Page 110 of After We Fall

I swallow, his beautiful green eyes drawing me under his spell.

“I’m about to kiss you,” he says.

I tighten my clutch on his arms.

He grins, his breath a warm caress across my lips. “Breathe, baby.”

I nod, that “baby” cutting a direct path to my heart.

Sliding one arm around me, the other sifting through my hair and cradling my head, he presses his lips to mine. The kiss is tender, sweet, slow, and long, but with just a hint of the power and strength that lie beneath the surface of his touch.

Too quickly, much too quickly, he pulls back, then rests his forehead on mine.

Eyes still closed, I smile. “Luke?”

“Right here, Penelope.”

“Kiss me again.”

Feeling his lips smile against mine, I lean my weight into his, and he tightens his hold.

“Bossy.” His teasing word flutters between us. With couples twirling around us, a country singer twanging sweet nothings through the room, Luke’s lips capture mine again, this time unleashing the electricity he carries with him and the love he just declared.

25

For Christmas one year, my mother bought me a preowned camera from Goodwill. The Olympus point-and-shoot had a nifty cover that, when slid open, triggered the lens to electronically move forward and prepare for the shot. At eight years old, I considered it my prized possession.

But with it came responsibility.

The film wasn’t cheap to purchase or get developed, and periodically, the batteries needed replacing. At first we bought film from Dollar General and processed it at Walmart. But after some research, my mom found a mail-in service that saved us about thirty percent. Waiting almost two weeks for the pictures to return was difficult, but we thought we hit the discount jackpot.

Because I knew it was going to cost us precious money, each photograph I took with that camera was a deliberate choice. I only took pictures I knew would turn out well.

My artsy mother, however, encouraged me to experiment, to look at objects through a different lens. You would have thought she had bought me a 35mm Kodak the way she encouraged me to play with light, color, and texture.

Five months into my novice photography stint, I was tasked with the most important photo shoot of my life, though I didn’t know it at the time. All my mother wanted for her birthday, she said, was a picture of the two of us at the beach. So as not to waste money on poor photos, I practiced using the self-timer without film. Once I understood the timing down to a science, I loaded up the camera and gave my mother strict instructions on where to pose and how exactly to time her beaming smile. She threw her head back and laughed at me. “Not today, Penelope. There are no rules today. We’re going to use all twenty-four pictures on just us.”

When I miss my mother the most, I remember that day. The freedom, the laughter, the joy.

But when I need my mother the most, I remember the day the developed film showed up in our mailbox.

I knew the developing process would take at least eight days, but it could also take as many as thirteen. Each day after school, I would run from the bus to our apartment, straight up the five concrete steps to the double doors, and down the hall to the row of tarnished metal mailboxes lined up in order of apartment number. That week, my mom let me keep the mailbox key in my backpack so I wouldn’t have to trudge upstairs to get it off the bulletin board where it usually hung. Our box was 3A.

Day nine was our magic day. I hugged the thick envelope to my chest all the way up to our apartment door.

My mother was running late returning from work that day, and when she found me, I was on my bedroom floor in tears.

Somehow I had made a mistake of astronomical proportions, ruining my mother’s birthday gift. I had loaded a used roll of film and taken our beach pictures on top of another set of pictures. Fanned out in front of me were the twenty-four photos. Twenty-four double-exposure snapshots. Images of our day at the beach were layered on top of images I had taken the previous week of flowers in a field. Our faces adorned one layer of the photo, distorted with the second picture on top of petal close-ups. Each picture was a mishmash of combined colors and gelled memories from the two different photo shoots.

The wasted money was almost as concerning to me as the wasted birthday gift.

But my mother walked in, put her hands on her hips, and gaped. She dropped to her knees, picking up various photos for closer inspection. “Penelope,” she gasped, “these are stunning.”

“I ruined them,” I told her through hiccuped tears.

She turned to me, placed one hand on my cheek, and held a picture with the other hand. “Don’t you see? The messy combination is what makes these so breathtaking.”

In the photo, our faces from the beach peeked through the petals of a flower from the previous week. Spread before us on the floor were layers of loveliness throughout each picture. The double-exposure process had pulled something abstract and textured from our lives, turning chaos into beauty.