Then he heard the other sound. The thin one.
He knew that sound. He had heard it from the NICU incubator. He had heard it through the wall at night, the few times Jonah had a nightmare and did not come get anybody, just lay there making it until Terrence woke up on his own and went in.
He came down the hall with the white mug in his hand, the coffee slopping a little over the rim and burning his knuckle, and he stopped in the doorway.
Brielle on her knees by the tree, holding something small and red against her chest. Renee standing over the presents with her hand closed around something, her face gone gray. And Jonah, folded up on the rug next to one of the brown packages Terrence had wrapped at midnight, crying into the carpet.
"Hey," Terrence said. "Hey, hey. What happened?"
Nobody answered. Renee did not look at him.
It was Brielle who answered. She said it simply, in the clear helpful voice she used to tell the teacher who had done what on the playground, holding up the little Santa as evidence.
"Mommy says his presents are mine."
Terrence looked at his wife.
He looked at the presents under the tree, his brown packages, the ones he had wrapped and knotted and labeled and set on the right side by the window. One of them was open, the paper torn off in Brielle's style. The others sat there, lumpy, bare. No twine. No tags.
He knew he had put tags on them. He had sat at the kitchen table and written seven of them. He could still feel the Sharpie squeak.
"Why are his tags over there?" he said.
Because now he saw them. On the grey sofa behind Renee, on the middle cushion, a small scatter of brown rectangles lying face-down, red-and-white twine curling off them like the ends of ribbons. Five or six. He set his mug on the arm of the sofa without looking, and it tipped a little and he did not notice, and he reached down and picked one up.