He stopped.
The smile did not fall off his face so much as go out of it. It stayed there, the shape of it, for a second after whatever had been holding it up was gone. Then it slid. His hand stayed out in the air. Brielle looked up from the toy, confused, from him to her mother and back.
Jonah turned and looked at the presents under the tree. At the brown paper ones. At the lumpy one by the window that still had its twine and its tag, because Renee had run out of time.
He walked over to it. He crouched down and put his finger on the tag, on the big black letter at the start, the one with the hook that curled almost all the way back up, and he traced it the way Daddy had shown him at the kitchen table on Sunday mornings.
He looked up at his mother. He pointed.
"But that says me."
There was a moment in the room when nobody breathed. The tree hummed. Brielle held the Santa against her chest.
Renee crossed the rug in three steps and bent and took the tag between her fingers and pulled, and the twine was double-knotted and did not want to give, and she pulled harder and it tore free with a little sound, and a strip of brown paper came with it. She held it in her hand. Brown paper, black marker. She did not look at it. She did not need to.
"Jonah," she said, and her voice was not as steady as she wanted. "It's not—"
But he was already crying.
He did not cry like Brielle cried, loud and stormy and over fast. He cried like something leaking out of a crack. His face crumpled from the bottom up, and his chin shook, and his whole small body folded down onto the rug next to the package with the torn spot where his name had been, and he made a thin high sound that did not stop. He did not reach for her. That was the thing. He did not reach for her at all.
***
Terrence had heard Brielle's shout through the floor and come awake all at once, the way you do on Christmas morning even at thirty-six, even with four hours of sleep. He had fumbled on his plaid pajama pants and the grey sweater from the chair and come down the back stairs into the kitchen, because the coffee was in the kitchen and he was not going to be any good to anybody without it. He'd stood at the counter with his eyes half closed while the pot gurgled, listening to the sounds from the living room, the rip of paper, Brielle's voice going up and up. He had thought: let them have a minute. He had thought: I'll walk in with my coffee and see their faces.