Chapter 39

Both the doorbell and her cell phone woke Lanh. It was still dark out! She thought it might be time to milk the cows, but she wasn’t in her cozy apartment in Minnesota. She pulled on Don’s huge Turkish robe, the one that still smells like him, and shuffled to the front door. A bleary glance at her phone showed three calls in a row and several unread messages. She shouldn’t have had that wine when she got home. Opening the door, she saw it was Colonel Gilliam again, and the first sergeant, Dave Olson, and the chaplain, Father Carl. Their faces were gray as ash and set hard. “No,” she gasped.

“Lanh, can we come in?” asked Dave softly.

“NO!” she screamed, her plaintive cry echoed across the houses and startled early risers as they prepared to head in to work. “GO AWAY!” she shrieked. “DON’T TELL ME!” she screamed at the top of her lungs. Then Lanh sagged to her knees, weeping “No ... no ... no...”

Their next-door neighbor in their duplex apartment, who was heading in for a day of early flying, heard Lanh’s cries in the predawn gloom and saw the men at Lanh’s door. He ducked his head back into his house and called out to his wife, “Darcy, there’s a colonel and a first sergeant next door,” his wife was almost back in bed when he added, “They have the chaplain with.”

Darcy’s eyes flew wide open. That only means one thing. “Shit!” Darcy threw on her robe and slippers “Oh god damn it, Shit!” she raced across the lawn to her neighbor’s front door and barged past the first sergeant and crouched down with Lanh who was chanting “Không phải Donovan của tôi, không phải Donovan của tôi... “ (Not my Donovan) over and over as she wept.

“Lanh, it’s Darcy, I’m here for you,” but Lanh was unresponsive.

Another woman, also wearing a robe appeared, “Honey, it’s me, Lydia Olson, we’re here for you.” The first sergeant’s wife looked at Darcy. “Let’s get her inside, it’s freezing out here.” She looked up at her husband, who gently knelt down and scooped the shuddering tiny Asian woman into his arms and lifted her up out of the light snow. She weighed almost nothing. He carried her into the house and sat her on the couch where Darcy and Lydia could sit on either side of her. Colonel Gilliam knelt in front of Lanh, who was a thousand miles away emotionally.

“We just got a call, we don’t have a lot of details, but there’s been an accident. Your husband is alive, but he’s been injured and is going to be airlifted to Wiesbaden hospital in Germany.” The colonel suddenly looked incredibly old. “We have delayed our Swan flight and are going to reroute it into Germany so I can start an investigation. You can come too, and you can be with Don, would you like that?” The Swan flight was the leased flight that swapped out deployed people at the 23rd Fighter Wing’s overseas commitments.

Lanh wordlessly nodded; her hands knotted into a ball on her lap.

“We had several people injured,” the exhausted-looking colonel said. “I have more calls to make, but I will fly with you to Germany.”

But Lanh wasn’t registering what the Colonel was saying. Her angel was in the room now. Tall and beautiful and definitely a woman, her angel had long platinum hair that became purple at the tips. Lanh had been seeing this angel on and off for years, but this was the first time she had ever seen the angel clearly and the first time she heard the angel speak. “Come on honey, let’s pack, we’re going to go see Don,” said the angel.

“Go see Don,” repeated Lanh.

“That’s right,” said Darcy as Lanh got up off the couch and moved toward the bedroom, almost sleepwalking.

“Get your bag,” whispered the angel, but Lanh froze.

“He’s dead,” she gasped in terror.

“No!” the angel crouched and looked in Lanh’s eyes. The angel had pale green eyes that were boring into hers. “He’s alive, he’s hurt, but he told me to tell you he’s ok, and he loves you.”

That cheered the shattered little Asian a bit, and she reached in her closet and pulled out her duffel bag, the one she took to Korea. For her part, Darcy saw Lanh panic, but then the tiny doctor sucked it up and started packing.

“That girl is made of iron,” Darcy said to herself. “She got her shit together and she’s doing it right.”

“Ok,” said the Angel, “we have underwear, shirts, skirts, slacks, what else?”

“I don’t know,” Lanh muttered. Her brain was numb. She couldn’t think.

“Let’s get a nightgown, something Don will like, but not too sexy, don’t want to get his doctors all hot and bothered.” Lanh finished packing clothes, and the angel guided her on packing her purse. “Get your passport, that’s right, wallet, make sure your ID card is in there, get your address book, good. Now change, you’re in your pajamas still.” She dressed in white stockings, a knee length dark plaid skirt of green, blue, and black, the Clan Campbell tartan, a white blouse with a notched collar, and a black cardigan sweater. With her reading glasses and her hair pulled back in a severe ponytail, she looked like a sad Asian schoolgirl.

A black woman with blond hair in long cornrows was in the living room with Darcy. The Enlisted Wife’s Club had sprung into action. Word went out and everyone knew what to do. Luckily, Don and Lanh had no children or pets to worry about, just Lanh, so the closest member raced over to Lanh’s house. She was Laquisha Washington. Her husband, a tech sergeant, was heading out on this deployment too. She had dropped him off at the air cargo terminal over an hour ago to fly out to Turkey. “Oh honey,” wept Laquisha and smothered Lanh in a huge, motherly hug. “He’s alive! If there’s life there’s hope, so he’s going to be fine!”

“Listen to her,” said the angel, “she’s right.”

“You go to Germany and be with your man,” continued Laquisha, holding Lanh out at arm’s length. “He needs you now, more than he needs those Army doctors. And when he’s all better, you whup that boy’s ass for giving us all such a scare, ok?”