The Carnival at Bray Read online

  Copyright © 2014 Jessie Ann Foley

  Winner of the 2014 Helen Sheehan YA Book Prize

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For information about permission to reproduce sections from this book, contact Permissions at [email protected]. Elephant Rock Books are distributed by Small Press United, a division of Independent Publishers Group.

  Lyrics for “Dumb” used by permission. Words and music by Kurt Cobain. Copyright © 1993 The End of Music LLC, Primary Wave Tunes, and BMG Platinum Songs. All Rights Administered by BMG Rights Management (US) LLC. All Rights Reserved.

  ISBN: 9780989515597

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014937608

  Printed in the United States of America

  Book Design by Amanda Schwarz,

  Fisheye Graphic Services, Chicago

  First Edition

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Elephant Rock Books

  Ashford, Connecticut

  For Denis, the measure of my dreams

  If you’re lucky, at the right time you come across music that is not only “great,” or interesting, or “incredible,” or fun, but actually sustaining. Your emotions shoot out to crazy extremes; you feel both ennobled and unworthy, saved and damned. You hear that this is what life is all about, that this is what it is for.

  —Greil Marcus, Ranters & Crowd Pleasers: Punk in Pop Music, 1977–92

  September 1993

  The carnival at Bray stood braced against the rain on the rocky coastline of the Irish Sea, the pink and green lights of the old-fashioned Ferris wheel winking and dissolving in the reflection of the waves. Maggie had already ridden the Takeoff, which made her feel like a pebble being skipped across a lake; the Crazy Frog, which whiplashed her back and forth so hard that she dinged her head off the safety bar and emerged with a painful purple egg already rising from her temple; and finally, Space Odyssey, which spun around so fast that gravity suctioned her and Ronnie to the cushioned wall like splattered bugs. Halfway through the ride, a girl who was pinioned across from them barfed, but the suction was so strong that the puke no sooner arced from her mouth than it was sucked back with a wet splat all over her own face. The ride ended abruptly, sending everyone thudding to the ground, and the sisters fled the sour smell of peanuty vomit on wobbly legs.

  “Where to next?” Ronnie was counting the remaining tokens in her palm. “I still have enough for three more rides.”

  “Aren’t you getting cold?” Maggie looked at her little sister, whose pale, wet hair was plastered to her head and whose hand-me-down windbreaker hung to her knees as warm and waterproof as a plastic grocery bag.

  “Yeah, but Mom said she wasn’t going to pick us up until the carnival closes.” Ronnie squinted across the dark road at the row of pubs and moss-streaked hotels where their mother had fled with Colm. “Do you think they’ll get back sooner?”

  “And interrupt honeymoon time?” Maggie laughed. “Be serious.”

  “What does that even mean?”

  “I’ll tell you when you’re my age.”

  “But that’s what you said about ‘douche,’ and ‘condom,’ and the first line of that Liz Phair song,” Ronnie complained.

  “Well,” Maggie said, putting an arm around her sister’s thin shoulders and drawing her under the leaky umbrella, “honeymoon time is kind of like all three of those combined. When you’re sixteen and I’m twenty-one, we’ll talk all about it. Now—where should we cash in the rest of those tokens?”

  “Bumper cars!” Ronnie shrieked, breaking free from the protection of the umbrella and racing ahead to the arena, where empty cars pointed every which way like in one of those apocalyptic movies where a whole city evacuates to escape an infectious disease.

  “Don’t you want to go on the Ferris wheel?” Maggie called after her. She reached up and touched the lump at her temple. It was hot and throbbing, and dotted in the center with a small smear of blood.

  “C’mon! Let’s do the bumper cars! Please? Please? Please? Please?” Ronnie hopped up and down beneath her sodden windbreaker.

  “Fine,” Maggie sighed, holding out her hand to the rain to clean the blood from her fingers.

  Ronnie flashed a winning smile, infectious and gap toothed, and they lined up behind the small herd of other little kids who stood waiting to turn in their tokens. Maggie was taller than all of them by at least a head. Earlier, they’d passed a group of Irish teenagers, kids of about Maggie’s age—maybe even her future classmates at Saint Brigid’s. The boys were dressed in tracksuits and gym shoe brands she’d never heard of, and the girls wore tights under their skirts and heavy gold necklaces. Not one of them had even glanced in her direction. Maggie was quickly learning that being Irish-American, as she was, was quite different than actually being Irish. Now, she stood behind Ronnie and watched the group as they walked toward the road. Their clothes, their slang, the way they wore their hair: all of it was foreign and unfamiliar; all of it was new, intimidating, and strange. I’m never going to fit in here, she thought.

  The announcement that, after four months of dating, their mother was marrying a man five years her junior and they were all moving to his hometown in Ireland so he could help run his brother’s construction business wasn’t really all that surprising. Since the day ten years earlier when Maggie’s father had walked out on them for a woman known in their home only as Bitch, her mom had developed a tendency to fall madly in love with whatever loser she was currently dating. It had always been easy for Laura Lynch to meet men—she was still young, had high, round breasts and green eyes fringed in long, mascara-tarred lashes, and she spoke in a gentle, low voice that men leaned in to hear. Each of her romances was a whirlwind, and each ended in total disaster. In the aftermath, Laura would lubricate her despair with great quantities of red wine and the occasional sleeping pill. Over the years, whenever this happened, Maggie had learned to quietly pack a bag for herself and Ronnie, drag it up the stairs, and knock on the door to their grandma’s apartment on the second floor of the two-flat.

  “Mom’s having one of her moments,” she’d explain.

  “How bad this time?” Nanny Ei, dressed in pleated jeans and a seasonal turtleneck, would step out in the hallway and the three of them would listen to the noises drifting up the stairs from the first floor. Sometimes there was sobbing. Other times there was drunken snoring. For the really bad times, there was Bob Dylan’s The Freewheelin’ blasting from the tape player, and for the really really bad times, there was Joni Mitchell’s Blue album, with Laura howling along in an off-key soprano.

  “Okay, girls,” Nanny Ei would sigh, herding them into her cozy apartment of faded beige carpets, fried breakfast smells, and cable TV. “I’ll make some pork and beans.”

  When she met Colm in April, Laura was coming off a Blue-level breakup with Ned, the gambling addict who had spent most of his days walking around the apartment shouting bets into the cordless phone and crop-dusting the air with silent, sulfurous farts. Colm possessed all of the qualities that Ned—and, for that matter, all of Laura’s previous boyfriends—lacked. He had a job, for one thing, and teeth that appeared to be brushed regularly, for another. Not only that, he seemed to be as crazy about Laura as she was about him. In August, they were married at the Cook County Courthouse. In September, they moved to Colm’s clean little house in Bray, a damp, briny town a half hour outside Dublin.

  Ronnie chose a shiny yellow bumper car, while Maggie picked pale blue. The ride operator turned a switch, and the electric current beneath Maggie�
��s car hummed to life. She lurched forward just as a jug-eared boy who could barely see above his dashboard stomped on the gas and reversed into her at full speed. His laughter trilled into the night while Maggie’s head whipped back. White, drifting stars filled her vision. She managed to steer over to the rubber edge of the ring and park while Ronnie and the other kids flew past, yelling, laughing, crashing.

  By the time the ride operator switched off the power and Maggie wobbled across the track to find her sister, Ronnie had befriended all the other kids from the bumper cars, even the jug-eared boy with the demolition streak. One little girl was unfurling sheets of pink cotton candy and handing them out to the others. She gave Ronnie a long piece, and Ronnie took it and folded it up into squares, like origami, then shoved the entire parcel into her mouth. The other kids laughed, and some of them began folding up their pieces, too. When Ronnie saw Maggie, she waved.

  “Hey!” She called, her mouth full, “we’re going to go back to Space Odyssey! Come on!”

  But what was the point? Maggie thought. What if the teenagers, the girls in the dark lipstick and jean skirts, saw her walk by with this group of ten-year-olds?

  She waved her sister away. “Nah,” she lied, “I’m just gonna go meet some people at the Ferris wheel. I’ll see you when Mom gets here.” Ronnie looked at her across the wet pavement and the ringing lights of the booths—Dart-a-Card, Smash-a-Can, Roll-a-Coin—as if she was trying to figure something out. Finally she shrugged, and ran to catch up with the other kids.

  The drizzle had quickened into a heavy rain, and the clouds over the sea rolled by, their dark shapes blackening the whole sky. Maggie stood alone beneath the Ferris wheel, its great twinkling arms reaching up in spindly supplication to the low sky. Fat raindrops poked holes into the choppy gray surface of the sea. When they’d first arrived in Bray, Colm told them that it was just like Chicago: if you want to know what direction you’re going, just remember that the water is always to the east. But on the Northwest Side of Chicago, you had to ride the eastbound bus for over fifty blocks before you began to smell the water; here, the sea was pervasive. On sunny days it glinted from the crests of hills or between the walls of buildings, and at night, while Maggie lay in bed, its restless sighing shaped a feeling in her chest that she couldn’t quite name. Even her clothes and hair began to take on its fishy, expansive smell, but eventually, and sooner than she expected, she stopped noticing, the way a woman stops noticing the scent of her own perfume.

  “Last ride! Last ride!” a man called, the tip of his cigarette glowing in the cozy shelter of his ticket booth. Maggie felt in her pocket and produced a few coins that flashed in her palm like silver fish. The man took her money and dumped it in a drawer.

  “Sit wherever you like,” he said, jabbing a thumb at the empty Ferris wheel.

  She sat in the nearest carriage and pulled down the safety bar. The ride jolted, and she was lifted into the dark, misty sky. Colm had told them, if you want to be a true Irishwoman, you’ve got to become an expert on water. Salty water and clear water, thick rain and misty rain, downpours and trickles, thundery rain and soft rain. He had explained the difference between a sea and an ocean, but now she could not remember and her head hurt too much to think very hard. She reached up and ran her fingers over the lump. It started just under her wet hairline and stood out from her scalp at least half an inch. Back home, she thought, the bell would just be ringing on the last period of her first day of her sophomore year.

  The ride climbed and climbed, arcing away from the center of the wheel, until Maggie was higher than the steeple of Saint Paul’s Church, and the group of teenagers walking down the shore, huddled together against the rain, were as small as board-game pieces. Across the asphalt strip from the carnival, at a pub called Quayside, she could see into a bright square of window. Even as far away as she was, she could tell that the two dark heads leaning together were Colm and her mother, sitting at a table with drinks between them, oblivious to the rest of the world, completely and totally and nauseatingly in love. One by one, she watched the lights of the carnival booths winking out, and still the ride climbed higher. She looked east, out to where there was nothing but waves and darkness. Breathing in the dampness, Maggie wondered what would happen if she tumbled out of her seat, splashing into the lapping nothingness, and how long it would take before someone noticed she was gone.

  The weekend before they moved to Ireland, Ronnie, who had a green belt in tae kwon do, was chosen to perform at an exhibition with her dojo in Milwaukee. The whole family was set to go, until Maggie came down with the summer flu.

  “Vicks VapoRub and a dehumidifier,” fussed Nanny Ei, “and you’ll be right as rain in the morning.”

  “Saltines and a can of Coke,” Laura advised.

  “No, no. For a flu, what you need to do is boil an onion in milk, add honey, and drink it down in one go,” Colm said.

  Maggie burrowed into the velvet nest of her grandma’s couch, half-listening in her feverish state to the discussion about what to do with her. When the conversation had reached an impasse, her uncle Kevin, who was twenty-six and still lived at home with Nanny Ei, emerged from the cave of patchouli and Newport smoke that served as his bedroom. Sandwiched under his armpit was a copy of Ranters & Crowd Pleasers: Punk in Pop Music, 1977–92, a book that lately he’d been quoting from at family dinners.

  Maybe it was because there was only ten years between them, or maybe it was simply because of the way he was, but Maggie had never viewed her uncle Kevin as an authority figure—more like an adored older brother. Uncle Kevin was the youngest of Nanny Ei’s three children, and though it would be unfair to call him spoiled—Nanny Ei’s household had been one of tough, blue-collar love, the kind where Christmas stockings were stuffed with practical gifts like socks, toothbrushes, and hard, bitter navel oranges—he was certainly the most doted upon. This was partially due to the heart condition he’d been born with, the two open-heart surgeries before the age of two, the long white scars across his chest, the warning from his doctors that he was never to play contact sports of any kind. Which was just fine by Kevin: he never had any interest in sports. He’d begun playing the guitar at age six, formed his first band by age twelve, and lately had finally begun to find some local radio play with his band, Selfish Fetus, and to book shows at venues that people had actually heard of—the Empty Bottle, the Hideout—and which people actually began to attend. To those around him, he emanated the nervous energy of someone who is close enough to touch a dream they’ve been chasing all their life.

  “Let the poor kid stay home if she’s sick,” he said. “I got no plans this weekend. I can watch her.”

  Colm and Laura glanced at one another and burst out laughing.

  “Absolutely not,” Laura said. “I love you, Kev. But there is no friggin’ way I’m letting you watch my kid all weekend.”

  Kevin threw himself on the couch next to Maggie and lit a cigarette.

  “So let me get this straight,” he said, exhaling. “You’d trust me with Maggie’s spiritual upbringing—her very Catholic soul, but you won’t trust me to give her some Nyquil and make sure she’s in bed at a decent hour?”

  “Christ on a crutch, Kevin,” Laura glared at him. “If I had known how much you were going to throw it in my face, I would never have made you her godfather.”

  “Well, you did, sis. And what God has joined, no man shall put asunder.” He put an arm around Maggie and floated a halo of smoke in Laura’s direction.

  “Well, the only reason I did was because Dave was stationed in the Philippines. You were ten years old—I figured, how much harm could it do? How was I supposed to know that you’d grow up to be a man with about as much sense of responsibility as your average poodle?”

  “Aw, now, love. You’re not being fair,” Colm said. “Even a poodle can be house trained.” He was referring to an incident earlier that summer when Kevin had come home drunk and peed in a corner of the living room.

  “Wel
l, why don’t we ask my goddaughter what she wants?” Kevin said, ignoring Colm’s bait. He turned to Maggie, who was emptying her nostrils into a tissue. “Mags, would you like me to watch you this weekend?”

  Of course she did, and everyone in the family knew it. But all the reasons why Maggie loved Kevin—his long, unwashed hair, his incessant guitar playing, his curse-riddled rants about the corporate takeover of radio stations, his dog-eared copy of Ranters & Crowd Pleasers—were all the reasons her mother deemed him an unfit caretaker, godfather, and brother.

  “May I interject?”

  Nanny Ei, dressed in a pair of khaki shorts and an Andre Dawson jersey that was at least two sizes too large on her little-old-lady frame, came in from the kitchen carrying a plate of sliced pears.

  “It is only one night, Laura.” She put the plate on the coffee table next to a pile of Maggie’s balled-up tissues. “And everybody deserves a second chance. Sometimes even a third and a fourth. Now eat those, young lady. They got Vitamin C.”

  That settled it. The rest of the family left for Milwaukee while Maggie and Kevin stayed back and watched a marathon of This Old House. Halfway through the fourth episode, Kevin reached across the couch and poked Maggie’s socked toe.

  “You’re not really sick, right?”

  “Of course I am!” Maggie sat up in her cocoon of blankets. “I’ve had a fever for, like, three days!”

  “Bullshit. You just didn’t want to go to your sister’s karate thing. And I respect that.”

  “Uncle Kev, I swear to God, I really am sick. If I wasn’t, I would tell you.” She bit into a droopy piece of pear while Kevin reached over with the back of his hand and felt her forehead.

  “Feels just fine to me.”

  Maggie batted his hand away.

  “Nanny checked me like an hour ago. I was almost 102 degrees!” Maggie lifted her own palm to her forehead. But Kevin was right. It was as if he had channeled some strange godfatherly powers: she could feel the fever draining out of her.