On a midday soaring into the nineties
the six-fingered woman came down from her home
in the big dry hills where few people lived.
She came down at the family’s invitation,
which had been issued breathlessly
in the moments after their nine-year-old son’s
near drowning.
No one had thought she’d take them up on it.
But here she was,
walking the gravel drive,
with her yellowed blouse and peculiar gait.
Her white hair rose and tangled in the breeze,
she carried a knit knapsack and wore rubber shoes.
For a few moments before ringing the doorbell
she lingered in the garden, moving among
stone Buddhas, frogs and faeries, touching the flowers,
as if it were her right.
(The parents twitched the curtain closed.)
Minutes later
she was in their house, fingering wedding photos,
showing weird interest in the pepper grinder.
Even the older sister came down to look—
the older sister who had lately retreated so far into herself
it was doubtful she’d ever emerge.
The six-fingered woman removed
her rubber shoes as she talked,
and the parents gagged:
she was also six-toed. The father,
who had always prided himself on his ability to
make women laugh,
was silent.
The six-fingered woman was a piano teacher,
a swimmer, a pragmatist, though she admitted
to visiting Mystic Rosa once a month.
How had she even reached the son in time,
when she had been sitting with her fizzy water
and polka dots,
many metres from the waves,
watching an empty canoe
break apart on the rocks?
The parents had to admit
that the six-fingered woman moved
with indisputable grace and dexterity,
and also she had brought a tin of lemon cookies.
But she seemed not to realize that the cookies
were furred with blue mould;
she ate them anyway,
and asked the son to play the piano. The son remembered
that after he’d slipped off the rock,
and after his annoyance with the grasping waves
had flashed in four seconds
into a terror that burned new channels in his brain,
the six-fingered woman was there
pulling him up, her hair streaming
around the new planet of her underwater face.
You’re young but I ask you to wait until no one recognizes your slang. Your music and food. I am old; no one knows I am modern to a fault.
For days after he had only to shut his eyes
to conjure the feeling of being gathered
not just into arms,
but into a warm white radiance,
into strength without effort or end, strength
to be deployed forever
only on his behalf,
in the service of understanding, protecting, and loving him.
At least, that had been his impression.
But now he was bound
not to the face and body of a saviour-seen-through-water,
but to an old woman plopping beside him on the bench,
dropping crumbs on the keys
crying for no discernible reason