The Carnival at Bray (22 page)

“I can scream for help, you know.”

“And I can break your pretty little nose.”

“Okay, okay.” Ashley's voice was small and pouty. “We already spent your money on these drinks.”

“I don't give a crap about the money,” Maggie said. Her face was an inch from Ashley's. She could see the tiny pores along the sides of her lovely nose, the pale lashes tipped in white. She could smell the expensive scotch rolling off her breath. “But I want those tickets back.
Now.”

“I can't reach them until you let go of my arm.”

Maggie released her grip, saw the receding imprint of her fingers on Ashley's flesh. Ashley reached down to the bag at her feet, her eyes darting around the lobby for an escape route. Eoin shifted his weight until he was standing right at the arm of her chair, so that if she wanted to escape she would have get past him. She knew better than to try. She unzipped the green backpack under her chair. Inside it, Maggie could see a stack of winking silver engraved with the Shelbourne S, and even a few stalks of cut hydrangea from the displays in the lobby. Ashley dug past these items and produced the tickets. Maggie ripped them from her hand and stuffed them down her sweater and into her bra. Then, she picked up Ashley's scotch glass. It was as heavy as a paperweight. She downed the last quarter inch of the liquor in one
gulp. It burned hotly down her throat. She wiped her mouth and looked at Eoin. “You ready?”

“Yeah.” He was fighting a smile.

On the way back out to the lobby, Maggie walked up to the manager, who was arranging their two glasses of Glenfiddich onto a tray.

“You might want to check that woman's bag,” she said, pointing over at Ashley. “She's about to make off with some of your fancy nut bowls.”

They walked out of the lobby and past the window just in time to see the manager stride up to their table and pull the stolen silver bowls from Ashley's bag.

“Do you want to watch the rest of the show?” Eoin asked as the manager took Ashley by the arm and waved over a security guard. Maggie shook her head.

“That's good enough for me.”

On the walk back to the hostel, the tickets folded safely in Maggie's bra, she and Eoin were giddy with victory.

“You were amazing!” Eoin laughed as they ducked under awnings and jumped from puddle to puddle. “Drinking her scotch like that!”

“My
scotch,” Maggie reminded him. “Purchased with Nanny Ei's Christmas money. Glenfiddich eighteen year—that stuff is older than we are!”

“How did it taste?”

She grinned. “Expensive.”

“Did ya hear that, everybody?” Eoin yelled to the startled strangers on the street. “Nobody fucks with Maggie Lynch!” Then he stopped right there in the middle of Grafton Street, whirled around, and kissed her in the rain.

It was late by the time they got back to Nora Barnacle's. Even Grazyna had gone home for the night, and a sleepy redheaded
boy who looked practically prepubescent had to unlock the dormitory for them. They crept past the rows of sleeping forms, the cavernous room filled with the ambient sounds of breathing and rustling people. Maggie took off Kevin's flannel and handed it up to Eoin.

“You'll be freezing without sheets,” she said.

“I'm no wimp,” he protested, but he took the shirt and put it on. He helped her to make up her bed, then climbed up the ladder to the top bunk. Maggie crawled under the thin fabric and tucked herself up into a ball. She was freezing, and she could barely stand to think about Eoin above her, curled defenseless on a bare mattress. The springs creaked as he moved around, trying to warm himself. Ten minutes or so passed by. Then, he whispered,

“You still awake?”

“Yeah,” she whispered back. The bed creaked loudly, his white feet hung momentarily above her, and he jumped down, landing with a soft thud on the tiles.

“You cold?”

“These sheets are pretty thin.”

“Move in, then,” he said. He raised his hands. “I promise to keep 'em to myself.”

She lifted the sheet and he crawled under, close enough for her to smell his deodorant and the sweaty tang of his armpits. In the darkness, Maggie's eyes were wide open. She could see the deep grooves in the wall, the messages scrawled by travelers of the past: names and dates, hearts and crosses, song lyrics. The accumulated totem scratches of the ever-moving world.

Eoin reached over and pulled Maggie toward him, his arm a quiet promise around her waist, the heat of his body a radiant line down her spine. The want, the desire, crackled between them. But he didn't try anything and she didn't want him to; it was good enough, more than good, that he only lay beside her. Was it only two days ago that she'd wondered whether he would
ever kiss her again? She remembered now the vial of perfume she'd bought at the drugstore next to the hostel, still unopened and unused in her duffel bag. Sometimes, even Dan Sean could be wrong about things. She drifted off to sleep with the Nirvana tickets pressed against her beating heart and Eoin's breath, warm and guileless, against her neck.

In a dorm with forty travelers, it was impossible to sleep in. They rose in the early morning to the zipping sleeping bags and gravelly voices of a Monday morning hostel, where travelers packed up to return to their real lives or their next guidebook destination. Eoin still had his arm around Maggie's waist.

“Good morning,” he mumbled into her neck. His face, puffy from sleep, made him look younger than his seventeen years. A red pattern from the mattress was imprinted on his cheek. She reached, with her fingers, and touched the puckered skin.

“Sleep in for a bit,” he whispered. “I'm going to catch the early train back home and get my money.”

“Are you sure?”

“I most certainly am.” He pushed a strand of hair behind her ear.

“What about your aunt?”

“She works at the pub Sunday nights. She probably didn't get home until one or two last night. She'll think I was sleeping. I'll just sneak back in through my bedroom window, get my money, and put on my school clothes. She'll probably even make me breakfast.”

He pushed away the sheet, climbed out of the bed, handed her Kevin's flannel, and pulled on his shoes.

“You sure you'll come back?” Already, she could feel how much she needed him.

“Maggie.” He leaned his arms on the metal rails of the top bunk. “Don't you trust me by now?”

“I do,” she whispered.

He scratched at the rusting springs of the bunk bed with his index finger. “I can be your person, you know,” he finally said. “I can be the person who won't hurt you.”

She lifted the sheet.

“Come back under for a minute?”

He smiled, kicked off his shoes, and climbed back into the bed. Maggie pulled the sheet over their heads. The sun filtered through the thin fabric, illuminating a faint line of stubble along Eoin's jaw. It stirred Maggie in some primal way as yet unknown to her. He brushed the hair from her eyes, kissed her forehead, her neck, her lips, then eased out of bed again, winked down at her, and left for the train station.

At Dublin airport, they waited in a long line at the Alitalia counter, only to be told that the sole flight from Dublin to Rome was sold out.

“Sold
out
?” Maggie dropped her duffel bag at her feet.

“Yes.” The ticket clerk, in her pert red and green neck scarf, smiled an empty smile. “Both today's flight and tomorrow's. I might be able to get you on for Friday morning.”

“Haven't you anything else? It's
extremely
important that we get there as soon as possible.” Eoin, trying a new tactic, was now affecting an upper-crust Dublin accent. His Saint Brendan's blazer and neat red tie made it sound almost believable. The ticket clerk clacked on her computer.

“I've one flight to Bologna,” the woman said. “From there, you could take a train to Rome—it's about three hours. But the seats are not together.” She looked at her watch. “And it leaves in fifteen minutes.”

“How much?” Eoin pulled his wad of savings from the breast pocket of his blazer.

“Two hundred ten for the both.”

“Can we make it in fifteen minutes?” Maggie leaned anxiously over the counter.

The woman picked up the phone. “I'll see if they'll hold the plane.” While she waited for a dial tone, Eoin began counting out
the money. The months, even years, of savings accumulated on the counter in small piles.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Maggie asked.

“It's just money,” Eoin shrugged, pushing it toward the clerk. “I've got my whole life to make more of it.”

“You've got to hurry,” the clerk said, hanging up her phone. “They'll only hold the plane a few extra minutes.” She handed them their tickets. “Run.”

“Let's go!” Eoin whooped. He grabbed Maggie's hand and they bolted toward the security gates, bags flying behind them, as Eoin sang out the anthem of the Roma club soccer team at the top of his lungs.
Roma Roma Roma! Core de 'sta cittá! Unico grande amore! De tanta e tanta gente! M'hai fatto ‘nammora!
As they ran, they dodged the crowds of older travelers who stared after them, a few in sour disapproval, but most with half-nostalgic smiles, perhaps remembering the way they, too, had been when they were young and free and seeing the world for the first time.

They arrived at the gate, breathless, just in time for the final boarding call.

“See you in Italy,” Eoin waved, and he went off down the aisle in search of his back-row assignment while Maggie climbed, apologizing, over a middle-aged couple dressed in matching windbreakers, and settled into her window seat. She fished around in her duffel bag for Kevin's compass and held its cool, calming weight in her palm as the jet engines roared to life. It was only when the plane began to taxi along the runway that Maggie realized the extent of what she and Eoin were doing. This wasn't a forty-minute train ride into Dublin. There was an ocean involved, and national borders. But as the plane lifted into the air and she watched out the window as Ireland fell away, rocky and impossibly green, giving way to deep blue water and then clouds, white as silence, she felt a sense of calm. She was above punishment now. Whenever it was she decided to return to Colm's house, she might
be lectured or grounded or worse, but at this moment, she just couldn't get herself to care much about some hypothetical future.
Take the boy. Don't ask permission.
Those simple instructions were her only guiding principle now, the only command she felt she had to heed. The flight attendant came around with her cart, offering coffee and packaged biscotti. Maggie ate gratefully. The food was as good as anything she'd ever tasted.

It was raining when they landed in Bologna. The small airport stood encased in fog, and the plane had to park far from the terminal gates. Maggie carefully descended a slippery metal staircase and waited for Eoin on the wet tarmac. Around her, airport employees wore reflective gear and walkie-talkies and chatted with each other. Italian sounded like crescendoing, excitable Spanish, and Maggie felt an unexpected wave of homesickness for Chicago, where Mexican grocers and taquerias had peppered Lawrence Avenue down the block from their two-flat.

By the time they'd cleared customs, bought their train tickets to Rome, and settled into their seats, it was already early afternoon, but the fog did not begin to lift until the train was well out of Bologna. The winter sun whittled away the clouds, and soon, out the window of the train, they could see the outlines of mountains and white farmhouses in the distance as if drawn in with pencil and then erased. She and Eoin sat across from each other, knees touching, and watched the foggy countryside roll along. “I've never left Ireland before,” Eoin admitted, his nose nearly pressed against the glass. “Even the cows look different.”

Somewhere in northern Tuscany, the train went into a long stone tunnel, and when it came blasting out again the fog had finally burned off. The world was dazzling and clear, and they were there, she and Eoin, throttling through its magnificence. Unlike Ireland, the country of her ancestors, Maggie had never read about Italy, except during a boring seventh grade history project about Roman aqueducts. She was totally unprepared for its beauty.
Crumbling farmhouses stood between the crevasses of hills painted with endless lines of spindly winter grapevines. Bare persimmon trees lined the dusty roads near the train tracks. Cypresses, the mythical trees of the afterlife, reached in clusters into the wide sky, as black and streamlined as arrows. Maggie and Eoin sat and gaped, chins resting on the windowsill of their train compartment. It went on like that for hours: Arezzo. Cortona. Montepulciano. Hills, pale dirt, stone walls, rows and rows of mute cypress and tangled, regimented vineyards. Outside the train was all of this, and inside was Eoin, his knee warm against hers, and the reclaimed concert tickets, nestled against her heart in the cup of her bra.