The Knock at the Door

by Ryan Manion

  As the party got under way, Rob appeared preoccupied with his visitors, but as soon as Matt introduced us, Rob’s attention shifted to me. We laughed and joked around the whole night. I remember being flirtatious and stealing his baseball cap at one point and wearing it around for a portion of the evening. I thought he was cute, but our first interaction was innocent, playful teasing, and I didn’t put much stock in it. I was happy to take it all in and experience this new thing called “college.”

  Soon after the party, Rob found ways to “accidentally” run into me. On one occasion, I called Matt to come over and help me hang a shelf on my dorm room wall. Rob happened to be standing near Matt when he answered the phone, overheard the conversation, and insisted it was a two-man job and that he would gladly assist.

  On another occasion, Rob offered to take me to Target under the pretense that he had some things to buy to prepare for the beginning of the school year. I had mentioned that I had a mild obsession with the store and sometimes just walked around to see what new merchandise they were pushing. I jumped at the opportunity. We spent some time chatting and strolling up and down the aisles until I reminded him that he had actually come there to buy something.

  “So what do you need?” I finally asked.

  “Oh right. I almost forgot.” He grabbed a wooden spoon off a nearby rack. “Here it is. This is what I need.”

  Another time, Rob and Matt engineered a surprise double date. Now, “surprise” and “double date” should never go together. In theory, it should have been a complete disaster, but Rob was effortlessly fun and charming and, of course, it wasn’t.

  In that instance, Matt asked me if I wanted to grab a cousin dinner with him one night, and I accepted. When he pulled up in his green Jeep to pick me up, Rob was in the front seat, beaming. I hopped in the back, confused, but pleasantly surprised. We then went to pick up another girl, who looked just as surprised as I was. I’m sure she, too, had thought she was having dinner with Matt alone, and hadn’t expected Rob and me to accompany them.

  Throughout September, I found myself unexpectedly spending more and more time with Rob. I remember going over to his house one evening. We fell into watching a marathon of The Real World: Las Vegas until 2 a.m., talking about whatever silly ideas popped into our heads. He hadn’t even tried to kiss me that first month, but we spent nearly every waking moment together. I was quickly growing attached.

  By my birthday in early October, we were officially dating. In fact, we were rarely apart. I’d spend mornings goofing off with Rob and his friends, and at some point in the afternoons, Rob would drop me off at my dorm or take me to class. I had an acute case of Fear of Missing Out in those days and would come up with any excuse I could to skip class and spend more time with him.

  We hated to say goodbye to one another, even for just a few days at fall break. At the Christmas holiday, he went back to his parents’ house—which was now in California, since the Marine Corps had moved his family across the country—and I returned to New Jersey.

  We were excited to get back to one another for the spring semester, but the excitement came with a caveat. Springtime also meant that the departure of Rob’s father was looming. It was about this time, in 2003, that the Iraq War began, and since Rob’s father was active duty, he prepared to deploy to a combat zone.

  I’m sure that was a stressful time for Rob, but he never let on to me. He was in his senior year, preparing to graduate with a history degree and unsure of what his next move would be. He watched his father head off to war, and he returned to carefree college life in Tallahassee with his freshman girlfriend.

  There must have been some cognitive dissonance there, but he was always patient, fun loving, and warm to me. I’m sure he worried occasionally about his father, but he knew how capable the man was—as both a leader and as a Marine. More than feeling worried for him, he felt awe. Rob mentioned to me once or twice that he had expressed concern to his father about his safety, but his father had always shrugged it off.

  “Nah, I’ll be fine,” the patriarch would assure his family as he waved a hand dismissively. “Sure, things get messy out there, but I’m always thrown clear of any danger.” It was tough to argue with such confidence, and I could see why Rob so admired his father.

  Somewhere along the way, Rob inherited that same cool self-reliance that his father always exhibited. He sounded as though he thought he was invincible, and I had no doubt that he was.

  Before long, a life of service started to call Rob’s name, too, just as it had for his father and brother before him. Shortly after graduation in May, he decided to take a Saturday and visit a recruiting station to learn a little more about what military life would be like for him. He settled on a nearby Coast Guard recruiting station, a rebellious deviation from the Kelly family pedigree of Devil Dogs—a nickname for the Marines.

  When Rob approached the building that Saturday, he saw that it was closed. He turned and started to walk back to his car. As luck would have it, a Marine Corps recruiting station was located just next door, and a Marine recruiter had been watching Rob’s every move. When he saw Rob turn away from the Coast Guard building, the recruiter decided to try his luck. He poked his head out the front door and yelled over to Rob.

  “Do you…uh…want to talk to someone?” he ventured.

  Rob’s servant heart couldn’t resist the opportunity, and less than forty-eight hours later, Rob had enlisted in the United States Marine Corps. He was told he’d be shipped off in September to boot camp for three months at Parris Island, South Carolina. Rob did the math and realized he was being granted one final hurrah in Tallahassee: a full summer with no job, no worries, and just enough savings to pay for rent and cheap beer. He planned to take full advantage of his freedom before he was stripped of it at boot camp.

  I, on the other hand, already had a plane ticket—purchased by my parents—back to New Jersey. When the semester ended, I gave Rob a tearful goodbye and headed back north. When I arrived in New Jersey, I couldn’t even feel excited about reuniting with my parents and high school friends. I just missed Rob. I begged my parents to let me move back down to Florida to spend the summer with him.

  “We just bought a ticket to get you here, Heather,” my mom said. “We’re not buying another one to send you back.”

  I didn’t have enough money to purchase a ticket on my own, so I continued to plead with them. I remember desperately crying to my mom.

  “You have to let me go back to see Rob. He’s joining the military now, and going to boot camp soon, and I don’t know if I’ll ever see him again,” I wailed—or something equally uncalled for and dramatic. I must have worn her down, though, because she relented.

  I owe my mother a debt of gratitude for that one, because that summer after freshman year was probably the best three months of my life. Some of my fondest memories with Rob are from that time. I don’t remember the moving process from New Jersey to Florida. I only remember being so excited to see him and not wanting to spend a single minute apart from him. We did nothing but goof off the entire summer.

  Our lives were such a joke. We neither worked nor took any classes. I spent my afternoons at the pool on campus watching Rob and his friends do outlandish tricks off the diving board. We spent our evenings at the movies or at the mall, or enjoying five-dollar all-you-can-drink beers at Irish Pub or AJ’s Sports Bar & Grille.

  Rob didn’t take his preparation for boot camp terribly seriously and rarely, if ever, worked out. By the time he packed up his things in September, he was almost looking a little full in the face. It was such a fun, carefree time in our lives, and neither of us wanted it to end. When it finally did, Rob and I said our goodbyes and prepared to endure the first of many separations.

  And so began a love affair with detailed calendars and daily countdowns. Moments after I kissed Rob goodbye and watched him drive off to basic training, I searched online for a weekly calendar for Marine Corps recruits. I reviewed what activities he’d be up to
each week for the next eighty-four days and made a personal calendar so I could follow along and cross out each week as it passed. The final destination was graduation, and time just couldn’t move fast enough. Twelve weeks sounded like an eternity, but at least it was something I could get my arms around. It gave me something to look forward to.

  Over the next several years, this became nearly the only way I would measure time. I didn’t think in terms of days of the week or months of the year. I thought in terms of how many more days until I saw Rob. At any given time, a friend would ask when I’d see Rob again, and I’d be able to give an exact number.

  There was a direct correlation between my calendar and my mood. At thirty days out, I was frustrated. At fifteen days out, I started to get anxious. At ten days out I allowed myself to become excited, and at five days out I was beaming. There was simply no better feeling in the world than one day out—except, of course, for day zero.

  I was so excited counting down the days until I would see him at graduation from boot camp that I never stopped to think about what would happen once graduation was over. I met him on Parris Island to celebrate with his family, and it wasn’t until then that it finally dawned on me that the clock resets after each celebration. I had thought we were done, but it turned out we were just getting started.

  It’s a good thing I loved the process of crafting countdowns, because they were about to become my entire life. Anyone who’s managed a long-distance relationship knows the drill: Your life becomes an emotional game of ping-pong between joyous reunions and painful separations, with anticipation serving as the momentum that keeps the cycle in motion.

  After we jumped the boot camp hurdle, Rob was stationed at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and I returned for my sophomore year in Tallahassee, a fourteen-hour drive away.

  In no time at all, I knew the exact number of days until spring break, when I would go to visit him, or until the next long weekend, when he would come and visit me.

  Before I knew it, I was counting down to June, when Rob would visit with me one last time before he left for his first deployment. Outside of mutual love and respect for one another, our relationship was anchored in this experience of anticipation. It made our lives fun and exciting. When we weren’t savoring our time together in the present, we were anticipating it in the future. We imagined the experience in great detail: which restaurant we would go to, which fancy drink we would order, what we would talk about. Imagining was half the fun.

  It was only nine months between the day Rob reported to boot camp and the day he touched down in a combat zone in Iraq. Long gone were the carefree days of creative spins off the diving board and cheap pitchers of beer at AJ’s. We were both growing up quickly.

  During that first, seven-month deployment, Rob had his first encounter with the ugliness and complexity of war. It affected him, but he preferred to share the details of it with his father rather than with me. I recall him getting choked up one night at dinner, talking about Gavriel and other men they’d lost.

  It caught me completely off guard to see my happy-go-lucky Rob become emotional. I’d never seen him like that. But he tried not to dwell on the sad parts of deployment. He reserved only the humorous or playful parts for our conversations: tales of the disgusting rats he found sleeping in his tent with him or quirky stories about the other Marines he served with.

  The intensity of his experiences was very real, however, and those experiences, coupled with the distance that separated us, caused our relationship to mature pretty quickly. There was no doubt from either of us that we wanted to be together forever. We talked about marriage frequently, but I still had my senior year of college to finish, and I wasn’t going to drop out just so we could get married.

  And Rob had another deployment coming up, so we decided to rely on our calendars and countdowns to get us through the short term until we could make long-term plans for our lives together.

  By the time I graduated FSU in the spring of 2006, Rob was completing his work-ups in preparation for his second deployment. Rather than return to Iraq, Rob would be spending his second deployment at sea: seven months on a marine expeditionary unit, or MEU, which meant he would be part of a small reaction force aboard a ship, sailing through the Strait of Gibraltar, bouncing around the Mediterranean, and sailing in the Persian Gulf. The idea behind these deployments was to have an amphibious unit of Marines available to respond quickly to any crises on land or on the water.

  Sometimes the unit responds to nearby natural disasters, and other times it provides support for combat missions. During that deployment, Rob’s ship would see both types of action, but by and large it was much more relaxed than his previous deployment to Iraq had been.

  After finishing his work-ups, Rob went to New Jersey to spend a few days with me and my family during his pre-deployment leave. We wanted to celebrate my graduation and clock as much time together as possible before it was time for him to go, so we made plans for a quick getaway to nearby Atlantic City. As we passed by the jewelry store of an Atlantic City casino, I pointed to a shiny, diamond ring.

  “That’s the kind of ring I’d like, Rob. Just like that one.”

  We’d talked about marriage dozens of times before, but never with this level of specificity. Rob had told me that his MEU would pass through Dubai and that he heard he could get really cheap diamonds while in port there. I figured it couldn’t hurt to give some not-so-subtle hints about my jewelry preferences before he shipped out and made any decisions independently. He looked at the ring behind the glass and smiled, but he wasn’t going to make things that easy for me.

  “You’re going to have to write that down, Heather. I’m never going to remember that.” I sighed and made a mental note to come back to it another time. Little did I know, he already had my engagement ring packed away in his suitcase upstairs.

  It was such a beautiful day in May, so I told Rob I wanted to go to the beach and take some pictures. As we were walking along the shore, we found large scallop shells to serve as props for our photo shoot. No one else was around, so we held the shells up and took a series of photos where each of us was wearing our makeshift “mermaid bra.” I couldn’t stop laughing and snapping away at this tough-guy infantry Marine modeling a shell bra on the beaches of Atlantic City.

  “Wait, take a picture with my camera,” Rob insisted.

  This was, of course, before the days of smartphones with professional-grade cameras built in, so we were each lugging around a digital camera to capture the mini-vacation.

  “I’ll just send you a copy,” I told him. “I’ve got it on my camera.”

  “No, I really want one on mine. Can you just take one on mine?” He was insistent, but I couldn’t understand why.

  I picked up his case and reached inside for the camera, but what I found instead was a little box. I opened it to reveal a beautiful diamond ring. My heart nearly stopped. I pulled it out and looked at Rob, but he was more frozen than I was. He didn’t get down on one knee and he didn’t open his mouth to say another word. He just stood there like a mannequin. I think he was too nervous to do anything but wait for my next move. I’m not even sure if he was breathing at this point.

  “So…” I started nervously. “Um…What finger does this go on?”

  I racked my brain for a less awkward way to inquire whether I was being proposed to or not. It was just indirect enough to save me some dignity if it turned out this wasn’t a proposal of marriage. I mean, who wants to be presumptuous in a situation like that? Imagine thinking you were being proposed to when, in fact, you weren’t. What if it was just a promise ring he was gifting me? And I shouted “Yes, of course!” and jumped into his arms, only to have him explain to me that I’d grossly misunderstood? Or worse, what if it was just a pretty piece of pre-deployment jewelry to remember him by when he was gone? No way. I wasn’t willing to risk it.

  My lack of an immediate and enthusiastic response was probably Rob’s nightmare. He continue
d to stare at me, mouth ever so slightly agape. In my defense, the poor man wasn’t doing himself any favors. There was no bended knee, no question being posed, no verbal indication at all, in fact, that this was a proposal of marriage. I was working with very few clues, so “What finger does this go on?” was the best response I could muster. He looked terrified, but finally he managed to find his voice,

  “Well,” he said, “it’s an engagement ring, Heather.”

  Phew! That was a close one. I felt a giant wave of relief wash over me. That was followed by a tidal wave of complete and total joy when I got to jump into his arms after all. I couldn’t wait to be Mrs. Heather Kelly.

  We took our excitement down to DC, where we celebrated with Rob’s close family and friends and prepared ourselves for another seven-month separation. And of course, as always, there was another countdown on the horizon until his return. And when we hit that one, there would be a rush of other exciting things to imagine: wedding plans, career discussions, vacations, moves, and the like. We saw our lives unfolding like a road before us and we couldn’t wait for all the landmarks along the way.

  Once Rob departed for deployment in June 2006, I became happily distracted with making wedding plans. Now I had two exciting countdowns to track: one for Rob’s return in early December 2006, and one for our wedding a few months later, in June 2007.

  I don’t know that anyone would claim that “time flies” on a deployment, but that one came pretty close. I was busy trying on wedding dresses, visiting possible venues, collecting addresses for invitations, picking out registry items with my mom at Crate & Barrel, selecting a color palette, and coming up with a list of “must play” songs for our DJ. The countdown flew faster than any I’d remembered. Rob returned and I was ecstatic. Greeting each other after that second deployment, we knew we couldn’t wait a second longer to make our commitment official. We had planned for me to move down to North Carolina after our wedding in June, but that felt eons away. While I was visiting him there after deployment, he finally turned to me one day and asked, “Why can’t you just move here now?”