Maggie's Door by Patricia Reilly Giff Read Free Book Online Page B

Granda with his white beard and his head full of stories for her, Da with his smiling eyes.
    The day before he had left for the fishing trip she had walked with Da. A bone cold day it had been, and she had slipped her hand in his, feeling the size of it, the warmth. He had promised her it would be only months until he’d be home with pockets jingling.
    He had never been able to come, though, not in more than a year, but he was waiting for her here.
    Bundles were piled in doorways and out in the open. Nory stumbled against one of them and realized the bundles were alive. People were sleeping there, whole families.
    “Da,” she said as loud as she could, and Patch said it too, his soft breath against her neck. She called until her voice was hoarse, and the bundles around them stirred angrily, but no one answered her. People began to mutter and she knew it was the sound of her voice that kept them awake. Someone threw a stone that glanced off the side of her bag and hit a wall in back of them.
    At last they sank down in a rough spot at the corner of a building. Nory pulled her bag in between the two of them, and she held Patch’s hand across the top of it to keep it safe. Patch was asleep almost at once, his pale eyelashes down over his cheek.
    She watched him, remembering when he was just beginning to walk, his cheeks round, his legs sturdy, as she held him up. But now his cheeks were sunken, his freckles standing out in that white face, and his legs were nothing but bones.
    Tomorrow,
she told herself.
Somehow . . .
Her eyes fluttered closed and she slept until just before dawn, when the harbor came to life.
    Bundles moved, changed shapes, people called out to each other. “A ship,” someone cried.
    Nory turned. Their ship?
    It had been on Nory’s mind all the time she had walked from Maidin Bay. Shining, clean and white, sails billowing. A sight that would never be forgotten.
    But this? Anchored just outside the harbor, dirty gray, pails of bilge water cascading over the side. That couldn’t be her ship, could it?
    She leaned over as a man went by. “Where is that ship going?”
    He looked after it. “Where most of them go. First to Liverpool, and then to America or Canada.” He shrugged. “Or down to the bottom of the sea.”
    “Will there be food?” she asked.
    “Not yet,” the man said. “The ship will take you to Liverpool first, and you must have your own food until you board the ship there that will take you to the Americas.”
    Nory’s stomach lurched from hunger. Next to her Patch had awakened too. His lips were dry and his head was back against the building. He had to have something to eat. It would have been better, she thought, if he had pulled at her skirt and cried for food, but he was too weak even for that.
    A long, ragged line was forming at the edge of the quay. Small boats kept filling with people; then sailors rowed them out to the ship.
    Where was Da? she wondered. Where were Granda and Celia?
    At the head of the line an old woman screamed as a sailor tried to push her onto one of the boats. Nory could see she was terrified of the rough water that splashed up between the quay and the small boat. And to get onto the boat she’d have to jump that distance.
    The woman grasped a wooden post with one hand. “I can’t,” she wailed.
    “How do you think you’re going to get out to the ship, old shawlie?” the sailor asked, laughing. “It’s not going to scrape the bottom of the harbor to come in for you.”
    Still the old woman hesitated.
    “You’re holding us up.” He grabbed her arms and in one motion tossed her into the boat.
    Nory’s hand went to her face as the woman landed painfully in the bottom and lay there sobbing, her long skirt soaked with the filthy water that sloshed back and forth between the seats.
    “This is just the beginning.” The sailor shrugged. “What do you think it’s like on the ocean with waves thirty feet high?” He called across to another sailor,