WITCHITA, Kan. _ For as long as she lives now, Mike Baird will be Christine Blaine's brother, soul mate and sorrow.
But with the stroke of a judge's pen on a recent Saturday, his son Payton became her legally adopted joy.
It was National Adoption Day.
Christine Blaine showed up at Exploration Place in the morning, along with more than 60 other families, to watch judges sign adoption papers that these families had worked on for months.
She fought hard to adopt Payton.
It was brutal, she said.
"And it was love."
HE LEFT HIS KEYS
On the morning of Feb. 5 last year, Mike Baird asked his sister for a hug as she left their home for work.
Christine worried about the hug, even as they embraced.
"This was not his usual," she said.
He loved her; she knew that. They were soul mates. She'd taken him into her home, her sorry 42-year-old brother, after the schizophrenic disorder surfaced.
"Why the hug?"
She spent the day at Eddy's Toyota, where she was a funding clerk, supporting herself as a single mom of two.
When she came home, Mike was gone.
He'd taken his wallet, and his cigarettes, but not his keys. Or his cellphone.
She began to call friends immediately.
He'd cut his own throat six months before this, with a kitchen knife, in her garage, trying to kill himself.
She called and texted: "Have you seen Mike?"
She called police the next day; within days, she formed a search party, 50 people walking through neighborhoods, past nearby ponds and lakes, past the Arkansas River.
Nothing.
SAYING GOODBYE
She called people and detectives every day for weeks.
Six weeks later, on March 24, 2015, two men fishing on Go Lake called 911.
A rescue team pulled John Michael Baird out of the lake, his body badly decomposed.
An autopsy showed drowning as the cause.
Was it accidental?
His sister thought not. Why leave the cellphone, and house keys?
She knew now: The hug, on the day he disappeared: "That was him saying goodbye."
A FACEBOOK SURPRISE
Three months later, on her dead brother's Facebook page, someone posted a photograph.
A black-and-white sonogram image.
It showed a baby in a womb.
She posted a question: "What is this? Why am I just now finding out?"
She got no reply.
That's when she started getting mad.
'NO, NO, NO, NO, NO'
Christine Blaine barely knew the child's mother, except that she was Mike's girlfriend. And if there was a baby, was it even his?
"So at first, I didn't get too concerned or upset," she said.
But she called hospitals, the Kansas Department for Children and Families, and more.
She got bad news: The baby was born in June _ three months early.
Payton Baird, as he was called, weighed only 1.9 pounds. He would spend three months in the Neonatal Intensive Care unit at St. Francis hospital. He would stay hooked to oxygen for the first year of his life.
State officials shut Christine Blaine out; so did the hospitals. They wouldn't tell her anything. She was not close enough family _ if she was family _ to have any rights.
"I was told no, no, no, no, no, no."
In one call with a state social worker, she got a tantalizing hint:
The social worker said cryptically, for no real reason:
"Be patient."
That was not a "no."
Those two words encouraged Christine to stay alert, to make more calls.
And so she heard there was a court hearing set, in September, to determine what to do with a child in need of care:
Payton.
'PART OF MY BROTHER BACK'
What followed was week after week of paperwork. Forms. DNA tests. Emails. Phone calls.
Was Payton her dead brother's son?
The one dream her brother had hung on to for 42 years was that one day he'd be a father. He had died with no knowledge that his girlfriend was pregnant.
When the call came, a voice said, "Hello, Aunt Christine!"
The baby's DNA matched that of John Michael Baird, obtained from his autopsy after his death.
"I started bawling," Christine said. "He was Mike's son. And I am his aunt."
She wanted to be more than that now.
"I wanted a part of my brother back.
"I wanted Payton."
A FAMILIAR FACE
And so that Saturday, after his father died, after three months in intensive care, after court hearings, after legal questions were asked and answered, Payton Baird, 1 year and 5 months old, came home to Christine Blaine, his aunt, his adoptive mother and, in a way, his savior.
That Saturday, while people around them celebrated their own adoptions, Christine and her daughter, Kylie, 15, and son Taylor, 10, sat together at Exploration Place while someone held Payton and fed him a bottle.
He lay in the arms of his loved ones, beside his cousin and now brother, Taylor, who looks much like him: the same shock of dark blond hair, the same eyes and face.
"He and Taylor both look like him," Christine said.
"It's the face of my brother."
