She'd wrapped her hair in some sort of red printed scarf, and she looked like a gorgeous gypsy from a Grimm's fairy tale.

“So, Chicago, tell me the truth. I
know
you're not here to look at colleges. Europeans don't
do
that. You're a runaway, aren't you?”