Page 9 of His Christmas Star
I stepped into him and stuck my finger into his chest. “I need to know if he suffered! I need to know if he knew what was happening! I need to know if he could have been saved!”
“You mean if I could have saved him.”
That sentence took the wind out of my sails, and I sagged back a step. “I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to.” Those four words were barely a whisper, and I wondered if he’d even said them. “The thought is never far from my mind when the world is quiet around me, Tobi. I ask myself that question multiple times a day. If I had been here, could I have saved my friend?”
“You don’t have an answer either.”
“Nope, at least not one I like.”
I tipped my head and stared at him. “One you like?”
He motioned out at the empty field. My brother’s tree stand had long since been taken down, but I could find the spot even without it. “I’ve read the report, and I know he broke his neck. Could I have saved him? Maybe if I’d been close enough to render aid and call for help. He’d be paralyzed, but he’d be alive.”
“But?”
“How do you know there’s a but?” he asked, as though he could trick me into forgetting what we were talking about in the cold woods as the sun started to set.
“Because I know you, Joseph Nash, as well as I know myself.”
“Probably not,” he said, his gaze over my shoulder now. “The but is that even if I’d been out hunting with him that day, I wouldn’t be in the tree stand next to him. I’d be out walking through the fields and driving the deer to him. That’s how you hunt most efficiently, Tobi.”
“Unless you had stayed in the stand and Cody had done the walking.”
He bit his lip and shook his head for the longest time before he spoke. “No. I was never going to be the one in the stand. I’m afraid of heights, Tobi. Harness or no harness.”
I waved my hand in the air. “Wait, what about all those times you climbed trees when we were kids.”
“That was before.”
“Before what?” I asked in confusion.
“Before I saw someone die falling out of a tree!”
“What? I would remember if someone died falling out of a tree in Wellspring, at least someone other than my brother.”
He pursed his lips and rubbed his forehead, and that was when I saw the exhaustion he wore like a cloak. “Do you remember when I was sixteen, and Daddy Nash let me go to the camp for kids interested in law enforcement careers?”
“I do remember. You weren’t gone more than a few days, and suddenly you were back. You said the camp closed down because of— oh.”
He nodded and sighed. “Yeah, oh. The camp closed because a camper died. He’d climbed up in a tree to scare another kid who was walking on the trail. He didn’t know there was a hornet nest in the tree, and he accidentally disturbed it. They attacked, he fell to the ground, and died at my feet.”
“God, Joe,” I said on an exhale. “I’m sorry. I had no idea.”
He nodded, his gaze on the giant tree that used to hold Cody’s tree stand. “From then on, I begged Cody not to do stupid stuff. The only reason he wore a harness was at my insistence, or I wouldn’t hunt with him.” He had poked himself in the chest, leaving his finger there to grind painfully into his skin while his chin trembled. “It wasn’t enough. It still wasn’t enough. I know I should have been there with him, but I still don’t know if I could have saved him.”
I slid my arms around his waist and held him, the scent of woodsmoke and fresh air enveloping me. “I’m sorry, Joe,” I whispered, my tone of voice reticent and shameful. “I never should have blamed you for his death. Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
He held me a little bit tighter and laid his lips near my ear. “You needed someone to blame.”
“Joe, that doesn’t make it righ—”
“Shh,” he whispered, sending a shiver down my spine. “You needed someone to blame, and if I let you blame me, that kept you in my life. Even if it was nothing more than thinly veiled threats that you tossed out once a year, at least I still got to see you.”
“You wanted to see me?” I asked, my voice putting my shock on full display.
“Yes. I wanted to see you. I wanted to take you out and make you forget about the pain and the tears, but I couldn’t. I had to be your punching bag so you could keep the rest of your life on the straight and narrow.”
