Chapter 34
The cemetery was on the east side of town, past the elementary school and the church Cathy used to take them to on Easter and Christmas.
Dustin drove. Greg sat in the passenger seat with his clipboard in his lap. He wasn't saying anything.
Dustin appreciated the quiet.
He didn't appreciate much else about this drive.
In the three years since his brother's death, he'd never visited his grave. Why would he? If Tyler's spirit somehow lingered in this world, he wouldn't be hanging out at the cemetery.
He would be where the action was. He'd stick around Dustin.
But if he did, Dustin would not feel so alone. This was how he knew that Tyler's spirit wasn't anywhere, not with him, and most certainly not at his gravesite.
Dustin parked near the iron gate of the cemetery and killed the engine. The headlights died and the dark rushed in.
They sat in the truck.
Through the windshield Dustin could see the shapes of headstones, pale against the dark grass, catching the faint light from a moon that was almost full.
Tyler's grave was in the back. Third row from the fence. Cathy had told him this. Once, over the phone, she'd described the headstone to him and he'd said “sounds nice” and changed the subject.
“Dustin?” Greg said.
“Yeah. I'm going.”
He wasn't going.
There was a very clear and simple thing he needed to do — open the door, walk through the gate, find the grave — and he could not make himself do it.
It was stupid. He'd jumped off buildings. He'd thrown himself out of airplanes at fourteen thousand feet. He'd flown through a canyon at a hundred and twenty miles per hour with rock walls close enough to touch. None of that had scared him the way this flat, quiet cemetery scared him.
“I can go alone,” Greg offered. “If you'd rather stay here.”
“No.” Dustin took his hands off the wheel. “It has to be me.”
He opened the door. The night air was cold and smelled like damp earth. He walked to the gate and through it.
Greg followed.
Their shoes crunched on the gravel path and then went silent when they stepped onto the grass.
Dustin counted rows.
First. Second. Third.
And there it was.
Tyler's headstone was simple. Gray granite, clean edges. In the moonlight it was almost white. Cathy had been taking care of it. There were fresh flowers in a small vase at the base.
Dustin shone his phone's light on the stone to read the inscription.
TYLER WELLS
BELOVED SON AND brOTHER
And below that…
Dustin stared.
Cathy had never told him she'd had an infinity symbol engraved on the stone.
Dustin touched his wrist without thinking. The ink was faded now, the lines soft, but the tattoo matched the symbol on the grave. Matched the tattoo Tyler had worn in the same spot.
Something hot and terrible climbed up the back of Dustin's throat.
He had to swallow it down. He had to…
“Dustin?” Greg said softly from behind him.
“I'm fine.” He wasn't fine. He put his phone away and the light disappeared and the headstone went back to being a pale shape in the moonlight. “Let's do this,” he made himself say.
The sooner he got this over with, the sooner he could leave.
He took a breath, took a moment to compose himself.
“I have more to lose,” he said.
His voice carried across the empty cemetery and died in the dark.
Nothing happened.
The grass didn't move. The air didn't change. No demon materialized between the headstones.
He said it again. “I have more to lose.”
Nothing.
“I have more to lose.” He said it louder this time, feeling desperate and stupid. He was standing at his brother's grave saying words his mother had said three years ago in this exact spot and the sky wasn't cracking open.
The words just sat there in the dark, flat and dead.
“This isn't working.”
Greg's face had gone pale. Even in the moonlight Dustin could see it. “I think you have to mean it.”
“I do mean it.”
“Dustin.” Greg's voice was gentle in a way that made Dustin want to hit something. “Do you?”
The question sat between them.
Do you mean it?
Do you have more to lose?
Could Dustin say that when he jumped off things for a living and didn't much care what happened when he landed? When he'd signed up for a stunt with a fifty percent fatality rate because the odds felt about right for how much he valued being alive?
He looked at Tyler's headstone.
He looked at Greg, standing among the graves in the dark, clipboard to his chest. He thought of Greg abandoning that clipboard for him. He thought of Greg resting his head on Dustin's chest last night, listening to Dustin's heart beat.
He thought about Cathy at the kitchen table, looking scared for him.
“I have more to lose,” he said again, with feeling.
He held his breath, and still nothing happened.
“I mean it,” he insisted.
But if there was a supernatural entity listening, it did not seem to believe him.
“Fine,” Dustin huffed, more to himself than anyone else.
He pulled out his phone. The screen was too bright in the dark. He squinted against it.
“What are you doing?” Greg asked.
Dustin scrolled through his contacts, past the names he hadn't called in months, past the promotional group chats he'd muted, until he found the one he was looking for.
Marcie. His manager. She'd been fielding calls and signing contracts and scheduling his stunts since before he reeled in Apex, since before Tyler died.
She'd be asleep. It was almost midnight on a weeknight and Marcie had two kids. She went to bed at nine-thirty and she was going to kill him.
He tapped the number.
It rang. And rang. And rang.
He was about to give up when the line clicked.
“Dustin?” Marcie's voice was groggy and immediately alarmed, the way people sounded when their phone rang at midnight. “What's wrong? Are you okay?”
“I'm fine. I'm pulling out of Devil's Needle.”
Silence. He could hear her sitting up in bed. “What?”
“That stupid stunt I promised Apex. I'm not doing it.”
“Dustin, it's—” A pause. She was probably looking at the time. “It's midnight.”
“I know what time it is.”
“Are you drunk?”
“No.”
“Are you hurt?”
“No. Well, that's not why I'm calling.”
“Then why are you calling me at midnight to—” She stopped. He could hear her recalibrating. Marcie was good at recalibrating. You had to be, managing someone like him. “Okay. Talk to me. What happened?”
“Nothing happened. I just can't do it.”
“Apex already started marketing on this. The media buy alone—”
“I know.”
“They might drop you over this.”
“I know.”
“Just tell me why?”
Dustin looked at Tyler's grave. And then he looked at Greg.
“I have things I need to be alive for,” he said.
It came out plain and quiet and nothing like how he usually talked. On the other end of the line, Marcie went silent.
“Dustin,” she said after a moment. “Can I be honest with you?”
“Since when do you ask permission?”
“I'm relieved.”
Dustin blinked. “What?”
“I'm relieved, Dustin. I've been—” She stopped.
Started again. “You've been scaring me,” she admitted.
“Your stunts keep getting more reckless and I keep telling myself you know what you're doing and you're a professional and it's not my job to tell you what you can or can't pull off.” She exhaled.
“But I've been sitting here wondering if I'm managing a career or if I'm profiting off your self-destruction.”
The cemetery was very quiet.
“Marcie,” Dustin said.
“I'll handle Apex. It'll be fine.” Her voice was brisk again, back in control. But it was too late. He'd heard what was underneath. “Get some sleep, Dustin.”
“Yeah.”
The phone screen went dark and the night came back and Dustin stood there with the phone in his hand, feeling the weight of what he'd just done.
Ever since Tyler's death, he'd had to keep running, had to keep moving. He'd been so busy convincing himself he was living the dream—his and Tyler's—that he never noticed when it had all turned into a nightmare he only wanted to wake up from.
He put his phone in his pocket.
Greg hadn't moved. He was still standing a few feet back, pale and quiet in the dark, and his eyes were too bright.
Dustin turned to the grave. His throat was tight and his eyes burned. His brother was in the ground and Dustin was choosing not to join him there. “I have more to lose,” he said.
He meant it.
The air changed.