THE ACCIDENTAL HEIRESS-excerpt 3

    Synopsis from last 2 newsletters: The airplane has landed in the river, short of the runway at Ireland’s Shannon Airport. Jess is holding the service dog of a blind woman who sat beside her, connected to them by a chain around the old woman’s wrist. When the unconscious woman panics in the rubber raft and rolls into the river, all three plunge in tandem into the cold water. Descending helplessly, Jess pictures her young children and prays for life. "Please God, please let me have more years with them!"
                                                                       *  *  *
   My answer came when I suddenly felt a jolt as the chain snapped, stopping my descent. In a dark, warm bubble, I tested my feet to kick free of loose tendrils of seaweed. Fluttering my arms, I tugged on the tether until I felt claws grappling my shoulders. The dog and I were shooting upward—toward the light—with an unseen force of power. I broke the surface gasping for breath and found Robby gasping beside me, still able to propel me and the heaving dog into waiting hands at the raft. 
   Vaguely aware of someone compressing my chest, water spewed from my mouth and nose and after I coughed violently and was able to breathe in measure, I rose on my elbows to see the wings of the plane were still barely submerged as a flotilla of boats filled with passengers, headed for shore. 
    Robby and Mrs. Donnelly were not among those still left on our raft, including the pilot who refused to leave until everyone else transferred to rescue boats. Orders were being shouted, and a chair lift levered by a crane from a large boat was hovering over the tail of the plane, with three men in black rubber suits directing traffic, maneuvering ropes, treading water, occasionally diving below the surface. Where was Robbie? Had Mrs. Donnelly been chair-lifted to another boat? 
     I was one of the last passengers transferred to a herring boat with the dog now shivering violently as he clung to my sore neck like a baby, under a rough woolen blanket someone threw around us. “Has my husband been taken ashore?” I searched the ruddy face of a fisherman who handed me a tin cup of whiskey. When he shrugged, I glanced at the others in the boat, searching in vain for the green eyes that were always my touchstone. With a shaky hand, I held the cup to my lips sipping whiskey until I could feel heat stream into my chest and trickle down to my shoeless feet. I dipped a finger into the whiskey and rubbed it over the dog’s lips until his pink tongue swiped my hand. It was then I noticed my wedding ring was missing, along with the chain that once connected us. Hot tears brimmed in my eyes, and the dog who had been so attuned to Mrs. Donnelly’s stress licked a runner sliding down my cheek.
    For the last few years, Robbie’s thumb often caught such emotional spill on occasions of joy as well as consolation: our wedding, the birth of our daughter, even when a fox killed our chickens. But the single memory I cherished most was on our wedding night when he fondled my hand, earnestly explaining the meaning behind the symbols of my odd new ring: love, friendship, fidelity. He was proud, yet ashamed he couldn’t afford better than a sterling silver wedding ring. He called it temporary. “Someday, you’ll have the diamond you deserve.”
    “It’s perfect,” I told him then. “I’ll never take it off.” 
    We both teared up as we sealed our love in an opulent hotel bed, and much later in a primitive tree house after I learned the true identity of the man I had married. Forever and a day became our destined refrain when we re-affirmed our vows in his rightful name with the same ring--my cherished Claddagh now in the Shannon Estuary. Was Robbie there too? Was this destiny fulfilled? Robbie back in his homeland in another shift of time, one that discounted the century gap which brought us together? The tongue of the dog in my arms feasted on salty sorrow as the boat taxied the estuary to the airport peninsula.
    A pair of leaping bottle-nosed dolphins diverted attention from the plane’s recovery effort. A network of tow lines and floats from oil tankers and tugs surrounded the plane. The afternoon sun glinted off the silver bullet of the airship as the blue-green river lapped at its wings. 
    And the dolphins danced.                                                                           (End of chapter one.)