Full Stop

by Joan Smith

  ‘Now what’s she doing? What’s going on?’

  It was the deaf man again and Loretta lost her temper. ‘Why don’t you all just... go home?’ she demanded, having to restrain herself from putting it more rudely. People shifted and complained, not hiding their disappointment that nothing much was happening, and she was relieved when they started to drift away.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said the woman who had spoken earlier, ‘but I have your dog ...’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said Loretta, looking up. She felt the boy shudder and squeezed his hand. ‘Don’t worry, she won’t hurt you.’

  The woman said sympathetically: ‘You want me to walk her till the ambulance comes?’ Loretta accepted the offer gratefully.

  ‘Will she come see me?’ Toni’s son asked suddenly. ‘If they keep me in the hospital?’

  In the distance, a siren wailed.

  Loretta ducked the question. ‘What’s your name?’ she asked. ‘I’ve been staying in Toni’s flat but I’m going home tonight, to England. I’ll have to try and get hold of her before I go.’ She frowned, not relishing the prospect of informing Toni, on this of all weekends, that her grown-up son had turned up out of the blue.

  ‘Frank,’ the boy said, a bit reluctantly. ‘Frank Ryan.’

  An Irish surname, Loretta thought, remembering that Toni’s parents were Catholics. She was doing mental sums, working out that if the boy was 18, as she had guessed, he would have been born when Toni wasn’t much more than that herself, presumably the result of a teenage romance.

  ‘I tried to — I wanted to go up to her apartment but those guys on the desk ... Mr Dunow, he said it was better to contact her direct. I mean, not call her up first or anything.’

  The siren was getting louder.

  ‘Not long now,’ Loretta said, and a moment later an ambulance swung on to Riverside Drive, coming to a halt against the kerb. A couple of paramedics got out, running round the back and taking out a stretcher.

  ‘Will she come see me?’ he asked again, still holding her hand.

  ‘I’ll have to find her first,’ Loretta said evasively. She was about to say she’d come to the hospital herself, after she had taken the dog home, but she realised it might take her some time to get hold of Toni. ‘I mean, I know where she’s staying, she’s in the Hamptons for the weekend.’ His face fell and she added quickly: ‘She’ll be home tomorrow. Where do you live?’

  ‘Newburgh.’

  It meant nothing to Loretta and she thought she should write it down, if she could borrow a pen and some paper, but at that moment one of the para-medics touched her shoulder. ‘Are you hurt, ma’am? Do you need medical attention?’

  Loretta got up stiffly. ‘No, not me.’ She gestured towards the boy, Frank. ‘He’s been bitten, I’m afraid my dog... It wasn’t her fault, she thought he was trying — ‘

  ‘You have blood on your face,’ the woman said matter-offactly.

  ‘Have I?’ Loretta was puzzled for a moment, then she remembered her hands. She looked down at the palms, which were scratched and bloody. The other para-medic was kneeling beside Frank, asking him questions, something about health insurance. The woman said: ‘You a relative?’

  Loretta shook her head.

  She turned, spoke to her colleague, and together they began preparing the stretcher, getting ready to move Frank on to it. It was a painful manoeuvre and he cried out, but in a surprisingly short time they were wheeling him towards the ambulance.

  ‘Where’re you taking him?’ Loretta called after them.

  ‘The Roosevelt. Tenth and 59th.’

  ‘Do you have far to go?’ It was the jogger, whose return Loretta had failed to notice.

  She shook her head and pointed. ‘Just over there.’ The woman who had volunteered to walk Honey reappeared, and Loretta took the lead from her. ‘Thanks,’ she said, meaning both of them.

  ‘No problem,’ the jogger assured her. ‘Livens up a dull morning. You want me to walk you home?’

  Loretta’s eyes widened and she shook her head. He lifted a hand, gave her a mock salute and loped off.

  ‘Miss? Is this yours?’

  The dog-walker was holding out a manila envelope, A4 size.

  Loretta stared at it, remembering something one of the porters had said, or written in the log-book, about the boy with the pony tail trying to deliver an envelope or package.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, holding out her hand. ‘I mean, I’d better keep it for him.’

  She took the envelope, thanked the woman again, and called Honey to heel. They left the park, using the shortest route to Riverside Drive, Loretta hurrying the dog along at an unusually fast pace which Honey seemed to enjoy, as she glanced up at Loretta from time to time and let out excited barks. It was not until they turned into 73 rd Street, yards from home, that a thought occurred to Loretta: at no point, even when she believed she was being mugged, had she entertained the idea that her attacker might be Michael Lindsay. At some point during their recent confrontation, her fear of him had entirely evaporated.

  She pushed open the door into the apartment block, ushered Honey inside and headed for the lift, bracing herself for a difficult conversation with Toni.

  Eleven

  A woman moved about a vast, empty apartment overlooking the Hudson river, preparing an elaborate meal for someone who had so far failed to arrive. From time to time she looked out at the lights on the rippling black water, reflections from the New Jersey shore, saying nothing, revealing nothing. There was no phone, very little furniture, none of the habitual detritus of everyday life — magazines, books, CDs, discarded clothes — but the apartment was described in minute detail: hairline cracks in the high ceiling, every crevice in the old-fashioned kitchen, the monstrous dead roach on the stark white bathroom floor. Dale Martineau’s prose was unadorned, without rhetorical flourishes, cinematic in its method of setting a scene; more like a director, Loretta thought, closing the book and remembering that he taught film studies, than a novelist. At first the style had reminded her of Bret Easton Ellis, without the trademark violence, but as she turned the pages and nothing happened another comparison came to mind, those Sixties art movies in which someone set up a camera and left it rolling, regardless of whether there was anything to record.

  The bus juddered to a halt and Loretta looked up from the novel in her lap. From Central Park West, where she got on, it had turned on to Broadway and was passing through the Theater District, familiar territory to her by now. Loretta fidgeted, wincing as her sore shoulder came into contact with the seat back, and thought how awkward it was going to be if she turned out not to like Dale’s book. It wasn’t holding her attention as she had hoped and she could hardly send him a note via his publisher saying how much she liked the cover — a detail of Leonardo’s cenacolo with Jesus and two of the disciples blanked out — without mentioning the novel itself. Loretta had begun reading it in a little Moroccan café with outdoor tables on Amsterdam Avenue, not far from the book shop where she’d bought it, propping it up against the salt cellar while she ate a plate of couscous and merguez sausages. She felt guilty about going out without speaking to Toni, passing on the shocking news that her son had turned up, but she had hung around in the flat for well over an hour after leaving a very insistent message on the Minister’s answering-machine in Sag Harbor. Perhaps Toni and Jay were staying at his grandmother’s for lunch, in which case they might not return for hours; bruised and a little faint, dreading the uncomfortable night ahead of her on the plane, Loretta had finally decided she needed a meal herself and the last thing she felt like was rooting about in Toni’s fridge. Before leaving the flat she had phoned the hospital to inquire after Frank Ryan but he was still in the emergency room, pushed to the back of the queue by a serious road accident; he had been given painkillers, she was told, but a dog bite, no matter how nasty, would have to wait until the survivors — that was the word the woman used — had been attended to.

  By now she knew the whole sad story of Fr
ank’s birth and adoption, having pieced it together from the documents in the envelope he had dropped in the park. Curled up on the sofa, the phone in front of her on the coffee table where she could reach it without getting up, she had felt no compunction as she up-ended the envelope and allowed the contents to slide out, as though the intrusion was somehow balanced by the amount of damage she had sustained during the struggle in the park: her new white shirt ripped and smeared with blood, a painful gash on her left hand and a long abrasion running from her elbow to her wrist as well as minor scratches. The shirt was beyond repair and she had had to borrow one of Toni’s, a bright turquoise that wasn’t her colour at all but the only thing on the rail that went comfortably with her trousers. She changed into it as soon as she’d washed the ingrained dirt and blood from her hands, smearing them with antiseptic ointment from Toni’s bathroom cabinet and covering up the two largest cuts with plasters. Her own shirt she screwed up in a ball and thrust into the waste bin, thinking she’d never owned anything for so short a time. She was going to feel quite aggrieved when it finally appeared on her Visa bill.

  With Honey snoring on the floor, Loretta had quickly and efficiently examined the neat collection of papers Frank had clipped together: letters, photocopies, even some photographs. They began with a copy of his birth certificate which showed he’d been born in 1974, making him a year or two older than her hasty estimate in the park. His birthday was in August, the same month as Loretta’s, and he’d be 20 next month. The mother’s name was given as Antonia Annetta Stramiello, occupation student; Loretta wasn’t sure whether this meant Toni was already at college when Frank was born, or still in high school. She had heard Americans use the same word for both. The space for the father’s name was blank.

  Attached to the birth certificate was a letter from an organisation called Right To Know, replying in detail to a letter from Frank asking how to go about tracing his natural mother. They had written to him at an address in Philadelphia, where he seemed to be at college. Loretta guessed that he’d gone home to his adoptive parents for the long vacation, travelling to New York to see Toni without telling them; Newburgh, she had discovered from an atlas on Toni’s bookshelves, was in New York State, closer to Manhattan than Philadelphia. The letter was accompanied by a leaflet, a combative manifesto in which Right To Know insisted on the right of every adopted child to meet his or her biological parents; it was clear, in spite of the fastidiously inclusive language, that this meant the mother. Next came a couple of blurred ten-by-eights of Toni, one of her leaving the apartment building arm-in-arm with a man Loretta took to be Jay, the other of her walking Honey in Riverside Park. Jay was taller than Toni, wearing glasses, a bit nondescript, not at all Loretta’s idea of a jazz musician, but the picture had been taken clandestinely, with a long lens, and it hadn’t enlarged well. In the second photo Honey strained at the lead, staring angrily ahead as though she’d intuited the presence of the camera, while Toni’s face was partly obscured by her hair. It was the same length as Loretta’s and it wasn’t really surprising that Frank, with only these poor images to rely on, had assumed that any blonde woman walking a bulldog in that particular park must be his real mother. The remaining picture was a snapshot, a colour photo of a chubby, fair-haired baby whom she took to be Frank at three or four months; it wasn’t clear why he’d included it in the package, unless he had invested it with some talismanic power to bridge the gap between himself and Toni.

  There was one more document in the envelope, a report from a private detective, Pete Dunow of Inside Investigations Inc, which supplied Toni’s present address and phone number along with a startling quantity of other information. There was a schedule of her daily movements: the regular walks with Honey, her journeys to Columbia on Monday, Tuesday and Friday, where and when she did her shopping, the fact that Jay stayed over at the flat two or three nights a week. With a growing sense of outrage Loretta read that Toni had had an ‘intimate’ relationship with Jay for almost a year and two boyfriends in quick succession before that; there were rumours, Dunow wrote, of an earlier, lesbian relationship with a female lecturer at Columbia, but he hadn’t been able to stand them up. Loretta had been goggle-eyed, unable to believe that this degree of surveillance was permitted in New York, when a new and alarming idea gripped her: if Dunow had been watching Toni from a distance, always having to conceal himself, was it possible he had made the same mistake as Frank Ryan? That it was Pete Dunow she had glimpsed behind the statue in the Met, Dunow that the nutritionist had warned her about in the book shop? Loretta shook her head, refusing to take the idea seriously. The detective had done his job, written up what he’d found, and that was the end of his involvement. But his tone worried her, the lubricious interest he displayed in Toni’s ‘intimate’ relationships; there was a fine line between private eye and Peeping Tom and she couldn’t help wondering whether he had overstepped it. It was just possible that Frank had innocently initiated this line of inquiry, he might well have wanted to know whether his real mother was married or single before he approached her, but this Mozartian catalogue of ex-lovers was something else.

  Had Toni really noticed nothing while Pete Dunow was on his marathon trawl through her life? Either he was extremely skilful or he hadn’t got really close to his target; at this point Loretta had put the papers to one side and dialled the Sag Harbor number again but there was the customary click and she broke the connection, in no mood to listen to that holier-than-thou voice reciting nonsense about prayers and credit cards.

  She went back to the report, finding a garbled summary of Toni’s academic career which apparently included a visiting lectureship at St Freda’s College, Oxford; there were also details of her bank account and the ownership of her flat. A final paragraph consisted of advice on how Frank should approach his mother: ‘Subjects do not generally respond well when the initial contact is made by phone,’ Dunow had written, ‘and letters may go unanswered for days or even weeks. For this reason, our recommendation is that the subject be confronted direct, at or near the home address. The subject’s initial reaction may be defensive or hostile and for this reason, we also recommend that you carry full documentation with you at all times.’

  He might have been writing about a criminal, Loretta thought indignantly, a shoplifter or a drug pusher rather than an 18-year-old who, for reasons Dunow presumably knew nothing about, had given up her child for adoption. There was no acknowledgement that the sudden appearance of an adult son or daughter might cause turmoil in a woman’s life, as Loretta suspected it was about to do in Toni’s. Her own involvement, accidental though it was, had left her winded and aching but it was as nothing to the impact the affair was going to have on Toni, Jay, their unborn child ... Loretta glanced at the resolutely silent phone, acknowledging her dread of the moment when it finally rang. On top of everything else, how would Toni feel, how would any woman feel, when she discovered her son had employed some quite possibly perverted private detective to spy on her? It was hardly a good omen for their future relationship.

  Unable to quell her uneasiness about Dunow, Loretta had turned back to the first page of his report and read an office address on Lexington, a few blocks north of Tracey’s hotel. He had told her the area was called Murray Hill and that it was rundown, a little seedy, and that was exactly how it had looked when she dropped him off the previous evening: drab buildings in brown brick, junk shops, the neon lights of cheap stores that stayed open all night. It was easy enough to picture a dark doorway between two shops, steps leading to a poky upstairs office, a glass door stencilled with the Inside Investigations logo; on the other side she imagined a thickset man with thinning hair, a phone in one hand and his feet up on the desk. Below the address was a column of telephone and fax numbers and without giving herself time to think, Loretta pulled the phone towards her and dialled one of them.

  ‘Inside Investigations, Julie speaking. How may I help you?’

  Loretta was unprepared, expecting an answering-machine.


  ’Inside Investigations, Julie spe –’

  ‘Can I speak to Pete Dunow?’

  ‘Mr Dunow isn’t in the office right now.’ She sounded wary. ‘Can I put you through to Mr Delehanty?’

  ‘No, I don’t think ... All I want to know is whether he’s still working for one of your clients, his name’s Frank Ryan.’

  She heard an intake of breath. ‘Client information is confidential, I’d better put you through to Mr Delehanty, if he’s free. Would you hold on one moment?’ Loretta heard the soft tap of computer keys, a chair scraping back, voices conferring out of earshot. It didn’t tally with the picture she’d formed of a shoestring outfit, a middle-aged man in a dirty mac and a part-time secretary. After a longish wait, Julie came back. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Delehanty’s with a client right now. Can he call you back?’

  ‘There’s no need, if you can just tell me –’

  ‘I’m sorry, we’re not allowed to give out client information over the phone.’ Julie was losing her temper, if you leave your name and number Mr Delehanty will call you back as soon as — ‘

  Recognising an impasse, Loretta interrupted: i won’t bother, thanks very much,’ and put the phone down.

  She frowned and looked down at her palms, wondering why they were hurting so much. It was a niggling pain, like a mouth ulcer, and it didn’t seem to have been eased at all by the antiseptic cream. She realised she’d been digging in her nails while she was on the phone, making it worse.

  ‘Oh God,’ she complained, uncurling her legs and accidentally kicking Honey.

  The bulldog growled, scrambled to her feet and backed away, teeth bared. Loretta did her best to pacify her, uncertain of the dog’s temper after what had happened in the park, and eventually resorted to bribing her back into good humour with a plate of meaty biscuits. Looking at her watch and deciding she’d waited long enough for Toni to call, she stuffed Frank’s documents back into the manila envelope and made sure the answering-machine was switched on. Trying to remember the exact location of the Moroccan restaurant she’d spotted the day before, she slipped quietly out of the flat while Honey was too busy eating to protest. In the corridor she glanced in both directions, still thinking of Pete Dunow, but it was as quiet and empty as it had always been; Loretta wondered briefly what kind of people Toni’s neighbours were, why they never seemed to show themselves. As she rounded the corner to the lift an impressive chorus of aches and pains started up in her calves and ankles; Loretta shook each leg in turn, not looking forward to the walk to the restaurant but relieved to have a good reason for leaving the small and increasingly claustrophobic flat.