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He sat there, unable to leave, for two hours as people walked by, incurious, indifferent, or perhaps just mystified as to what they might do.
Messenger released me, and I took a last sip of coffee.
“He’s older,” I said. “I think he’s already lived maybe twenty years like that. Twenty years, Messenger, that’s a life sentence.” A ter
ribly long time, but not as long as Messenger’s own sentence.
“He will awake from this life sentence when we go to him.”
I nodded. “All right. I’m ready.”
Once again we stood in Trent’s basement. He was as we had left him, a strong, healthy young man with a head full of hates.
And suddenly, his eyes opened. Just like that, Trent—the comatose one before me—gasped, sucked in a shaky breath, and woke.
He stared up at me. Stared at me like I was an impossibility. Like I could not be there, probably wasn’t there. He turned his head, only his head, to look left and right and his bewilderment edged toward panic.
For the longest time then he looked back at me and at Messenger. That stare seemed to go on and on forever.
His body was trembling, and he noticed it. He frowned in incomprehension. And then, he moved one arm. Just a little. And cried out, “Ahh! Ahh!”
He moved the arm again. And his other arm.
“Ahh!”
Tears formed in his eyes. He was swallowing hard and obviously afraid, but not the fear of growing terror, rather the fear of discovery, of realization and hope. He was crying quite openly, crying without shame or self-consciousness.
Then, sobbing, he moved his legs. When they shifted, he stopped, bit his lip, then moved them again.
We were seeing a boy—no, not a boy anymore, not a boy with sixteen years of experience of life, but a man in a boy’s body. An old man, a man with a long life of pain and perhaps much worse than pain.
Slowly, slowly, as if he couldn’t believe it yet, Trent rose to his feet.
I had chills. Only a few minutes had passed but I had dipped into Trent’s experience long enough to have some impression of what he had endured subjectively.
To a casual observer he was still the muscular sixteen-year-old boy, but I saw something very different in his eyes now. Not just tears, but something far deeper. Something so very like what I saw in Messenger’s own eyes and had not understood until the Shoals.
We watched, Messenger as mesmerized as I was myself.
At last Trent mastered his emotions and I braced for his resentment, his fury. We had subjected him to an entire lifetime of misery and humiliation.
Hadn’t we?
Trent whispered something that neither of us could hear. He took a careful, tentative step. He approached, haltingly, as though he could still not believe he was able to walk.
He came within a foot of me and I was still braced for him to lash out.
“Thank you,” he said.
I misunderstood his meaning. I said, “You can walk again because you’ve suffered your punishment and now it’s over.”
He shook his head slowly. “No. No, I mean, thank you for giving me that life.”
“What?”
He sighed and passed his hand over his face, wiping away tears, and when he was done he smiled. He smiled, then threw back his head and laughed.
“No,” he said, barely able to stop laughing, and now crying very different tears. “No, I mean thank you for what you did. Thank you for giving me that. For all I lived. I . . . I’m not the same person. I’m . . .” He had to pause to catch his breath. “I lived fifty-two years as a quadriplegic. I was angry and bitter, but then . . . then, well, I found love. So much love. I . . .” He shook his head, amazed. But he could not have been more amazed than I.
