The back of it was blank brown paper. He turned it over.
TO JONAH
LOVE, SANTA
His own handwriting. His own block capitals. The J he had made big on purpose, with the hook at the bottom that curled almost all the way back up, so his son would know it was his.
For a second his face did nothing at all. He was still half in the kitchen, still half asleep, still standing at the counter smiling at the cabinet. His brain tried to give him the easy version: some mix-up, the kids got into them, the tags fell off. Tags don't fall off double knots. He picked up a second one. TO JONAH. A third. The twine on that one had a strip of brown paper still stuck to it with his tape, torn from the package. Somebody had peeled them. Somebody had sat here in the dark before the kids woke up and peeled his son's name off of every single thing.
He looked at the stocking on the right side of the mantel, flat and empty, and then at the one on the left, spilling over, and he understood the stocking too.
He felt it start in his stomach and go up. It was not anger yet. It was something colder and worse than anger, a kind of falling, the feeling of stepping onto a stair that is not there. It went up through his chest and into his face, and he felt his own face change, his mouth come open, his eyes go wide and stay wide, and he could not have stopped it if he tried. He was looking at his wife, and he was seeing, all at once, like a light switched on in a room he had been living in for four years, every single thing he had looked at and not looked at.
The yogurt. The swim lessons. The pajamas with the hems let down. The birthday in May when Brielle had gotten a party at the trampoline park and Jonah had gotten a cupcake at the kitchen table, and Renee had said he was too little to know the difference, and Terrence had been tired, and had believed her, because believing her was easier than not. The way Renee said Brielle's name, round and warm, and the way she mostly did not say Jonah's name at all. Him, she said. He. Your son.
He had seen it. That was what the falling was. He had seen it and filed it under phase, under tired, under she had a hard time with the pregnancy, under it'll even out. He had fixed a bike and worked overtime and bought a dump truck, as if a dump truck could fix it, as if buying more for one side of the tree was the same thing as standing up and saying out loud what was happening on the other.
He held the tags in his hand. Three of them. His fingers were shaking.
"Renee," he said.
It did not come out like a question.
***