The Last Newsletter

My birthday was in three days, and I was spending the morning before it crawling through a broken escalator in a dying shopping mall in Ecuador. Well, the morning before my birthday, technically. Three days out. Close enough that the dread had already set up camp.

Let me back up. My name is Samuel Carr, I'm twenty-eight, and for the last six years I've run a little community newsletter called El Valle Viejo out of the valley where I grew up. Twelve pages a month. Farmers' market prices, who got married, who died, whose goats kept escaping onto the highway. My mother says it's the only thing that keeps the valley from forgetting itself.

And I'd decided, in one of those midnight decisions that seems noble at the time and insane by daylight, that the final edition would come out the week I turned twenty-nine. The orchards were being sold. The developers had the signs up already, big blue ones with pictures of golf courses. A newsletter about a valley that was turning into a golf course felt like a joke I didn't want to finish. So. Final edition. Due the day after my birthday. Which meant I had three days to write it, and I had maybe half a page of material.

Lou had dragged me out here to help him. Lou Hamilton, twenty-nine, my best friend since we were both broke and twenty-something, now a location scout for a small film company shooting some quiet drama in the valley. He'd promised me "interesting people with stories." What I got was a film crew that had taken over the floor of a half-dead shopping center in Noboa and set up base camp around a broken escalator like it was a monument.

So there I was, Tuesday morning, carrying a thermos of coffee and a folder of blank interview notes, wandering the shell of the place. The escalator was dead of course, its steps frozen mid-climb like something out of a photograph of a shipwreck. Behind it, a door stood slightly open, and I could see down into the machine room, the pit where the motor and the chains lived. Grease and old copper, that smell. One bare bulb burning.

And a woman crouched at the bottom of the steps, holding a white gown against her chest like it was something stolen.

"Hello?" I said.

She spun around so fast she nearly dropped it. And I knew her. Kelsey Brandt. Twenty-seven now, two years since I'd seen her, back when she was still living in the valley before she took off for a job in Guayaquil. We'd dated for maybe two months, very casually, and ended it so amicably it barely qualified as ending. Her hair was shorter now. She looked good. She also looked absolutely guilty.

"Samuel?" Her eyes went wide. "Oh no. Oh no no no. Okay. Okay." She clutched the gown tighter.

"Should I... what's happening here?"

"Nothing! Nothing is happening. I'm just..." She looked down at the gown, then back up at me. "Okay, I need you to promise me something before we do any catching up."

"That seems backward."

"Promise first, catch up after. Please!" She had that voice, the one people use when they're three seconds from laughing or crying and haven't picked yet. "You can't tell anyone. Anyone, Samuel. Not Lou, not your mother, not the guy selling empanadas upstairs. Nobody."

I looked at what she was holding. It was a christening gown, old-fashioned, soft linen, with a border of lace so fine it looked like frost. Even down in that dim pit I could tell it was the real thing, somebody's grandmother's kind of lace.

"Is that... why is there a christening gown in an escalator basement?"

"Because I took it," she said, very fast, "and I'm giving it back, and if anyone finds out I had it, Rosa will tell her sister, who will tell the whole crew, who will tell the whole valley, and I will be the costume girl who steals babies' gowns for the rest of my natural life. Please. Please promise."

"Start from the beginning," I said, and sat down on the third step of the dead escalator, which creaked but held.

She took a breath. "Okay. So. The shoot. There's a christening scene, one scene, the baby gets baptized, very touching, very important to Rosa the producer because it's based on her family, blah blah. Wardrobe needed a real gown, not a costume one, because on camera a real one reads different, apparently. So somebody said Rosa has her own family christening gown, Belgian lace, her great-aunt was a nun who made it, the whole saga. And I was sent to fetch it from the crate of her personal things."

"And?"

"And I borrowed it," Kelsey said. "Temporarily! Overnight. Because Marta from costumes has a granddaughter getting baptized on Sunday, in the valley church, the same church, and her gown got ruined in the move, dye stain, whole hem, wrecked. And I thought, one night, nobody will even notice it's gone, I'll take it back before anyone opens that crate."

"And Rosa opened the crate."

"Rosa opened the crate this morning." She pressed the gown to her face for a second. "There's a search happening right now. Upstairs. A whole search. Lou is turning over boxes as we speak. And I panicked, and I ran down here, because I remembered the shoot coordinator used this room for storage in week one, and I thought I could hide it and... I don't know. Pray? I'm not religious but I was seriously considering it."

I laughed before I could help it. She gave me a look that would've stripped paint.

"I'm sorry. It's just, you're hiding a baby's gown in a hole like a criminal, and the gown is going to a baptism either way. It's very wholesome crime."

"Samuel. Focus. Promise me."

"Okay, okay. I promise. Nobody hears it from me." I put my hands up. "But Kelsey, you can't just stuff it back in the crate and pretend. Rosa will know it was handled, someone will have seen you, there's a whole mystery now. Mysteries are worse than confessions."

"I know." She groaned and sat down on the concrete step next to me, still hugging the gown. "I know that. I panicked. I've been standing down here for forty minutes trying to think of a plan and the plan I have is hide it and move to another country."

"That worked out great for you in Guayaquil, I heard. You loved it there."

"It rained for six months, Samuel." But she smiled a little when she said it, and something in my chest did a small unforgivable flip, which I ignored, because I had a deadline and a plan to never drift again and no time for chest flips.

"So here's my thought," I said. "You can't return it quietly. So return it loudly. Tomorrow night, at dinner, in front of everyone, you tell Rosa the truth. Your friend's granddaughter needed a gown, you took it hoping to have it back before anyone noticed, you were an idiot, here it is, ironed, spotless, and you're sorry."

"Ironed? Where would I even..."

"The hotel has an iron. I've seen it. It's terrible but it works."

"And everyone will still know I'm the girl who steals gowns."

"Everyone will know you're the girl who made a bad call to help a friend, and then came clean. That's a completely different animal. Trust me, I write the valley gossip page. Redemption runs longer than scandal, every time."

She looked at me for a while. Not the guilty look anymore. A different one. "You really think it'll work?"

"I think lying is what ruins you here. The truth is just embarrassing, and everyone's embarrassed constantly, look where we're sitting."

She laughed at that, a real one, and it did the chest flip thing again. I ignored it harder.

"Okay," she said. "Okay. Deal. But I can't do it alone tomorrow night, I'll fall apart the second Rosa starts crying, and she will cry, she cries at everything, it's her whole thing. So you have to be there. Sit near me. Be my... I don't know, my courage."

"My entire schedule this week is being courage for a gown thief? Wow, what happened to my life."

"Wait, no, that's not fair to you." She chewed her lip, thinking. Then her face lit up in a way that should have scared me, and did, a little. "What are you even doing here all week? Lou said you had some project."

"The newsletter. Final edition. It comes out the day after my birthday and I have nothing in it."

"Nothing?"

"Half a page. A rumor about goats."

"Samuel." She set the gown down on her knees and turned to face me fully. "You are sitting in a film crew of forty people. Forty people, from six countries, making a movie in the last valley any of them will ever shoot in, because of the orchards, because of the story. You have a film crew. You have a broken escalator. You have, I'm sorry, you have me, and I know every single person in this production and every single story they'll tell you for free if you buy them coffee."

"That's..."

"Trade," she said, sticking her hand out, all business now. "You help me return the gown tomorrow night and live through the crying. I fill your newsletter. Every page. Real stories. Even a photo if I can steal a camera."

"That's twelve pages, Kelsey."

"Then you'd better iron well."

I shook her hand. Her grip was warm and her palm was sweaty, which made me like her more, weirdly. We sat there a second longer in the grease-smelling dark, under the one bulb, two conspirators over a christening gown.

"So," I said. "Tell me about Marta's granddaughter."

"Oh, that's a whole story. You'll want that one for page six."

"Tell me anyway."

"Fine. The gown was made by Rosa's great-aunt, who was a nun. Sister Mercedes. She made it in 1961 and it's been in the family ever since, and Marta's granddaughter is the first baby to wear it outside the family in sixty years."

"That's a page six if I ever heard one. Wait, why would a nun make a christening gown?"

"Because it was for Rosa's mother, and Rosa's mother was her favorite person in the world, and the convent let her sew on Sundays. See? You're already writing it."

"I am, actually. I can hear it." I tapped my pen against my knee. "Okay. Who else?"

She counted on her fingers. "Tomás, the gaffer. He grew up here, left when he was twenty-one, came back for the shoot, and cried the first night he saw the orchards. There's your opener. Then Dev, the sound guy, who has recorded rain in forty countries and says ours is the best rain. Then the driver, Efraín, who claims the mangoes here are sweeter than anywhere on earth and will fight you about it."

"Will he fight me?"

"He will fight you. But he'll also give you a bag of them, so it evens out."

I wrote all of it down, my handwriting getting worse as I went because I was writing too fast. Six years of the newsletter and I'd never had material like this fall into my lap. Usually my sources were my mother and the man who sold me diesel.

"Kelsey, this is twelve pages."

"I told you. And that's not even the locals. Tomorrow I'll introduce you to Doña Imelda, who remembers when the cinema opened. She's ninety-one. She'll talk for four hours."

"Is that a threat?"

"It's a promise. Wear comfortable shoes."

***

The next two days went like that. I'd arrive at the shopping center around nine, and Kelsey would meet me by the crates with a list of names written on the back of costume continuity sheets, which felt illegal to use but worked great. I interviewed Tomás under the broken escalator while he repositioned lights around me like I was furniture. I interviewed Dev in the parking lot during a rainstorm, which he insisted on doing live, holding his recorder up like an offering.

"She's using you," Lou said over breakfast on Wednesday, watching Kelsey steer me toward the sound tent. "The costume girl. She's got you doing her errands."

"She's getting me twelve pages of interviews."

"Uh huh. And why does she need you personally for that? She could've just given you the list." He pointed his fork at me. "You dated her, right? Before Guayaquil?"

"It was two months, and it was barely dating. We went to the river twice and she beat me at cards."

"Uh huh," Lou said again, and went back to his eggs, and I concentrated very hard on my coffee.

The truth was I didn't know why she needed me personally. I hadn't asked. The arrangement was simple on paper: I ironed the gown at the hotel Tuesday night, badly, and Wednesday night at dinner Kelsey would confess to Rosa with me at her elbow. In exchange, the newsletter. That was all it was. Except we'd also developed a habit of eating lunch together on the third step of the dead escalator, because it was the one place on set where nobody went, and she'd bring food from the crew table and I'd bring questions and somehow an hour and a half would disappear.

Wednesday's lunch was rice and some kind of chicken, and she'd stolen two of the good rolls.

"Okay, next question," I said, mouth full. "Tomás says the orchards. How much time do we have? Because the developer signs in the spring, everyone says different months."

"March, I heard. Or February. Rosa said she got the location because the owner already sold and doesn't care what happens to the trees." She picked at her roll. "It's strange being back, you know. Everything's the same and it's all leaving at the same time."

"That's basically the thesis of my final edition."

"Then it's a good edition." She bumped her shoulder against mine, and I made a note in my notebook that said nothing, just a line, to have something to look at.

"So tonight," I said. "Are you ready?"

"No. God. No. I practiced in the mirror and I got through two sentences and started crying myself, which is ridiculous, it's not even my gown." She put her face in her hands. "She's going to cry and then Marta is going to find out her granddaughter wore a stolen gown and then I have to move to another country again."

"Or you say the thing and it's fine. You have the speech?"

"Half a speech."