Maggie's Door by Patricia Reilly Giff Page A

somewhere doing nothing, thinking nothing.
    She glanced at the people around her. She made herself concentrate on them. So many of them. Some were leaning on the railing. One man had a long string. He had attached a shirt to it and dangled it far over the side of the ship. Washing his clothes, she told herself.
    Children were everywhere, chasing each other, running around knots of women who leaned together, talking.
    After a while she closed her eyes. On such a day, with the sun warm on her eyelids, it was hard to imagine the terrible storm they’d been through. It was hard to imagine that she would never see Granda again.
    How could that be?
    She’d never again walk along the strand at Maidin Bay holding his hand. His hand was hard, she remembered, with calluses on his palms from digging in the potato field. She’d never sit in their house listening to his stories while the fire threw shadows across the whitewashed walls. So many stories he had told: about being a young man and fighting with the French against the English, about meeting her grandmother Bird at the fair in Drumatoole.
    She thought of Sean then, and the ribbon he had pulled from her hair when she was eight.
    Everyone was gone.
    And Anna’s cures, too.
    In her mind she saw Anna bent over her table, her head raised in her little white cap, telling her, “If you want to cure, you have to know what will help and what won’t.”
    She had knelt on Granda’s bunk, Anna’s seeds spilling on the coats, not knowing what would work, what wouldn’t work.
    She’d never try to cure anyone again. How terrible to think of a life without it, though. She had loved grinding the bits and pieces of flowers and leaves together; she had loved listening to Anna telling her about what to do, showing her how to soothe a cough, to bind a broken bone.
    But maybe she had given Granda the wrong cure, done the wrong thing. Maybe she knew nothing about cures that would help anyone.
    You’ve healed your foot,
Anna said in her mind.
    It might have healed anyway.
    What about Eliza?
    Eliza was too tough to die.
    Nory couldn’t even cry. Her throat burned, and the back of her eyes. The wind had turned and she could feel her hair blowing against her face. If only she could sleep for a moment.
    She heard someone leaning over her. “Miss.”
    She opened her eyes. It was Garvey, the steward. His thin face was red and she could see his hand trembling just a bit.
    “I know you can heal,” he said.
    “That I cannot,” she said.
    “My friend is hurt,” he told her. “He has been burned.”
    It ran through her mind quickly.
Buttermilk for sunburn. But for serious burns, one part beeswax to four parts mutton fat. Add camomile flowers. Keep the wound clean; keep it covered.
    But was it beeswax? Was it camomile? She didn’t know anymore.
    You do,
Anna said.
    Where would she even find beeswax or mutton fat? And she had thrown the camomile over the side of the ship. “I’m sorry,” she told him. “It’s no use.”
    Garvey looked desperate. “Do you know anyone then who will help?”
    And then something else, something Anna had said that Nory hadn’t thought of since Granda died.
“Sometimes my cures work, and sometimes they don’t. I wish I knew why.”
    “He’s in so much pain,” Garvey said.
    Hadn’t Anna said something about that?
“Even if the cure doesn’t work, it means something just to make the poor soul feel better.”
    Patch was one of the children running. She could see that. A dangerous thing to do. One misstep on that slippery deck and he would slide, and suppose he went over the side of the ship? She caught her breath and pushed herself to her feet. “Patch,” she called, but then she saw Eliza in back of him, watching.
    “Are you coming?” Garvey asked.
    “I was looking after my brother,” she said.
    How can you not go?
Anna would say.
    Eliza was playing a game with Patch. She had raised her dress over her ankles and was showing him how to do the steps of