If she didn't answer, could she pretend it wasn't happening? The faraway war, with its car bombs and small-arms fire, where her husband, Tyler, was a daily target.
Could she go to work at Starbucks, be a girl in a green apron like a hundred other girls in green aprons in a hundred look-alike Starbucks across the country? Pretend she was a regular 25-year-old newlywed sharing a french press with her husband on her break, sleeping late with him on weekends?
Could she get past the fact that she was living alone in a tiny condo at the end of the Earth -- 3,000 miles from her big Irish family in Fredonia, New York?
Maybe. Until the phone rang and it wasn't about someone else's husband.
The call came in February: Tyler had been hurt. An IED exploded, he'd lost some hearing, injured his arm and his face.
"His face?" she said, her voice hollow.
She flashed on all those newspaper pictures she'd tried to avoid. The soldier who lost an eye, the one scarred by a burn. She called her roommate. She called her grandma. Her stomach heaved. The phone rang again.
It was Tyler.
It wasn't that big a deal, he said. He wasn't even going to tell her about it. The explosion blew him off his feet. He lay in the dust and did an inventory of his arms and legs. "Am I all here?" he asked his buddies, talking way too loudly. "You're all here," they said. He got up, then felt weird, like the ground was rising up to meet his feet.
She lost it.
"I've had it, this is enough, I'm not doing this anymore," she said.
"What can I do to make you come home? ... I'm gonna try. I'm gonna to write somebody. Do I have to look crazy or something?"
The line went quiet.
"It's just going to be like this until I get home," he said. "You're just going to have to be strong."
Be strong. Be strong. Be strong. She didn't sign up for this. She never wanted to be a military wife. But then she met Tyler, with his distracting blue eyes, his certain way of keeping her laughing.
Tyler had gone to school to be a teacher, but couldn't find a job. He was living at home, working at a pharmacy. He needed a change. He wanted to see the world. He enlisted.
They'd been dating six months when he found out he was being shipped north. He called her from a night out with his friends, sitting in the parking lot at a Taco Bell. He was going to Alaska. Would she come with him? Would she marry him?
That wasn't a real proposal as far as she was concerned. But the idea stayed on her mind. She'd gotten stuck in a 20-something eddy similar to his, living at home, working at a hotel.
Even in college, she'd been just less than two hours away from where she grew up. He went to Alaska in June, and on a trip home, he asked again, this time with a ring.
She said yes. Her parents said she was crazy.
"I always looked at my life as this, like, cookie-cutter. Mom's at home cooking, dad comes home from work, we have our weekends together, we watch football games," she said. Not a military life. But she wanted to go out on her own. She wanted to see if she could do it.
They were married at Christmas in 2005. In March, she moved to Alaska to be with him, got a job at Starbucks. He shipped out in early October.
At first, Colleen stayed home and watched movies. Mostly just "Garden State," a movie about love and death, over and over again. The clock seemed frozen. She woke up college friends on the East Coast in the middle of the night just to hear a familiar voice.
There were chipper mornings at the coffee shop, steaming the milk, remembering who wanted whipped cream while part of her brain was 7,000 miles away, caught up in a war that didn't concern the faces she served at the drive-through window.
She forgot to shop and to eat and counted down the days on a white board on the empty refrigerator. She watched one movie, then another. She kept a list of the things they'd do together when he got back. Peanut Farm with their Buffalo Bills T-shirts. Ice skating. Skiing. Maybe dinner at Simon & Seafort's, where she heard you can see whales in the Inlet.
On St. Patrick's Day, she dressed up in her knee socks and pleated skirt, her Flogging Molly T-shirt and bouncing shamrock headband. But all her friends had husbands or children to take care of and couldn't come out with her.
She cracked a beer and called her mom in New York, listening to the sounds of friends and family celebrating in the background. She lifted a one-sided toast to Tyler, wherever he was.
She tried to imagine what she would do if something happened to him, constructing the moment in her mind, trying to steel herself for it. She'd answer the door. Two soldiers would be standing here. She'd let them give her the news. Then she'd lie down on the floor and wait until her mom came to get her.
And so the year passed. Somehow the dread eased. It was the last day on the white-board countdown. She dusted and washed the sheets and hung the welcome-home signs.
Late on a Monday night, wearing her red jacket and sparkly eye shadow, she drove to Fort Richardson. Everyone waiting for the soldiers in the gym was on edge. The pregnant woman in an American flag T-shirt, the toddler in miniature fatigues, the mothers with three, four, five kids.
The soldiers were late. Hours passed. She thought about her life to come:
Would Tyler want to re-enlist, take them to some other town? Would they have children? Would he be deployed again? Would this be her forever -- the leaving, the worrying, the returning?
A band began to play. The soldiers filed in, grouping in formation with their rucksacks at their feet. She spotted Tyler, then lost him behind a line of men. She ran down the bleachers, weaving through the crowd, reached for him, held him. She didn't care what came next. What mattered was Tyler was right there, home, with her.
Find Julia O'Malley online at adn.com/contact/jomalley or call 257-4591.
ABOUT THIS SERIES
SUNDAY: Cari Collins has five girls, two rabbits and a dog, but you can feel something's missing.
MONDAY: Lauren Bretz doesn't worry about her husband, Nat, in Iraq; she prays for him.
TUESDAY: For Vicki Bell, the million little everyday decisions are the loneliest.
TODAY: Colleen Mihalic had enough. What could she do, she wondered, to make her husband come home?
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