Ginny
2001, Fort Lauderdale
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I pulled away from Tommy and looked at him. My brows knitted in concentration as I tried to make sense of his last sentence.
“You want me to what?”
He didn’t answer me right away as a small family made their way past us and continued happily down the beach. I placed my hands on my hips and waited for his reply.
“I want you to signal Grizz. I want you to wear it.”
“Have you lost your mind?” I glared at him. “After everything you just told me? You want me to see him?”
My eyes narrowed as another thought occurred to me.
“Is this a trick, Tommy? Are you using me to lure him out? So someone can actually kill him?”
Without giving him time to answer, I started marching back toward our hotel. I could feel him close at my heels. He grabbed me by the elbow, swung me around to face him.
“Absolutely not, Gin. That’s not why.”
His expression was so sincere, I was caught by surprise. I waited for him to continue. He looked up at the sky and shook his head slightly.
“I can’t do it anymore, Ginny. I don’t want to do it anymore, honey. You need to have Grizz come to you so you can figure out your heart.”
“I know my heart!” I shouted it so loud some birds scattered. He wouldn’t look at me. “I know my heart, Tommy. It’s here, with you.” I couldn't believe he was asking me to wear the bandana. Was Tommy purposely sabotaging the progress we'd made? And if so, why? My heart ached at the possibility and my sense of disappointment was acute.
He looked at me then, and I saw something in his eyes that saddened me.
“No, it’s not Gin. Not all of it. I can’t compete with Grizz. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder, wondering if he’ll show up again. I’m glad he left a way for you to contact him if you needed to. I just can’t live like this anymore. I’m refusing to live like this anymore.”
“I’m not stupid, Tommy. I know you just tested me back there, and I know I passed. Why are you doing this? Our future is finally here, right now. All the years you waited to be with me. The last fifteen years of our marriage, a good marriage, and it comes down to this?”
“If he’s alive, you need to make a choice.” The resolve in his voice was firm.
“I have made a choice, Tommy. I’m with you. I’m not going anywhere. Did you not hear me? The bandana is in a landfill.”
“But you did go somewhere, Gin. After you talked to the nuns, you stopped on your way home. You stopped where Grizz’s real parents were born. You’re still searching. For what? Why?”
I swiped my hand through my hair as his accusation and question sunk in.
“I stopped there for you and Mimi. Grizz’s roots are Mimi’s roots, Tommy. And up until ten minutes ago, I was still under the impression that you were his son. They would’ve been your roots, too.”
“And after everything we’ve been through, you’re ready to connect Mimi back to Grizz’s family? Don’t you realize, Ginny, that it’s not going away? It’ll never go away. You need to see Grizz and confront your feelings once and for all. I don’t like it. And you’re right. It’s going against everything that I’ve fought for, but all of a sudden, I’m tired. Ginny. I’m really tired.”
I just stared at him. I wasn’t sure how to react.
I was angry because I felt like he’d tricked me, but at the same time, I knew he was being sincere. And worse yet, I knew he was justified.
My shoulders slumped, then something else struck me.
“So I guess you don’t believe the story he told you. I mean, if he comes to me, then I guess there isn’t any threat to his life. My life. That’s all nonsense?”
“I didn’t say that. I believe the threat was real. But not anymore. If he’s still alive, it’s because they don’t give a shit, Gin. If I believed there was still a plausible threat from them, no matter how small, I wouldn’t be telling you to put on that bandana. I wouldn’t have told you any of this. Besides, he won’t be able to just roll up and knock on our door. He still needs to live off the grid. He wouldn’t risk being seen or recognized by someone who may remember him.”
I crossed my arms. “So if I decide I want to be with Grizz, how does that work? I ride away into the sunset, leaving you and my children?” I stomped my foot in the sand. “It sounds ludicrous, and it’s not even a decision to be made, Tommy. I am your wife. Your wife.”
I poked him in the chest. He didn’t flinch.
“Seeing Grizz isn’t going to make me change my mind,” I added.
He softly grabbed both of my shoulders and what he said sent a chill up my spine. I knew it was painful for him, but I also knew he was serious.
“If it ever comes to that, I promise you we’ll figure out a way to make it work. I don’t know how. Don’t ask me details, because believe me, it’s not something I let myself think about.”
I roughly shoved him away and spun around to head back to our hotel.
Instead of making love in our romantic hotel room that overlooked the ocean, we spent the rest of our night talking. We canceled our dinner reservations and opted to have room service. The hotel served a quality meal, but it might as well have been cardboard.
We put the bandana conversation on the backburner as Tommy told me more details about his meeting with his grandmother. Apparently, she’d mistaken him for someone else. Her mind, clouded by years of alcohol, thought she was being visited by someone from her past.
“Apparently, I’m the spitting image of David Enman,” Tommy told me. “Or rather, what David would’ve looked like if he’d lived longer.”
I shook my head, not recognizing the name.
“He was Donald Enman’s brother,” Tommy said. “Donald Enman was Red, the guy I told you about that Grizz met at the motel. Red was Candy’s godfather—and, I suspect, my father.”
“Why do you suspect that? Maybe your father is David, Red’s brother. That’s who she thought you were.”
Tommy explained how his grandmother knew both Donald and David Enman, and that David had died years before Candy got pregnant.
“Candy’s mother, my grandmother, grew up with the Enman brothers. Red was responsible for introducing her to Candy’s father, Tom, the man I was named after. She knew Donald and David Enman long before Tom even came into the picture.” He stared at the wall over my shoulder and sighed.
“It makes sense now, Gin. What Grizz told me. How Red was obsessed with getting Candy off the street. How he had her practically held captive in Grizz’s little apartment above the garages. I remember Grizz specifically telling me Red stayed there with her when Grizz and Anthony couldn’t. I think he was raping her, Ginny. I think it had probably been happening long before her teens. I think that’s why she turned to prostitution and drugs. To get away from him. I get creeped out when I think about how Grizz must’ve come up with her nickname.”
“Tell me. How did he come up with Candy?” My stomach roiled.
“Grizz told me Red kept a bag of candy behind his bar because my mother, then Stacy Ann, loved candy. Makes the hair on my neck stand up thinking about predators and how they use sweets to bait kids. I wonder if he’d been doing the same thing to my Aunt Karen. Might explain why she was so miserable, too.”
“Oh, Tommy. Grizz knew what Red was doing to your mother?”
“No. I don’t think he knew at all, Gin. I really think Grizz thought I was his kid. He would never have known Red’s brother, so he wouldn’t have seen the similarities or made the connection like my grandmother did. Of course, I can’t prove any of it. I suppose I could find out where Red is buried and have him exhumed, see if there’s any usable DNA, but no. I have my proof. I think I’m done.”
All of a sudden, I’d felt the weight of the world that had rested on my husband’s shoulders and knew why he felt so tired. I did my best to console him.
I spent the rest of our mini vacation trying to talk him out of the ridiculous plan to summon Grizz. He was still insistent. But we also didn’t stop on the way home to buy a bandana. I was relieved.
**********
A week passed, and we fell back into our routine with our life and our children. I secretly hoped I’d dreamed the whole bandana nonsense. It hadn’t been mentioned since that day at the beach, and I was certain Tommy’s suggestion had only been brought on by the emotions of finding out about his real father.
Of course, I’d told him that night at the hotel that he was grabbing at straws based on an old woman’s memories. He’d quietly reached for his wallet and pulled out a picture. My jaw dropped as I saw the truth. I was staring at a picture of an eighteen-year-old David Enman, and it could’ve been Tommy.
But by now, I thought everything was back to normal. I’d tucked what I’d found out about Grizz and his family into a corner of my mind, telling myself that if I ever decided to share it with Mimi, I wouldn’t do it now and definitely wouldn’t do it without Tommy.
I was in the laundry room folding clothes. Jason had a basketball game coming up, and all his uniforms were dirty. I heard Tommy come in through the garage, I could hear his briefcase as it made its familiar thunk on the bench. I was smiling to myself when he came up behind me and kissed my neck.
“Dinner smells good.”
“It’s your favorite,” I said, leaning back into him.
“I’m going upstairs to change my clothes. I’ll be back down in a few.”
I turned to face him and stared into his eyes. My smile faded as I saw an expression that made me uneasy.
Without breaking from my gaze, he felt around for my hand and tucked something into it, slowly closing my fingers around it. He turned around and headed out of the laundry room. I could hear him walking up the stairs toward our bedroom.
I looked down and saw what he’d placed in my hand.
A blue bandana.