Instead of Three Wishes by Megan Whalen Turner

opportunity. When it was combed, it didn’t float in perfect fans down to my shoulders.
    When she saw me, out of the corner of hereye, Olga stopped singing. She wrapped her hair around one hand and pinned it up with a few deft movements. When it was back in its conservative wrapper, she turned to me.
    â€œI thought you weren’t coming. I had just about given up.”
    I smiled. “I had to get my hat.”
    Olga had a jigsaw puzzle that was a painting of waves. She and I spent that afternoon on her living room floor putting it together. While we pieced the edge together, we talked. I didn’t read books, and I didn’t know many people, and I hadn’t learned anything of any interest from my governess, so I had not much to say, but Olga seemed happy to talk about jigsaw puzzles. She agreed that finishing wasn’t the important part. It was the contentment that came with the placement of each individual piece. She asked me if I thought that this was true of different kinds of puzzles as well.
    I asked, “What kinds of puzzles?” Jigsaws were all I knew.
    â€œLike riddles,” she said. “Like word problems. Do you like to solve word problems?”
    I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
    â€œThere are puzzles everywhere,” said Olga. “There are very simple kinds of puzzles, and there are kinds that grow more and more complicated. People are a puzzle. I like to piece together their actions in order to understand their thoughts.” She looked at me. “Sometimes puzzles are so complicated you don’t recognizethem at first as puzzles.”
    Olga lifted her bulk off the floor with a ladylike grunt and went to pull a painting from behind an armchair. “This is a puzzle,” she said. “This is very special, this painting. I looked for it for many years before I found it, and that was very satisfying, but,” she sighed, “there is more to the puzzle that I haven’t solved yet, and that is very upsetting.”
    It was an oil painting. Thousands of little dabs of paint had been put together to make a picture of a city. I wondered what was puzzling about it.
    Olga looked thoughtfully at the painting and sighed. “I keep working on it.” She slipped the painting back behind the armchair and returned to the jigsaw.
    I spent every afternoon thereafter with Olga and her puzzles. She asked me riddles and produced brainteasers. We fitted together jigsaw puzzles, and we talked. Some days she suggested a walk on the beach. Whenever we topped the sand dunes and looked over the ocean for the first time, Olga would pause. She looked so sad that I finally asked what distressed her. She shrugged.
    â€œYou are growing a little more sharp-eyed, Charlotte,” she said. “I am only wishing I could swim through the waves.”
    â€œIt will be warm again soon,” I said.
    â€œIt is not the cold that keeps me out of the water.”
    â€œCan you not swim?” I asked. I couldn’t imagine someone living surrounded by ocean and being unable to swim.
    â€œI used to swim,” Olga explained, “like a fish. But then I changed.” She waved a hand at her heavy body and shrugged. “With a body like this I would sink like a stone.”
    I looked her over and admitted to myself that Olga’s bulk would be hard to propel through the water. I thought she must have been much thinner when she was younger.
    â€œDo you go wading?” I asked. Lots of fat people did that.
    â€œNo, it only makes me sad to wade without swimming. But enough of that. We have puzzles still to be solved, and maybe someday I will swim again.”
    One afternoon I sat in Olga’s living room waiting while she talked on the porch to a fisherman about the weather. I pulled out her painting in order to look at it more closely and wondered again what there was about it that was puzzling. I thought at first it was a picture of a river running