She turned on the tree because the overhead light felt like an accusation. She stood in front of the brown packages in her sock feet with her arms crossed tight over her sweater and listened to the house. Nothing. Terrence snoring, faintly, upstairs. The refrigerator. A car going by on Willow Street with its tires hissing in the slush.
Later, when she tried to tell it, she would not be able to say exactly when she decided. It did not feel like deciding. It felt like her hands simply doing what her hands had been doing for four years, the smallest motion, a scrape of a spoon to the other side of the plate. She knelt down and picked up the little package that was the wind-up Santa, and she worked the double knot loose with her thumbnail until the twine came away, and she held the tag in her palm.
TO JONAH. LOVE, SANTA.
She turned it face-down and put it on the sofa cushion behind her.
Then she did the dump truck. Then the train book. The tape Terry had used was everywhere, and in a couple of places the twine was taped down too, and she had to peel, and on the slippers a corner of brown paper came away with the tag and left a pale torn spot. She smoothed it with her finger. Nobody would notice.
She was doing the puzzle when she heard the thump of small feet hitting the floor upstairs, and then a second thump, and then Brielle's voice, high and thrilled: "Jonah! Jonah, it's Christmas!"
Renee's heart jumped into her throat like she'd been caught stealing, which she understood, distantly, she had. She yanked the tag off the puzzle and the xylophone, fast, and tossed them face-down on the sofa with the others, and the twine trailed off them in little red-and-white curls. There was one left, the hat, and she reached for it, and the kids were already on the stairs, and she straightened up and smoothed her sweater and put her face on.
Brielle came first, the way she always did, taking the stairs two at a time with one hand on the rail, her curls flattened on one side from the pillow. She was in the new green pajamas, the ones with the white stars, bright and stiff from the package. She hit the bottom step and stopped dead and put both hands over her mouth.
"He came," she whispered. "Mommy, he came."
"He came," Renee said.
Jonah came down the way he always came down, one step at a time, sitting on each one and scooting to the next, because he had fallen once last spring and never forgotten it. His pajamas were the same green, softer and paler, the cuffs rolled once at the ankles, a little hole starting at one knee. He had his thumb in his mouth. He took it out when he got to the bottom and stood in the doorway of the living room and looked.
He looked at the tree first. The lights were in his eyes, tiny and doubled. His mouth opened a little.
Then he looked at the fireplace.