***
Renee filled Brielle's stocking first.
She had bought the things over weeks, one at a time, at the dollar store and the Target clearance end-caps and once, guiltily, with a coupon at the good toy shop downtown. A small brown teddy bear with a plaid bow. A plush snowman with a carrot nose made of felt. Hair ties with plastic strawberries on them, which she had picked up before she remembered that the strawberries were Jonah's thing, and then bought anyway. A tin of lip balm shaped like a ladybug. Stickers. A tiny flashlight. A chocolate orange. She packed them in until the stocking bulged and the bear's head and the snowman's top hat stuck out over the red cuff like they were peering into the room.
Then she stood in front of the other stocking for a long time.
She had things for it. That was what she would think about later, at the kitchen table, at the sink, in the shower with the water running hot enough to sting. She had things. There was a bag in the hall closet with a candy cane and a little rubber ball and a box of crayons. She had bought them. She was not a monster. She had bought them.
She did not go get the bag.
Instead she stood with her hand on the empty stocking, feeling the tight knit of his name under her fingers, and she thought: he won't remember. He's three. He won't remember this year. Brielle will.
It was not the first time she had thought this. It had become a kind of song she hummed under everything. When she gave Brielle the last of the yogurt. When she signed Brielle up for the Saturday dance class at the rec center and told Terry there wasn't money for Jonah's swim lessons, too. When she let Brielle pick the movie, every time. When she bought Brielle's new pajamas and let down the hems on the old ones for him. He won't remember. Brielle needs it more. Brielle had a hard year.
And Brielle had had a hard year. That part was true. In March she'd had an asthma attack bad enough that they'd ended up in the emergency room at two in the morning, Renee holding her on her lap in the plastic chair while the nebulizer hissed, Brielle's lips going a color Renee had never seen on a living person. Then the move to the new school in September, when the district redrew the lines, and Brielle coming home every day for a month with her face closed up tight, saying nobody played with her. Renee had lain awake for that. She had lain awake for all of it.
She did not lie awake for Jonah. Jonah was fine. Jonah was always fine. Jonah ate what you gave him and slept where you put him and played by himself with a wooden spoon and a pot for an hour if you let him. That was the thing nobody understood. He did not need anything from her. He had never needed anything from her. He had taken it all before he was even born.
She took her hand off the stocking.
The pregnancy had started fine, like Brielle's. Then at twenty-four weeks her blood pressure had gone up and stayed up, and her ankles had swollen until they looked like someone else's, and the word preeclampsia had come into the house and sat down at the table and did not leave. Bed rest. The dental practice where she had worked as a hygienist for seven years had held her job for six weeks and then, politely, with a card signed by everyone, had not. She had lain on her left side on the couch in this room for three months staring at the ceiling, listening to Brielle, who was two then, play with Terrence's mother in the kitchen, and she had felt her life drain out of her through the soles of her feet.
At thirty-three weeks they had admitted her to the hospital to watch her. And on the fourth day of that, her mother had called to say she was driving up from Columbus to sit with her, and somewhere on I-71 outside of Mansfield her mother had pulled onto the shoulder with a terrible headache and put on her hazards, and a state trooper had found her there forty minutes later, slumped against the window. A stroke. She had died two days after that, in a hospital in Mansfield that Renee had never seen and never would see, because Renee was strapped to a fetal monitor an hour and a half away with a nurse checking her pressure every thirty minutes and a doctor saying the word stroke to her, too. Your risk. Your numbers. We cannot let you travel.
They held the funeral without her. Terrence went, and took Brielle, and came home and told her it had been nice, that her aunt Ivy had sung, that there had been a lot of people. He had brought her the program. Her mother's face on the front, smiling, in the purple church hat. Louise Marie Tate. Mama Lou.