Chapter 7 - The Woman Who Raised Him
Diane Carr chose a café near the lake because it was halfway between our homes.
I recognized her from the picture Kael had shown me: a woman with a warm smile standing beside a boy holding a fishing pole. She was seventy now, with carefully brushed white hair and a handbag she held against her knees.
"Thank you for coming," she said.
I sat across from her.
"I came because Kael deserves to know the truth of how we both cared for him."
She nodded, then opened her handbag and took out a photograph album. The first picture showed him on his seventh birthday, blowing out candles while Paul stood behind his chair. Another showed him with a broken ankle propped on pillows, grinning at the camera. I looked at each one slowly.
"He was happy," she said.
"I'm glad."
"I was afraid you'd think we stole him."
"I don't know everything about what happened in court. I know I tried to find him afterward. I know the letters reached your house."
Diane's eyes filled.
She told me Paul had been determined to help Kael settle after the adoption. The boy asked for me almost every night for the first year. Sometimes he woke convinced I'd left him at a bus stop. Paul began saying that I was far away and couldn't come. Later, when Kael asked why I hadn't returned, he said I didn't want to.
"I thought telling him the truth would make him feel unwanted by us," Diane said. "I didn't understand that keeping him from your letters could make him feel unwanted by you."
"Did you ever try to correct it?"
"I tried once when he was fifteen. Paul said he wasn't ready. Then there was college, and work, and Paul got sick. I kept waiting for a good time."
"There wasn't a good time," I said. "There was just time he should have had."
She nodded. I didn't want to punish her by pretending she'd never been his mother. I also couldn't absolve her simply because she was sorry.
"What do you need from me?" I asked.
"Nothing. I needed you to know I am sorry. And I wanted to ask whether he was always so stubborn."
I laughed before I could stop myself.
"He once tried to teach a cat to fetch. He said if dogs could learn it, cats were just refusing to practice."
Diane smiled through tears. "He told me that story when he was ten. I thought he'd made it up."
For the next hour we exchanged memories, some painful and some absurd. I learned Kael hated green peppers as a teenager and that he had broken his arm playing basketball. She learned he'd insisted on putting his shoes under his pillow as a child so nobody could take them.
When we stood to leave, Diane offered me copies of the photographs. I accepted them.
"He calls me Mom," she said, almost apologetically.
"He should, if that's what he wants. You've been his mother in all the years I couldn't be there."
"And what should he call you?"
"That's for him to decide."
I told Kael about the meeting that night. He listened without interrupting.
"Are you friends now?" he asked.
"We're two women who told each other the truth for an hour. That's a start."
He said he'd been avoiding Diane's calls because he didn't know whether forgiving her meant agreeing with what she'd done. I told him forgiveness didn't require forgetting, and distance wasn't the only way to prove his anger mattered.
A week later he drove to Cleveland to see her. I didn't ask him to report the conversation.
The transit authority meanwhile announced a preferred evening-shuttle option with a revised protected crossing near the medical center. Funding and final permits still had to be secured. Ruth pinned the notice above the volunteer desk with a smile I hadn't seen in months.
I was leaving the station when a young reporter asked whether the changes were a result of my reunion with the developer.
"They came from riders showing what they needed," I said. "My son wasn't the one who walked those routes in winter."
The reporter asked for a photograph of the two of us together.
I said no.
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The next morning Kael's company website published a story about its leader's "personal commitment to reuniting families through transit."
It included a picture of me at the station without my consent.
