The Perfect 36

The needle had pointed home since Titusville.

All the way up the coast, in the hire car and then on the plane, Mara had opened the walnut box every few hours, and every time the blued needle had lain on its jewelled pivot pointing north-north-east, up the long seaboard, at Philadelphia, as steady as a finger on a map. It had never done that before. Three times now it had pointed away from home, at a corner in Philadelphia that was not the present, at a corner in Washington, at a riverbank in Florida. It had never once pointed back.

Home was a city with clinics in it that had not been there before. That was the thing Mara kept noticing. On the corner of Girard Avenue, where Mara remembered a shuttered bank, there was a low brick building with a green door and a plain lettered sign, SHARE CLINIC, FISHTOWN, EST. 1974, and under it, smaller, a line from a speech: a rocket can pull a wagon. In the window of Marisa's shop there was a poster for the share's open day, with a cartoon mule in a space helmet. On the radio, every evening, a woman with a warm dry voice did ten minutes on what the share had built that year, a water plant in New Mexico, a dental van in Kentucky, a school roof in Camden, and nobody seemed to think it was strange that the money came out of the Moon. The Moon itself was further off here: the program had run slower and longer, and there was a small station now, new, with nine people in it, and no one in Fishtown could have named one of them. But at the clinic on Girard the waiting-room cards were lettered to a standard Mara recognised at once, big plain capitals readable at arm's length by someone frightened, and on the wall by the door, in a frame, was a photograph of a farm wagon in the rain at Cape Kennedy, and two men shaking hands beside it. Mara stood in front of it for a long time, until the receptionist asked if Mara was all right, and Mara said yes, and found that it was true.

But the needle did not care about any of that. It pointed at Philadelphia all the way home, and when Mara was home, standing in the studio with the bag still on her shoulder and the box open in her hands, it did not stop pointing. It turned, as Mara turned, and held, and pointed down Frankford Avenue, three blocks, to a door Mara knew.

Marisa Tenney's door.

The bell rang over it. The shop was as it always was, a long narrow room full of other people's lives: lamps, chairs, boxes of photographs, a rack of coats, a glass case of watches and rings, and at the back, under a window, a desk with a receipt pad on it printed Tenney & Daughters. Marisa was behind it, in reading glasses, with a pencil in her hair.

"Well," she said, looking up. "The prodigal letterer." She looked at the box in Mara's hands. "Something wrong with it? No refunds. It's been in the sale book for months."

"No," said Mara. "It brought me here."

Marisa gave Mara a long look over the glasses, the look she gave a chair somebody swore was Chippendale. Then she reached under the desk and brought up a book and put it on the blotter between them.

"Funny you should say that," she said. "This came back yesterday."

It was the ledger. Mara knew it at once: the battered calf binding, the marbled edges, the thing that had sat on the table at Delia Penhallow's sale beside the walnut box, that Mara had not opened, that Marisa had sold by noon to someone else.

"The man brought it back," said Marisa. "Wouldn't take his money. Said the dates gave him bad dreams." She sniffed. "I bought it back for a tenner. Then I sat here all evening thinking, I know who ought to have this." She pushed it an inch across the blotter. "Go on. You've been wanting to since the sale."

Mara opened it.

It was not an account book. It was a list. Page after page of dated places, one to a line, some in brown ink and some in black and some in pencil, in hands that changed every few pages: a round eighteenth-century hand, a cramped clerk's copperplate, a schoolteacher's upright print, and others. Most of the places meant nothing. But on the first page, in the round brown hand Mara knew from the lid of the box, the first line said Philad.a, July 1776. A few pages on, in a hand Mara did not know, Washington City, April 1865. Further on, in the schoolteacher's print, Houston, July 1969.

And beside each of those three lines, in the margin, there was a small mark, like the sign a surveyor cuts on a stake when a line has been run: a short upright stroke with a crossbar. The ink was fresh. It had not been there at the sale. Mara would have bet her life on it.

The next line in the book had no mark beside it. It was in an upright hand Mara did not know, quick and neat and young, a stenographer's hand.

Nashville, 18 Aug. 1920.

In the open box on the blotter, the needle swung. It came off Marisa's shop the way a dog comes off a scent it has finished with, and went round the dial, slowly, and settled: west-south-west, through the back wall, across the river and the whole of Pennsylvania, toward Tennessee.

Marisa watched it do it. Her face did not change at all.

"Well," she said. "I've seen stranger. Not many."

Mara closed the book.

Marisa watched Mara do it, and raised an eyebrow, and did not ask. She had run estate sales for forty years. She knew the look of someone who had opened a drawer in a dead woman's house and found a letter.

"Take it," she said, and pushed it the rest of the way across. "It's yours. It's the oddest thing I ever sold twice, and I'm not selling it a third time." She went back to her receipt pad. "Delia used to say some things in that house weren't hers. She was only minding them."

Mara flew to Nashville two days later with the ledger in the canvas bag, wrapped in a sweater, and the walnut box on her knees.

The rules were the same as they had always been. Mara said them over in the taxi from the airport, in the dark, the way a pilot reads a checklist. The needle points at a hinge, a day when the country could have gone more than one way, and never at north. Go where it settles. At first light, stand there, raise the sights, and look along it. You arrive on that spot, on the hinge's first day, dressed for it, with a letter in your pocket that gets you through one door. You stay until the day is decided and the needle swings north. What you change stays changed, and only you remember the world before.

And now, it seemed, a new one: the needle had pointed first at the place where the day was written down, and only then at the place where it happened.

At half past five, in the grey, on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Union Street, in front of a tall old hotel with a striped awning and its name cut in stone over the door, THE HERMITAGE, Mara stood on the pavement with the box open in both hands. The needle pointed up the hill, at the dark bulk of the State Capitol against the paling sky, a few hundred yards away. A street-sweeping truck went by. Somewhere a bird started.

Mara unfolded the two brass sights, and raised the box to eye level, and looked along the needle through the slit of the near sight and the window of the far one, at the Capitol on its hill.

There was a sound like a breath let out.