Vic returned from the base to the farm on the third day, nervous with anticipation. Sure enough an express box sat on the kitchen table, waiting. It bore his name, writ large, in black texta. He picked it up, it felt heavy.
Susan was out visiting with her aunt so he had the place to himself. He took the box to the bedroom and opened it. In it, nestled in bubble plastic, was a black stone, flat and round, as if river smoothed, but with a dark polished texture. It looked as if the stone was coated in impregnable matter which had rubbed smooth into a dull luster.
He lifted it out. It sat, neat and full, in the palm of his hand. He could feel it was infused with a presence, emanating a silent force. It soothed his mind and spirit like healing balm.
He understood, without it being said, that it was intended for Susan to hold, for it to sit in the palm of her hand or rest against her body. Alan and Charlie had talked of the crocodile stone which had given her mind solace before. Perhaps this was it and it could help again.
When she came in, full of subdued brightness, as the light of the night was fading from her eyes; he brought her to sit on the bed and asked her to close her eyes, and to put her open hand out, palm up.
She complied and he rested the stone in this place, closing her fingers around it. She seemed to want to open her eyes. So he rested a finger on each eyelid and asked her to stay still and tell him what she felt. He could feel calmness wash over both him and her, coming from her to him in the place where their skin was touching.
She said, “It is like a dream and yet I know I am awake. My mind is full of light, light and colours. I can see your colour; I can see David and Anne’s colour. I can see my baby’s colour. I can even see the colour of the sky. It is so glorious and beautiful.
“It is as if, when I hold this stone, my mind sees through other eyes, eyes not my own. These eyes can see what mine cannot. But because I am linked to it I can see the things these eyes see too.”
He lifted his fingers from her eyelids. As he did the shared vision faded. He watched her face intently as she looked at him. “It is not so bright as it was before, when you touched me. But still colour remains, softer than before, but still a thing of beauty.”
She kept looking at him with a beatific smile, saying. “The thing of most beauty I see is you. I had forgotten how wonderful you look.”
So now as she walked and talked she carried the stone with her, mostly in an inside pocket where a part rested against her skin, sometimes in her hand. It brought light back into her eyes and joy to her smile. It almost made her seem whole again. But then, whenever she put it aside, the brightness faded and only the shadows remained.
Vic felt his anxiety fade as the brightness returned to her eyes. It was not fully the Susan of old, but at least, when she held the stone, the fading colours returned to brightness and with them came a light which lit her face like a shaft of sunlight.
Their life returned to a place of quiet joy. He did not have her fully back but, having known the fear of losing her again, now he understood the preciousness of what he had regained. She had a renewed zest for life, playing with her children, talking to Anne, her parents and the old Kashmiri man, making plans for the wedding. But it hid a brittleness; a shell encasing a shell, hollow inside.
Others seemed delighted to have back the Susan of old, perhaps they had noticed more than he realized. But he knew that, while it was better to have her in this place, he only held her by a thread, a thin line of contact through a crocodile stone. The sickness was still in her soul and sometimes he glimpsed it, even now.
He wondered, as he saw her now, if on the day when she gave Mark to the crocodiles, whether in that act a part of the crocodile’s spirit occupied her soul and now this part consumed her spirit from its inside place.
He must find a tribal medicine man from the place of crocodile spirits, and see if she could be healed that way. The crocodile stone was working as a medicine pill that kept the disease at bay, but it was no cure. The soul cancer was still there; when the link was broken the disease would return.
But still it was something, a lifeline to buy time, time to find healing. He knew he must bring her back to the land of the crocodiles for this.