The last piece showed a red roof. Oren fitted it into the puzzle, and the rain outside stopped.
That alone would not have troubled him. What troubled him was the railway bell. The tracks behind his shop had been pulled up when he was nine.
His sister Nell stood in the doorway with two coffees. She looked past him, through the window, and set both cups on the floor.
“Where’s the car park?”
Across the street, the old station had acquired a roof. A man in a yellow waistcoat was pushing a luggage trolley along its platform. The butcher’s shop beside it was a café. Above the café hung a sign Oren knew from a photograph: BELL’S REFRESHMENT ROOMS.
The photograph had been taken before the fire.
Oren repaired jigsaws. He cut missing pieces, matched the faded print, and sold the results to people who liked the assurance of finishing something. Nell said he should charge for each hour rather than each puzzle. She had been saying this for twelve years, through three separate accountancy qualifications.
Today’s puzzle came in a wooden box with no maker’s name. Its picture showed the station at night, flames rising behind it. Along the bottom ran a date from sixty-seven years ago. Oren had picked it up at an estate sale because the pieces were hand-cut and because, despite the picture, the box smelled pleasantly of cedar.
There were two almost identical pieces where the refreshment rooms should be. One had a black roof, one a red. The black was charred at its edge. He had put that one aside to copy it, then tried the red one for fit.
Now the assembled picture showed a lighted window, and no fire.
Nell bent over the table. “Take it out.”
He did.
Rain struck the window. The station roof vanished. The trolley became a shopping cart in the car park, tilted against the payment machine.
Neither of them spoke. Oren put the piece down well clear of its hole.
“Coffee,” Nell said finally.
It was on the floor. They had stepped over it without spilling any, which seemed a remarkable achievement for the morning.
They experimented with the puzzle’s edges. Nothing happened. Oren lifted a piece showing the road, then replaced it. Still nothing. Only when the whole picture was joined, with the red roof completing it, did the bell sound and the rain cease. Removing any piece restored the car park.
Both of them remembered each change. The passersby continued walking, whether on the platform or beside the parked cars, without looking surprised.
With the puzzle complete for a third time, Nell went across the street. She returned carrying a bun in a white paper bag.
“Don’t undo it while I’m out there.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“You did when I was halfway to the door.”
He had. They had not known yet what might happen to someone outside the shop.
She placed the bag next to his coffee. The café receipt said BELL FAMILY, ESTABLISHED 1884. Below it was a website address. The refreshment rooms had lasted long enough to get a website.
On his phone, Oren found the town’s history page. The great station fire had become a chimney fire, contained before it spread. Six people who had died in the version he remembered had escaped. One had bought the refreshment rooms the following year.
He knew those six names. He had painted their little memorial board for the town council. It had hung beside the car park entrance.
“We can’t leave it,” he said.
Nell was reading the page over his shoulder. “Why?”
“Look at everything it changes.”
“I’m looking.”
She scrolled through photographs. The station had remained open; the town had grown around the line. There was a swimming pool where the old freight yard had been. Oren’s house still stood, but his shop sign in a street photograph read OREN MARCH, PICTURE FRAMING. In the corner of the photograph he was holding a long wooden frame, wearing a shirt he had never owned.
He went behind the counter. There were frames stacked where his replacement-piece stock belonged. His bank app showed a balance higher than the one he had checked that morning.
“You look prosperous,” Nell said.
“I don’t know how to run this business.”
“You know how to cut wood and charge too little. You’ll recognize it.”
He pulled the road piece out. The frames became his labeled drawers. Rain began again. Nell shut her eyes.
“You didn’t ask me.”
“We need time to think.”
“You keep deciding which world we think in.”
He could have said it was his puzzle. The argument arrived complete in his head, small and ugly, and he let it stay there.
Nell opened the history page again. Now it listed six dead. She read all the names aloud. At the fourth she stopped to swallow.
“What about the people alive here who wouldn’t be there?” he asked.
“We don’t know.”
“That’s the problem.”
“It’s a problem in both directions.”
The afternoon passed through the shop’s little panes. They ate the bun from Bell’s, which remained a bun after the café disappeared. Oren wondered what else could be carried between versions. He did not want to find out with a person.
Once, a customer came in for a replacement corner. They said it wasn’t ready. Oren had finished it the previous evening. He could not trust himself to open its drawer.
At four Nell called her husband. The children were home from school; supper was going to be late. She asked him to leave the phone on while she and Oren restored the picture.
The railway bell sounded. Nell’s husband was still talking. Same children, same supper. In this world she had met him at the swimming pool rather than at a cousin’s party. He laughed when she asked if he remembered the party.
“There wasn’t a party. Your cousin broke his ankle.”
Nell looked at Oren. She ended the call with a promise to come home soon.
“I have those memories too,” she said. “They’re arriving. Like remembering a film I saw years ago.”
Oren’s hands remembered joining a frame. There was an order waiting for him in the shop diary, written in his own slanting capitals. He could almost recall the woman who had placed it.
“I want this one,” Nell said.
Outside, two people were running for the train, laughing. One held an open umbrella over both their heads though the pavement was dry.
Oren looked at the puzzle. “We’d be choosing for everyone.”
“You already did. Several times.”
He sat until the shop grew dim. Then he put his hand over the red-roof piece, without lifting it.
“It can’t be on a table anyone can knock.”
Together they slid a thin board under the assembled puzzle. They clamped its edges, fitted a second board over it, and put the package inside the empty framing cabinet. Oren drilled through the cabinet doors and screwed a plate across them. There was still a way to open it, if someone worked at it. He would not pretend screws had solved what they had done.
Nell wrote down the six names, the two roof pieces, and each experiment. She made him sign the account. They kept separate copies.
“Come to supper,” she said.
“Are we all right?”
She looked at the cabinet. “You can come to supper.”
He took his coat. At the station a train was waiting, its windows yellow in the dusk. Nell went ahead while he locked the shop. From the platform she called his name, impatient because he had stopped to watch a girl help an old man lift his bag aboard.
Oren hurried across. He had a train to learn how to catch.
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