The Missing Piece at the Top Station

The night shift in the cable-car maintenance room was supposed to be quiet. Zosia and Halima had checked the cables, oiled the wheels, and signed the long form. It was one in the morning, and nothing was left to do.

That was when Zosia sat down at the jigsaw.

The jigsaw lived on the big steel table in the middle of the room. It was a wooden puzzle of the mountain. It had two thousand pieces and a very blue sky. Eleven different crews had worked on it over four winters. Nobody had ever finished it, because nobody could agree on where the sky pieces went.

"There are forty sky pieces left," Zosia said happily. "Forty. I can feel it. Tonight is the night."

"You said that last Tuesday," Halima said. She was eating a cold sausage roll and reading the repair log. "And the Tuesday before."

"This time I have a system."

"Your system is to hold each piece up to the light and say 'hmm.'"

"It works for me," Zosia said with great dignity.

They were still arguing about the system at ten past three. Then the door sensor on Cabin Four began to beep. Halima looked up. An orange light was blinking on the control panel, and it did not look like a joke.

"That is not good," she said.

They climbed the ladder to the loading platform and found the problem in about a minute. The latch on the cabin door had a small plastic tab, no bigger than a thumbnail. The tab had snapped in half. Without it, the door could not lock, and an unlocked cabin could not carry a single passenger.

"The first group of skiers arrives at seven," Halima said. "That is four hours."

"Do we have a spare tab?"

Halima checked the shelf. She checked it again, slowly, as if the tab might be shy. "We had one," she said. "I used it in November. I wrote it on the order list. The new ones come on Monday."

"It is Friday."

"I know what day it is, Zosia."

Zosia scratched her head. For a moment, the two women looked at the broken latch in silence. A cold wind whistled through the platform and made the empty cabins sway on their cables.

"Right," said Zosia. "First attempt. We make a new tab out of something."

"Out of what?"

Zosia looked around. She found the jigsaw box lid on the table. It was a thick sheet of cardboard with a picture of the mountain. She cut a neat little tab from the corner. She used the knife that Halima kept for opening boxes. It was the right shape, and it fitted the latch perfectly.

"Genius," said Halima. "I take back what I said about your system."

"I never had a system," Zosia admitted.

They pushed the cardboard tab into the latch and pulled the door shut. It clicked. The sensor beeped once, in a friendly way, and the orange light turned green. Both women cheered quietly, because it was four in the morning and the mountain was asleep.

They went down for coffee. Twenty minutes later, the sensor began beeping again.

When they got back to the platform, the cardboard tab was lying on the floor. It was a small, sad lump. The latch was cold and wet. A thin line of oil had soaked into the cardboard until it turned soft. It could not hold a door against the wind, let alone twenty skiers with heavy boots.

"Oil," Halima said. "Of course there was oil. It is a cable car."

"We should have thought of that."

"We should have thought of that in the first place."

So the first attempt had failed, and they had three hours left. This time, Halima suggested, they would not try to be clever. They would think. What they needed was something small, hard, and shaped like a tab. It should not mind oil or cold, and it should not snap when somebody pulled the door.

Halima walked back and forth on the platform. Then she stopped, turned around slowly, and looked at her friend.

"Zosia," she said. "How do you feel about wood?"

"I feel fine about wood. Why?"

"The jigsaw is wood. Real wood, not cardboard. It is thick, and it has a smooth coating. The oil won't soak into it." Halima waited. "And there are plenty of pieces with a little knob on one side."

Zosia's face went very pale. "No."

"There are two thousand of them."

"Halima, no. I have forty sky pieces left. Forty. If I give one away, then there will be thirty-nine, and I will never finish. I will be buried with an unfinished jigsaw."

"Nobody is going to bury you with a jigsaw," Halima said. "Pick the piece you hate most."

It took Zosia a long time to choose. She stood over the table and held one piece after another up to the light. She said "hmm" in a very small voice. In the end, she chose a sky piece with a bent edge. She had tried it in nineteen different places over three weeks, and it had never once fit.

"Goodbye," she whispered.

"It is a piece of wood," said Halima.

"It is a piece of my heart."

They filed the little knob down with a metal file until it matched the broken tab. Halima held the latch steady. Zosia pressed the piece into the slot with both thumbs, and for a moment, neither of them breathed. The wooden piece slid in smoothly. It was a perfect fit. It looked as if it had been made for the job.

"Try the door," said Zosia.

Halima pulled the cabin door shut. It closed with a firm, solid sound. The light on the panel turned green and stayed green. They stood on the freezing platform for fifteen minutes, waiting for it to fail. It did not.

At seven o'clock, the first skiers arrived, loud and cheerful. Cabin Four took them up the mountain without a single problem. Zosia watched it rise into the pink morning light. The little piece of the sky was hidden in its latch.

"Two thousand pieces," she said sadly. "And the only one that fitted anywhere was the one I gave away."

Halima handed her half of the cold sausage roll. "At least it is up there with the real sky."

At that moment, high above them, the cabin door closed behind the last passenger.

Click.