The Knock at the Door Read online

  Ryan

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  Chapter 1

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  Sunday, April 29, 2007

  I was in downtown Doylestown, Pennsylvania, scouting locations for a business I was opening. Doylestown is a quaint little suburb north of Philadelphia that evokes a different time. With a historic downtown brimming with shops and restaurants, it seemed like the perfect spot for a second location of my high-end women’s and men’s clothing store, Pale Moon Boutique.

  Several years before, I had opened the first store in Avalon, New Jersey, a tiny resort town on a barrier island called Seven Mile Island. The business had been mostly seasonal, since Avalon was largely empty between September and May. The store had become a labor of love for me, and I was thrilled to be selecting its newest location in the neighborhood where I’d grown up.

  I had left my daughter, Maggie, with my parents while I and my business partner drove a few minutes away to look at a vacant store right in the heart of town. As soon as I saw it, I knew it would be perfect. As the landlord was putting the lease in my hand for me to sign, my cell phone rang, and I saw that it was my mom. Thinking she was just checking to see when I would be back, I ignored the call.

  When my phone immediately rang again, I knew something was up. My initial fear was that something had happened to my ten-month-old daughter. My mind went to the worst place, and at the time, I didn’t think anything could be worse than that.

  When I answered the phone, all I heard on the other end were muffled screams. It was clearly a noise made by someone who was so broken up and in such a state of shock that he or she couldn’t even cry properly. I didn’t know how to prepare myself for whatever news I was about to receive.

  I starting shaking uncontrollably. “Tell me what happened!” I cried. I was terrified that something horrible had happened to Maggie. Had she tripped and split her head open? Choked on something? My mind was running wild with the possibilities. Not knowing was almost worse than knowing at this point.

  “Have you called an ambulance?” I yelled.

  “Yes,” answered the voice on the phone before the line suddenly went dead. The call had come from my mom’s phone, but it wasn’t until later that I learned that her sister, my aunt Annette, had been the caller. At the time, I had been too stunned to notice it wasn’t my mom’s voice on the other end. I knew that I was too upset to drive. I asked my business partner to take me home, a five-minute drive I had traveled countless times before. But this time, those five minutes felt like an eternity. And while the car was crawling through the streets, my mind was racing at a thousand miles a minute.

  My husband was at work, about an hour away. While I wanted the comfort that his voice would bring, I decided not to call him until I got to the house and could figure out what was going on. I didn’t want to upset him if I didn’t have to.

  As we pulled onto my parents’ street, my heart started racing as fast as my mind. I didn’t see an ambulance anywhere in sight. For a moment, that gave me a sense of relief. Maybe things weren’t as serious as I had led myself to believe.

  My dad was standing in the driveway next to a friend, Lieutenant Colonel Corky Gardner. He and my father had served together in the Marine Corps, and he was a dear friend of the family. He and his wife lived about forty-five minutes away, so it struck me as odd to see him standing there, especially since my parents had not mentioned he would be coming over.

  I jumped out of the car while it was still moving.

  “Where is the ambulance?” I screamed.

  My dad stared at me with a blank look. Then in a very measured tone, he said, “Travis was killed.”

  I heard those words loud and clear, but they didn’t make any sense to me. It took me a few seconds to process what I was being told. Since the moment I hung up the phone, I’d known something was wrong, but this was far worse than I could have imagined. I had thought my daughter was in imminent danger, and here I was being told that my brother was dead. He was twenty-six years old.

  Travis and I had been born only fifteen months apart, so to say we were close would be an understatement. The fact that ours was a military family also brought us closer than most siblings. Like many military families, we’d had to adjust to new situations very quickly until I was twelve, when my dad left active duty. Before that, we had moved almost every two years.

  We knew that, no matter where we moved next, no matter what school we ended up in or which sports teams we’d be the new kids on, we always had each other to depend on. Travis had been my built-in best friend at every stage of my life.

  I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t want to believe it. I collapsed in a heap right there on the driveway. I remember thinking that the asphalt felt unnaturally warm for a mid-April afternoon that had been mild.

  “It’s not fair! It’s not fair!” I screamed over and over into the sky. I wanted to make sure that everyone—even God himself—knew that he had made a terrible mistake. As I screamed, my parents’ neighbors spilled out of their houses to find out what was happening.

  My dad didn’t rush to my side to comfort me. He let me get those tortured screams out of my system before I went about the hard work of trying to understand what had happened and pick up the pieces.

  As had always been the case with my dad, he knew exactly what I needed before I did. I have no idea how long I lay on the ground screaming. I just know that it was long enough to get the rage out of my system. At some point, one of the neighbors helped me up and walked me down the driveway toward the house.

  As I walked, I turned around and saw an unfamiliar car parked on the road in front of the house. In my shock, I hadn’t even noticed it earlier.

  Inside sat a young man, about my age, in full military dress blues. His forehead was resting on the top of the steering wheel, pressed between two folded arms that cradled his head. His eyes were closed and he looked dejected, or perhaps unconscious.

  I later learned this poor Marine—twenty-six years old at most—had been charged with the unfortunate task of sharing the news with the people closest to First Lieutenant Travis Manion that he had been killed in Iraq.

  Captain Eric Cahill, as I later learned was his name, had been assigned to carry out the job since he was local and had graduated from the Naval Academy the year before my brother.

  Lieutenant Colonel Gardner had also been called, since the military knew that he was a family friend close by. Together, while I had been out scouting sites for my boutique, they had approached my parents’ door and knocked. My mother opened the door, took one look at Corky and the young Marine in uniform, and slammed the door in their faces.

  She simply couldn’t face what was on the other side.

  I wasn’t sure that I could, either. When I reached the front door with the help of my neighbor, I stopped. I had walked through that door thousands of times before, but this time I wanted to turn the other direction and run away. I knew, deep down in my soul, that once I passed through that door this time, the life that I had known was over and there was no going back.

  Inside was pure pandemonium. My parents had been hosting a family barbecue when they received the knock at the door. Now, moments later, family members were scattered throughout the house, loudly sobbing, making hushed phone calls, and racing aimlessly back and forth.

  I walked into a swarm of tumultuous and confused activity, but my brain was still processing slowly. In all the chaos and furious movement, I locked eyes with my grandmother, who was seated alone in a wheelchair in the dining room, tears streaming down her cheeks. She was receiving neither comfort nor attention from anyone. My heart broke in that instant; I’ll never forget that image.

  The rest of that day is a blur. I floated between feelings of painful shock and dark emptiness. I finally emerged to a lucid state sometime later that night to inquire about my daughter’s whereabouts. It had been hours since she even crossed my mind. Apparently, a friend had taken her from the house during the afternoon, and I hadn’t even tho
ught to ask until nightfall.

  In the days that followed, it was as if I myself were a child. I couldn’t care for my infant; I could barely care for myself. I lost ten pounds in seven days, from the day I learned of Travis’s death to the day we held his funeral.

  For a week, I slept between my parents in their bed. I found a bright-red Marine Corps sweatshirt in a forgotten drawer that had belonged to my father and I wore it religiously. As I sat on the back steps outside, it was in that sweatshirt. When I fell asleep at night, it was in that sweatshirt. And when I finally went to meet my brother’s body upon arrival at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, I carried the sweatshirt with me.

  I hadn’t planned to stay in Doylestown, of course. I had planned to sign the lease to the new store and return that same day to my house in Avalon, a couple hours away.

  That’s where my clothing and the rest of my belongings were. So when I went to bed that first night, it was in that red sweatshirt and whatever I had worn all day. I remember being so grateful as I lay down in bed, looking forward to the moment when sleep would come over me and I could have a few hours of quiet forgetfulness, as though this terrible day had never happened.

  When I woke the next morning, I remembered what it felt like coming out of anesthesia from an operation I’d had in college. First one eyelid opened cautiously, and then the next, but my body remained frozen. My mind was already churning, going over the details of the previous day and coming to terms with the unalterable fact that my best friend and brother was dead.

  This marked the first of what turned out to be many anxiety-ridden mornings that would follow. Every day, I would slowly and warily transition from sleep to consciousness, hoping that my overwhelming anxiety wouldn’t make another appearance. But it always did.

  On one particular morning, I woke up thinking about the casket in which my brother would be arriving home that afternoon. What would it feel like to stand in the pouring rain in the middle of an airfield with my parents and my husband and watch the casket being carried solemnly off a military aircraft?

  The house filled with another buzz of activity that morning as we all prepared to greet Travis and welcome him home. I stood in the kitchen with a few aunts and uncles, and one of them made a joke. What it was, I can’t quite remember. I do remember knowing it was funny, but not being able to laugh. It simply wouldn’t come. The rest of the group chuckled, grateful for a break from the heavy, somber mood of the previous few days. My uncle gently touched my arm and told me, “I promise you’ll laugh again.”

  I really wanted to believe him. But I wasn’t so sure.

  The greeting at Dover was gut wrenching. My parents and I were plagued by questions in those early days that were difficult to ignore. Who was with Travis when he died? What happened? Was it instant? Slowly, the answers started to unfold.

  We learned later that Travis wasn’t actually scheduled to be out on the mission the day that he was killed. Instead, a fellow Marine was slated for the patrol, but he wasn’t feeling up to it. Travis, who had been assigned to do some humanitarian work at a local Iraqi school, offered to take his place.

  During the course of the patrol, Travis and his team of Marines were ambushed. A firefight erupted and they were quickly pinned down, taking fire from three sides. Travis, seeing his Navy corpsman shot and lying wounded in the middle of the road, immediately ran out into the line of fire to carry his colleague to safety.

  As the ambush intensified, Travis again entered the line of fire to pull another wounded Marine back to safety in a covered position.

  Then Travis moved out to take on the ambush that was now overwhelming his patrol. Undaunted by the onslaught, he fired his M203 grenade launcher, taking out an enemy position, and then expended a firestorm of rounds at the other positions before running out of ammunition. His efforts pushed the enemy back and changed the entire momentum of the ambush—ultimately saving the lives of his entire patrol.

  It was then that Travis was shot by a sniper, and immediately the enemy began to pull back. His teammates quickly grabbed him and provided what emergency medical care they could. He was rushed back to Camp Fallujah, where he was pronounced dead by the medical staff that had worked feverishly to try and save him.

  There’s no part of that story that doesn’t sound just like my brother. Offering to take the worse assignment to help a friend in need—that was Travis. Thinking about the safety of others before ever considering his own—that was Travis, too. Seeing dismal odds that didn’t bode well for him and choosing to grit his teeth and answer fire with more fire anyway—also Travis. My brother was a protector and warrior in every sense of those terms. I certainly felt it as his sister, and I’m proud to know that his fellow Marines got to experience it, too.

  When I learned that he’d been killed by a bullet, I was nervous that I wouldn’t be able to stomach the sight of him in an open casket. My mind imagined the worst. I was shocked, then, when the lid of the casket was raised at the viewing, to see my brother looking as though he were sleeping peacefully, just as I’d remembered him.

  I approached the coffin and rubbed his head as I’d done a hundred times before. From the time he was a child, Travis had always sported a buzz cut, and as I felt the surface of his freshly cut hair with my fingertips, I thought, Yep, that’s Travis’s head.

  I stood by his side all day, greeting friends and family who had taken the time to pay their respects. I was touched by visits from so many of Travis’s friends, but there’s one memory in particular that will always stay with me.

  One of Travis’s best friends and roommate at the Naval Academy, Brendan Looney, was unable to make the funeral. He was in San Diego attending the Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL School (BUD/S), the training program required for Navy SEALs. Leaving to attend the services on the East Coast would have surely meant relinquishing his chance to become a SEAL officer.

  But Brendan’s girlfriend at the time, Amy, who had also been close to Travis, did come to say her final goodbye. I remember Amy walking up to the casket and bursting into tears. I knew that the loss cut her deeply as well.

  The friends who traveled to see him lying in that casket were about his age. It felt terribly backward and wrong to see so many of them break down. For hours, I watched all these young, strong men, in the prime of their lives and in peak condition, weep at the sight of my brother, who appeared to be sleeping peacefully in front of them.

  It was a physically and mentally exhausting day. And as much as I could hardly bear the idea of standing by that casket one minute longer after hours of doing so, I also didn’t want to imagine that time coming to an end.

  I knew that, after the last person knelt down to say a prayer in front of Travis, the funeral director was going to close that casket forever, and that would be it. I’d never see my brother’s face again. I rubbed his head one last time and felt my heart sinking as my father gently pulled me away.

  There hadn’t been much discussion around where to bury Travis. Before he left, he had tried to talk with me about it. We were having a couple of beers and he casually mentioned that, if anything were to happen to him, he would want to be buried at Arlington. I abruptly ended the conversation, telling him we were not having that discussion and steering the conversation in another direction.

  My mom wanted Travis to be interred in the family plot in Pennsylvania so that she could visit him regularly; I refrained from telling her what Travis had told me.

  After the funeral, the burial, and the celebration of his life that followed, I remember sitting on the back stairs outside my parents’ home, the same place where I had sought solace in the chaos after first hearing of his death. The winter had melted away and a beautiful spring day had sprung up in its place. I sat, arms wrapped around my knees, enveloped by the big, red Marine Corps sweatshirt. I stared into the pond behind my parents’ home and noticed a large goose waddling into the water from the grass. Then I noticed she was being trailed by half a dozen baby geese. It was strang
e to see these lively, innocent, and sweet creatures in spring juxtaposed against the backdrop of my own feelings, gray and bleak.

  In the weeks and months that followed, I often found myself outside, crouched on a stair in that same position, searching for my little family of geese and wondering what the day had in store for them. Then one day, as I sat there, I saw them all fly away.

  It sounds silly to say this now, but watching them disappear into the sky left me with such an empty feeling. All of the sadness that had been flowing through me during the previous weeks hardened into a solid knot that dropped like a rock into the pit of my stomach.

  Time was passing. Life was moving on. I was watching it happen, but I was not participating in it. I felt bitterness toward the people who could return to their normal lives, jobs, and families, while I sat on the same stair, in the same red sweatshirt, terrified of what might come next.

  It was hard to believe that, only weeks before, I had been so happy, blissfully ignorant of how my life would be cruelly, abruptly, and permanently changed. I remember sitting in my kitchen two weeks before Travis died. I was watching my baby girl, all of nine and a half months old, pull herself up to stand. On uncertain and wobbly legs, she stood with her chubby hands on the screen of the door; she stood next to our dog Pup and giggled excitedly as she peered outside and watched a bunny rabbit hop around the backyard.

  Life is so completely perfect, I remember thinking at that moment. I was a happy new mom. I had a fantastic relationship with my husband. Business was good, and Travis would be back in time for the grand opening of my second store. I felt wholly in control and at peace.