Chapter 4 - THE WOMAN WHO RAISED HER
Clara was halfway to the front door before I caught up.
“Let me drive.”
“I don’t know you.”
The words hurt because they were true.
Naomi stepped between us.
“Then I’ll drive.
You can call Ruth’s neighbor from the car.”
Clara looked at her for a moment.
Then nodded.
Richard stood beside the staircase.
“Caroline, don’t turn this into a spectacle.”
I took my coat from Arthur.
“A girl may have been taken from me.
Someone just went to the home of the woman who raised her.
What part should I keep quiet?”
He lowered his voice.
“You are making a mistake.”
“For once,” I said, “I’m making my own.”
During the drive, Clara learned that the visitor had left when the neighbor refused to open Ruth’s door.
He had worn a suit.
He had asked whether Ruth kept old documents.
No name.
No business card.
Naomi called a local attorney she trusted and asked him to meet us.
We arrived after midnight.
Ruth Mercer lived in a small blue house with a ramp that looked recently built.
Inside, a television played softly beside a rented hospital bed.
Ruth’s right hand rested curled against a blanket.
Her eyes moved from Clara to me.
Then she began to cry.
“I didn’t know,” she said.
Her speech was slow, but the words were clear.
“I swear to you.
I didn’t know.”
I had spent the drive building anger against this woman.
Then I saw the framed school photographs.
Clara at eight, missing a front tooth.
Clara at thirteen, holding a science fair ribbon.
Clara at eighteen, standing in a borrowed graduation gown.
A whole life.
The one I had missed.
Clara knelt beside the bed.
“Mom, tell her how I got here.”
Ruth described a private placement through Marianne Cole, a caseworker she had known through a church assistance program.
The child had been moved between temporary homes.
The mother had supposedly left the country.
The father supposedly wanted no contact.
“She cried for you,” Ruth told me.
My hands went numb.
“For how long?”
Ruth looked away.
That was my answer.
She pointed toward a cabinet.
Clara brought over a thick folder.
Placement forms.
Medical records.
School enrollment papers.
Naomi turned the pages carefully.
Then she stopped.
A consent form lay beneath a yellowed receipt.
At the bottom was my husband’s signature.
Above it, in a box labeled Mother’s Authorization, was mine.
Except I had never signed it.
And next to that forged signature was a witness’s name.
May you like
Vivian Hale.
My sister.
