had. They just were, and they always would be.
Arielle went to a supply room where Favor kept some first-aid supplies. She grabbed bandage squares and gauze, bandage tape and antibiotic ointment, and zipped it all into a pocket of her overnight bag.
When she got to the gazebo, Favor and the others were discussing which vehicle they should take and who would drive.
She said, “Slow down, hotshot. Let’s take a look at those dressings.”
“The dressings are fine,” he said.
“Take off your shirt.”
“You think I can’t tell if the dressings are good? Think I haven’t been banged up often enough to know when I need fresh bandages?”
“Ray,” she said. ”The shirt.”
He opened the shirt.
The G550 had twelve seats, first two occupied by the two relief pilots. Halfway back in the cabin, four of the seats were grouped around a table. The four of them gathered there once the plane was airborne at cruising altitude.
They joked and laughed, drank champagne, and ate oysters and caviar before a meal of lobster bisque and tournedos Wellington.
By now the time was past midnight on the West Coast. They dimmed the cabin lights. Mendonza and Stickney went to the back of the cabin and were soon asleep, reclining in their seats.
Favor sat across the table from Arielle. She watched him fall asleep, his eyes gradually closing, his chest rising and falling in a measured rhythm.
His body suddenly tensed. He mumbled an extended guttural sound. It could have been words or just a tortured groan; she couldn’t tell. His hands clenched the ends of the armrests.
She knew that he was dreaming. And from the anguished expression on his face, she thought it must be one of those dreams.
She was right: it was one of those dreams. Except Favor didn’t think of them that way. True, they came while he slept, and they came on their own relentless schedule, even though he desperately willed them not to come. So in that way they were like dreams.
But dreams were supposed to be symbolic creations of the mind. These were real. Every moment came direct and unaltered from Favor’s life, selected with brutal logic, assembled in such a way as to inflict maximum pain. They were a personal library of horror, episodes of his history that he had always tried to push aside. Long avoided in his waking hours, the memories came roaring back to him in sleep. But even as he slept, some part of his mind was always conscious when they played out. The memories seemed to want this. They demanded his awareness. No matter how bad they were, he could not turn away.
The one that played for him now as he slept in the Gulfstream’s cabin was the worst of the worst. It was so searing, and so shameful, that he had never told anyone. He was the only living person who remembered it, and he knew that he would take it to his grave.
It begins with the voice of his mother, summoning him to attention.
Oh, Raymond, she says, a sad sigh that pierces him through the heart. He is eight years old, in the living room of their little bungalow on the back side of his grandparents’ ranch. He’s looking into her eyes. Dark eyes, red rimmed and glistening with tears. She’s a beautiful woman. Long black hair and glowing pink skin and ripened-cherry lips. At eight, he doesn’t comprehend her this way. But thirty-six years later, as he dozes in the seat, the alert part of his mind sees her as she was, the way others must have seen her. A beauty.
Oh, Raymond. Her tone is beseeching. He doesn’t know what she wants, and this scares him, because it is the most important thing he has ever done or ever will do, and he has to get it right.
Tell me what you want, the eight-year-old boy wants to say. But he can’t speak.
Tell me, the sleeping adult says across the distance of decades.
Pull the fucking trigger, says his father. It’s a few days earlier, a summer evening. The boy is holding a .22 rifle, crouching with his father beside a fallen log in a forest. (The sleepborne memories do this sometimes, bouncing back and forth in time and place, but never at random. There is always a point.) The boy squints down the barrel. He has handled guns for more than a year: his father insisted on it. First it was paper targets and tin cans, now live game for the first time. Ten or fifteen