Six days after the funeral, Jonah's heart rate had dropped on the monitor, and they had cut her open and taken him out, four pounds and eleven ounces, blue and furious, and rushed him to the NICU before she even saw his face. She had lain there with her arms tied down and her body numb from the chest and thought, with total clarity: my mother died for this.
She had never said it out loud. She knew it made no sense. Babies did not kill grandmothers. Blood pressure did not cause strokes in other people. Her mother had had high blood pressure for twenty years and refused her pills because they made her tired. Renee knew all of that. She had read all of it. She had read it at three in the morning in the NICU with her breast pump whirring and her son behind a plastic wall with tubes in his nose, and it had not changed anything, the reading. The feeling had already set, like concrete.
Brielle was the baby her mother had held. Brielle was the one with her mother's laugh, a short surprised bark that came out of her at the funny parts of cartoons and made Renee's whole chest hurt. Brielle had her mother's hands. Brielle remembered, a little, or said she did: a lady with a purple hat who gave her butterscotch. Renee had told her those stories so many times she had made them true.
Jonah had his father's face, and his own quiet, and the hospital in him. When she looked at him too long she could hear the monitor.
So she did not look at him too long. That was all. She fed him and bathed him and dressed him and took him to his checkups, and she did not look at him too long, and if she gave the extra to Brielle it was because Brielle needed it, and Brielle would remember, and Jonah was fine.
She went to the tree and looked at Terrence's packages.
Seven of them. Brown paper, too much tape, the tags tied on with double knots. She knelt and turned one tag over and read his big square capitals. TO JONAH. LOVE, SANTA. The J with its hook. She knew what it cost. She had seen the overtime on the pay stubs. She had seen the receipt in his coat pocket for the dump truck.
And Brielle had five things. Five small things and a used bike, because Renee had done the budget the way she always did the budget, carefully, to the dollar, and had told Terry they could do sixty dollars a kid this year, and Terry had nodded and then gone and done this. As if Jonah needed it. As if Jonah were the one who'd sat in an emergency room fighting for air. As if Jonah were the one who would wake up in the morning and look at the two piles and understand what they meant.
Brielle would look. Brielle counted. Terry said kids did not count boxes, but Terry had not grown up the way Renee had grown up, the middle of five, watching her older sister's pile and her own pile every Christmas with a feeling like swallowing a coin.
She sat back on her heels. She did not take the tags off. Not then.
She told herself she was just tired. She told herself she would think about it in the morning. She hung the empty stocking straight on its hook so it would not look crooked, and she turned off the tree, and she went up to bed beside her sleeping husband and lay on her left side out of a habit four years old, and she did not sleep.
***
At twenty to six Renee gave up and went downstairs in the dark.