Two Secrets & A Sunset

Ingrid spent fourteen straight days holding it under until the grief took her out.

She was in the bus shelter on Forest and Elm, the pre-dawn light filtering down through the sky with the infinitesimal flecks of rain that tapped their way over the roof. On the wall beside her, an advertisement for someone's tutoring services, three contact tabs torn roughly off at different points; the same humidity-crinkled missing poster that's been haunting the news all year. Some missing heiress: Beautiful, of course, done up in pearl earrings and necklace. White, of course, or they would've stopped offering rewards long ago.

It wasn't yet five a.m. and she had some time before her bus came to take her to the coffee shop she'd been slaving at for minimum wage for the past twenty years. She'd never thought of it that way before, slaving. Ingrid had always been content with very little. She liked most of the customers, liked being a positive start to their day, but now, two weeks after the news, it was like she'd woken up with a darkness moved into her soul, so heavy that it forced the tears out that were now running through the fingers she'd loosely cupped over her face.

She didn't hear the man come in, didn't even hear him sit down he was so silent. It was only the clicking of his cigarette lighter that informed Ingrid she was no longer alone. At the sound she jumped, wiping the tears from her cheeks. The man was nondescript in appearance, in his forties like herself, she might have said at a guess. He was wearing a ratty army jacket and worn jeans and his brown hands were weathered like he used them daily for a living.

A trail of smoke escaped his lips when he said "What's wrong, chica?"

His dark eyes took her in, arresting and calm. She didn't know whether she found them alluring or terrifying.

"I'm dying."

The words escaped her mouth before she knew it, and then the rest followed. She was telling him everything: the doctor's appointment, the first one in years due to her new health insurance, the routine tests they'd done when she'd told them casually about the pain she'd been experiencing, and then the news. Stomach cancer. Stage four.

She'd kept it all inside not so much because it was a secret, persay, but because she'd realized there was no one to tell. No one who would really care, who would really miss her. She was divorced. No children, parents estranged or dead. No time for friends. It was her who'd be doing the missing, the grieving for things she didn't even realize she'd wanted to do before her diagnosis. Visit the Grand Canyon. Fall in love again. See the sunset in Santorini.

The stranger just sat through her outpouring, quietly smoking his cigarette down to a glowing red cherry he dropped to the damp ground.

"Life isn't fair, is it?" he asked, when she was done. "People rarely get what they deserve."

She didn't know what to say to these tired platitudes, so she said nothing. The man leaned forward. "Let me tell you a little secret of my own. It's no Santorini, but I know a spot the sunset hits that's probably just as lovely in its own way."

.

Ingrid took the bus that evening to the outskirts of town and walked the short distance to the hiking trail. The signs proclaimed "Closed for the Season" but she ducked under the gate and went up a ways to the place he'd indicated, where a near-invisible path ascended steeply up through the trees.

She took this faded sub-trail for grueling minutes, the sweat dripping from her brow, the pain in her stomach intensifying. Twice she thought of turning around, and more than once she almost lost the trail entirely. This is why you don't trust strangers, she thought, just as she broke through the trees onto a rocky promontory.

The view was dizzying, the houses below like matchboxes and the cars tiny ants swarming between them, headlights flickering on like Christmas lights. But the sky above it all- he was right. It was beautiful, the rich blues and purples and reds stacked on one another, glowing like the promise of heaven.

Mesmerized, Ingrid stepped closer to the precipice and something crunched beneath her shoe. She looked down at what she thought at first was a pebble before she registered its unnatural perfect roundness, its snowy hue.

Pearls. Not one, but several, as though they'd been popped from a necklace, scattered over the ground.

Ingrid's breathing grew still as she followed their trail to a shallow gorge to the left of the vista. Dread filled her as she thought of those dark eyes contemplating her, but she'd be lying if she said there wasn't a competing sense of something else: excitement. Hope. Reward: Ten Million Dollars. She edged toward the ravine as around her the painted colors of the sky warmed and deepened like the vision she was allowing to struggle to life in the back of her mind. If it was a painting, she'd call it The Future.

He was right about one thing: it was lovely.