Countdown to Deployment

by Amy Zaranek

Ten more days until he is supposed to check out of his command. His waiver goes through—the military has deemed him mission essential. Despite the stop movement, he can now travel more than fifty miles from home. He can move as if COVID-19 doesn’t exist. You tell yourself to take it one day at a time. They’re sending your man to the Middle East in the midst of a pandemic.
Nine more days together before he goes. Be happy, tread lightly; he needs you to be strong for him. His family calls a game night when it was supposed to be date night. You remind yourself that he’ll be away from them for the next year, too. You look for reassurance at the diamond on your hand in his. He is going unaccompanied for the money, for the time, for being away for one year instead of two accompanied. If he loves it, and if you love it when you visit, maybe you’ll elope in a chapel on base.
He rolls over you on the morning of day eight. The breeze through the window and the rain on the street makes you forget he has to go. You laugh together and nuzzle noses and whisper your love. In the afternoon he receives guidelines from his next duty station: a greeting in Arabic from U.S. Naval Forces Central Command. He reads it with a smile; you read disbelief and excitement in his crinkling eyes. He will be tested for COVID when he arrives in Bahrain, then will be quarantined on base or in a marble-floored four-star hotel eating food from the galley or twenty-four-hour room service. He will be tested again after two weeks. He looks forward to the adventure of foreign quarantine. You worry that the pandemic will prevent you from seeing him while he’s gone. You make your life more mobile.
The night before day seven is sad. At one A.M., you cry, burying your face in his chest. You don’t want him to go. He holds you and kisses your forehead and rubs your back, and you worry that you’re adding to his stress. He’s done this for eighteen years, but you never have. You wake with swollen eyes and a headache. He wakes and goes to his work computer. His orders come through, but they’re wrong—sending him to a training still closed for months due to coronavirus. He makes calls and checks his email. In the afternoon, the two of you go to the convenience store to buy more masks.
On day six, you watch Netflix together and wait for his order modification. There are less than forty-eight hours until he’s supposed to check out at headquarters. You sit close, keeping both hands on him as if to soak up all the times you won’t be able to touch him. You feel lucky to be quarantined with him here, that he wasn’t already deployed when all this started. At night, he reads jokes to you from his phone. You record his laughter. The video picks up nothing but soft sound and darkness; you know you’ll replay it again and again and again when he’s gone.
Day five: he receives his order modification while Face Timing with the officer he’ll replace overseas. You eat breakfast at the kitchen table, trying not to eavesdrop or jump to conclusions. You go to the other room where it’s harder to hear him. You know he’ll fill you in truthfully. He’s told you how op tempo picks up closer to sea duty, especially one this arduous. You start to understand when you see him switching between work phone and personal, texts and calls, updating you in between. You pack your bags in minutes and get ready to drive three hundred miles to headquarters with him. He knocks on the door when you’re in the shower and tells you his orders have changed again. Now he’s going to Norfolk before Bahrain. Two ORDMODs in a morning. His detailer says it isn’t even a record in this unprecedented time. You stay strong, you stay flexible, you support him. You feel like you’ve aged a decade in the past three months and another five years today.
You wake early on day four to the sound of the air conditioner and his light snoring as the big spoon. You are frustrated—your plans have changed six times in the past twenty-four hours, and you long for some semblance of normalcy. Maybe this morning will be the most normal for the next year. There was a shooting on the base in Corpus Christi, and you tell him to stay safe in Norfolk. You tell him how you want everything to be perfect before he goes, so you raise the bar and beat yourself up over your smallest mistakes. You tell him you don’t want to be a statistic, not another failed military relationship. He lifts your spirits with a pep talk: it’s not what happens that determines success, it’s your reaction. The fact that you’re communicating about frustration is already a sign of success. The two of you have moved out of your apartment and with nowhere else to stay, you check into a hotel. You make love. The ceiling leaks. When you switch rooms, you snuggle and laugh and snack until three A.M.
Your mind races on the morning of day three, which may now be day two or four or day eighteen and you aren’t sure why you’re keeping track anymore. You try to make plans for the days before he leaves. None of it is in your control. You want him to go so he can hurry up and get back; so you can marry him. You want him to stay so you won’t miss a moment with him. When asked what you’ll do when he’s gone, you come up with hypotheticals, but nothing in stone. You just finished your MFA and might edit, might teach, might fill in on the farm where you used to work, but none of it seems consuming enough to keep your mind off of his absence. So you focus on his presence. You focus on the moment. The rest will come in time. Besides, you want to be free enough to be with him whenever and wherever you can. You hope COVID will permit. You’ve talked about Paris and Dubai; he’s talked about coming home for Christmas. You talk about restaurants you’ll go together when he comes back and your state reopens. Now, you share each meal and split each dish. When he passes the hotel fork to you, you shovel too-large bites into your small mouth. He eats quickly, having learned in the galley and on the carrier. You’ve learned to keep up.
On day two, you long for alone time. You wish you could stick to something you say you’ll do. There are no more slow mornings or quiet days. He senses your gloom and sits in the car with you and asks if you want to talk. You need a minute but follow him into his parents’ house to celebrate his birthday two months late. The company cheers you in a departure from your introversion. The two of you drive to his brother’s house singing along with old Taylor Swift and classic rock. He and his brother play a game of their own invention while you sit in the other room, working on writing and stealing glances at your man, savoring each look and wishing you could bottle them for all the times he’s more than one room away. You hug him in the kitchen while making a midnight snack. The nights keep getting later but this is your second day in a row without crying.
It’s day one. Sunday of Memorial Day weekend. You’ve never been sure if the holiday honors all veterans or focuses on the fallen. Mere weeks ago, you followed COVID protocols like a religion. Now, the pandemic is the furthest thing from your mind as you hug your goodbyes and hold hands in prayer. In the parking lot of his storage unit, you share McNuggets and listen to “Chicken Fried” and don’t realize the coincidence until later, opting to stay in the moment. You help him clean out his car and push a cart of storage totes down the dimly-lit hall. When he rolls up the door to his locker, you see your life together deconstructed: your mattress leaning against the wall, your couch shoved into the corner, your kitchen chairs piled on top of your coffee table. You know you could feel sad about locking your furniture away; instead, you look forward to moving all of it into your next home together. At the end of the day, you thank him for all he does. This could be the last night you share for a while. It’s nice to be appreciated, he says.
Day zero—what was supposed to be day zero. You’re in limbo. It’s uncertain when his orders will come through and when he can check out and when he can fly. He decides it’s time to go to headquarters to be ready to go at a moment’s notice. You pack his and your bags into your truck. His car was left behind for family use in his absence. The two of you make one last trip to the storage unit. He drops off his old flight helmet and recruiting awards. You say one last goodbye to his parents, you pick up breakfast sandwiches at your favorite local coffee shop, and you drive to Detroit past freshly-sprouted farm fields. He DJs on your phone and naps in the passenger seat. You wish you could bottle the sunshine on your arms, his soft breathing asleep and laughter awake, the air conditioning on your bare toes, the togetherness. In the evening, you squeeze in an engagement photo session outside of the ballpark where he proposed. You share Easy Mac for dinner on your parents’ couch in the suburbs. That night, you lay fully-clothed above the sheets in accordance with their conservatism. It is too hot, the windows are open, you’re wrapped around his left side, and despite your restlessness, you wouldn’t change anything. You barely sleep. You whisper late into the night about future plans to visit, telling him you love him whenever the conversation stops. As a couple, you always make the best of things. When you drift off, you dream of storms.
Day zero again. He rolls out of bed early to check his email and his orders haven’t come through at start of business. The time difference between headquarters and detailer accounts for it. You fold his laundry and make his coffee—tasks he usually does for himself, but you want to take any weight off his back that you can. You wish you could carry it all for him. An hour later, his orders arrive. His expected departure date is listed as yesterday.  He rolls his luggage into the driveway and says goodbye to your mom, and you all take photos. You drive him to headquarters. He holds your hand. He reassures you sweetly and tears rise behind your sunglasses. No fair getting misty eyes while you’re driving, he says, and hands you a tissue. I’ll save all the mushy stuff for later. You assume later means at the airport that evening. At headquarters, he starts the command checkout process while his boss gives you a tour of the office. The wardroom greets you with congratulations and genuineness built over the last two years. You sit across from flags and trophies in the lobby and you write about the day. You can hear his voice drifting from each office he visits. His words are unintelligible but you savor the sound. Right now, he is still close enough that you could rest your head against his chest and feel him speak: you’ve done it so many times that you know exactly how the deepness of his voice rumbles in his chest. He receives his end-of-tour award and shakes hands with the skipper despite social distancing. You drive him back to your parents’ house and wait for his itinerary. You play games with your family. Friends stop by to see him off. They keep their distance in the driveway and wish him well for when he goes. His itinerary never arrives; he cannot leave.
Every day is day zero now. All the steps are completed except the final one that will send him away. He could get an email at any time that would cut your seemingly-endless stretch of togetherness into a few hours: a drive to the airport, a teary farewell. You bask in the unknown time you have left. The evenings feel the freest. The offices are closed so you won’t receive any news for the next sixteen hours. You take him to your favorite hometown sandwich shop and show him your dream home down the street. You feel deeply present in the evening’s golden light. You build a bonfire in the backyard. It burns fast and hot and you sit and talk until the glowing embers fade to black.
On the next day zero, he bets you that he’ll hear something today. You agree, but you’ve felt that way for days. You’ve stopped wondering when the “last” will be—the last day, the last night, the last meal—you don’t know. It’s a constant course of uncertain goodbyes. He calls it a spin cycle and you call it a roller coaster. He tells you that you seem to be handling everything better this week than last. You agree. He keeps mentioning how much he wants to go so he can get started on everything there. Movement will ease his worry. You want him to go so he can get started on coming back. By the end of the day, there is still no news.
The suspension of time swirls back to reality with a phone call three days after checkout. He is to leave the next morning. He goes with you to ask your cousin to be the maid of honor in your post-deployment wedding. She says of course just like you did three months earlier, when he asked you to marry him. He arranges his flights and, on the way home, runs down a timeline for the evening. He makes steak for dinner, one of your favorite traditions as a couple. You eat on the balcony in the treetops and walk your dog together in the evening. You never thought you could feel this sort of happiness in your hometown and you know that you’ll feel it again and even greater in the next place you call home with him. Dark thoughts nag as dusk settles and you tell him I know you’re not going to leave, but all of my relationships have ended in situations like this. Your dog sniffs at the grass. He squeezes your hand and tells you that he’s not going to do anything to mess this up; he put a ring on your finger and he’s coming back to you. You wrap your arms around his shoulders at the corner and the scene behind him—your family’s home, the fading light—blurs through tears that you don’t let fall. He wipes at your dry eyes. You’re trying to save your sadness for morning. It’s your last night together for a while, and you want it to be happy. For the last few weeks—hell, his second half of shore duty—all the serious talks and tears led up to this night. It is somber but not emotional. It is unspoken. It is enough. You drape your arm over his waist and press your body to his back. You count down the hours and hold him close.
You drive west across the city before dawn, his bags packed into the back of your truck. The two of you roll his luggage from short-term parking to the terminal. You joke that he looks like a Batman villain with his shaved head and mask. The check-in line looks long because of social distancing; it moves quickly. He puts his bags on the scale. The woman at the counter asks you if you’re traveling today. Not yet, you say. You look down. But really soon, he adds. You touch his arm. Before security, he takes off his mask. He pulls your face to his and kisses you. Unlike the sweet smooches you’ve shared all morning, this one is serious. Urgent. This one is saying goodbye. You rest your foreheads against each other. His sunglasses press into your chest and mascara stains your sweatshirt sleeve. He rubs your back and holds you close to him. I’d better get going, he says. I’ll see you so soon. It’s you and me. I love you. You watch him walk to security; somewhere you can’t follow. He zigzags through the empty maze to the back of the line. You stand still. He sets down his heavy bag and you don’t know how long to stand and watch. It could be all day, or it could already be too long. You blow him a kiss and turn away. You wave from the escalator and look at him until the ceiling hides him from view. When you imagined this scene weeks ago, it was a wiped tear and your ring glinting in the sun—something pretty, almost romantic, a reminder of hope. In reality, you cry all the way back to the parking structure and sit in your truck for an extra half hour. The radio turns on automatically to a too-happy country song. You turn it down. Someday, these songs will sound jubilant again. You blow your nose into a rough paper towel and your eyes are already swollen in the rearview. Your chest is tight and your throat is raw from gasping for air. You wonder how you’ll drive home. The parking structure is empty and you follow the exit signs like a detour. You drive into a neon orange sun rising above the city where you were born and find beauty in this departure. Now, the days will count upward until you know when he’s coming home again. Day one.

****

Amy Zaranek holds an MFA from Ashland University. She is the managing editor of the Black Fork Review. Her writing has appeared in Yemassee Journal, matchbook, and elsewhere. Her fiancé, LT Jason Gaidis, is an active duty Naval officer. Visit Amy online at www.amyzaranek.com.