Reckless Kiss

Prologue

Angelica

Midnight blue sky over misty mountaintops, the moon paints the edges of the peaks in shimmering, silver light. Mamá would sit for hours gazing at the twilight, changing filters, changing lenses, manipulating the angles. I was little, and I would watch her, thinking she was magical, imagining her a genie or an alchemist.

Only her vision wasn’t gold. It was a nightscape of shadow hues, deep and complex, and layered with emotion. I never asked her why the darkness lured her more than the light. I only wanted to follow her.

“La Luna,” she would say, as I studied her photograph. “To the moon and back.” She’d smooth my hair off my cheek, smiling warmly, tiny laugh lines crinkling her hazel eyes. “What do you see, Carmelita?”

“A lady sleeping, dreaming of a feast.” My voice was little-girl quiet, and she’d laugh, holding the small metal camera.

“What kind of feast?” She’d gaze into my eyes as if she were memorizing my soul for the next time we met.

Her hair was stick straight and dark, inky brown spilling down her back. Her olive skin was pale. Mine was tanned by the blazing sun, and my long, coiled curls were tipped in gold.

Sitting under a string of multicolored twinkle lights, I’d hear a click and look up to see the round black lens tracking me, waiting for Mamá to tell it what to capture, what to preserve forever.

“Chilaquiles!” I’d grin, singing out my favorite dish.

“It’s not breakfast,” she’d playfully complain.

“Flautas with guacamole!”

“Hm… perhaps.” She’d nod, returning to her work.

Our home was full of her art hanging from strings along the walls like laundry put out to dry. Georgia O’Keefe was my mother’s idol, but where O’Keefe used canvas and acrylics, my mother used photopaper and film.

She was an artist.

She was a wizard.

She was the most beautiful

woman I’d ever seen.

We lived in the Villa de Santa María de Aguayo, where the colorful houses rose in layers along the foothills, and I ran barefoot in a thin, cotton sundress on the cobbled streets with the other children.

She taught me how to cook with spices, how to eat fruit sprinkled with chili, how to dance. She had named me in the traditional way, Angelica María del Carmen Treviño, but I was Carmie or Carmelita to my family and friends.

The days passed slow, but the time moved fast.

Every day, death crept closer to our door.

My mother’s death was insidious. More than a year passed from the time she was diagnosed to the day she died. She grew thinner, paler, weaker, but she never stopped working, taking photos, capturing the beauty of the mountains.

She was a Buddhist. She told me Death was a wave returning our souls to the sea. She said it was as natural as Life. Still, I clung to her and cried when she said it was time to go.

“You will be an artist, Carmie.” Lying in her bed, she held my cheek, her eyes shining with love, her voice breaking with fatigue. “But your path is not mine.”

Placing my face against her chest, I soaked her gown with my tears. I breathed her scent of gardenia and grace as I listened to her heart slowly stop beating.

I didn’t know how to live without her. I didn’t want to live without her.

I wanted our life in the shadow of the Sierra Madre forever.

Instead, she slipped through my fingers like those salty waves on the shore, and I was put on a bus at fifteen years old, sent to Plano, Texas, a huge suburb of Dallas, in the country where I was born, to finish school.