Tot Time at the Asheville Art Museum lived up to the promise on the signs: Mixed-Up & Messy! The kid-parent pairs had been turned loose in the permanent collection rooms to seek out the shapes they’d just finished painting in the activities corner, and many of the tots sported paint-smeared clothes and fingers. A few sucked applesauce from packets as their mothers pretended not to see the NO EATING OR DRINKING notices, more willing to beg forgiveness than to risk a hangry meltdown.
As the littles ran in an excited clump for the more obvious contemporary choices—there, three circles on a gridded background; there, a pattern of trapezoids floating in a hypnotic black sea—Sela came to a stop before one of her own favorites, George C. Aid’s etching of Carcassonne. The early-1900s work showed the French medieval fortress in hard lines and deep shadows, and she knew Brody could easily spot the triangles of the turrets, the square openings in the stone walls, the tall rectangular towers.
Ecca had showed her you didn’t need to dumb down art for children, didn’t require special programming to take them to a museum. The important thing was to take them at all. But if you showed up on a weekday morning to almost any remotely educational place, chances were you’d stumble into events catering to the stay-at-home parent—or, in her case, the work-from-home-on-a-flexible-schedule parent. So it had been today: She’d arrived expecting a quiet gallery and instead found the program getting off to a boisterous start.
Brody would love this, she’d thought.
But Doug had taken Brody, along with Oscar.
Sela had had to agree that she could use a few days to pull herself together.
Now, though, being here without her son felt wrong.
Her impetus for coming had nothing—and yet everything—to do with Brody. She’d lost her spark, Ivy had said. Well, Sela knew how to get that back. In this, one of her favorite exhibits away from Brevard and its memory-laden galleries, she was nothing if not flammable. Ideas flickered at her everywhere she looked. But so, too, did the children.
Outings like this required energy, and hers was in such short supply that she’d selectively forgotten that whether she possessed said energy was irrelevant. She had to summon it and come anyway, for Brody’s sake as well as her own. Doug was right to remind her of that. Of the fact that her own mother had believed the necessary push-push-push of Brody would be good for Sela, even if Doug had not been so sure.
That’s the point, isn’t it? he’d said. Or have you lost sight of that too?
Ecca had never worried the way the others had about whether Sela, in her state, could handle motherhood. Ecca had never insulted Sela by wishing Brody away.
Sela used to call Ecca from galleries when something struck her. She missed having her mother’s voice a speed dial away. Missed how Ecca always answered by saying Sela’s name in a way that made hello seem euphoric. “I’m in Asheville,” Sela would whisper into the phone. “Stopped in my tracks by—” And then she’d name the work and artist.
“Ooh,” would come the breathy response. “Describe it for me.” Their game. Sending a picture was cheating.
Sela had called about Carcassonne, in fact, the first time she’d seen it. “It’s like a fairy tale that hasn’t figured out its moral yet,” she’d said. “Sepia, waiting for color that won’t come.”
Ecca had hummed with approval. “I see it.”
“What are you working on?” Sela had suddenly needed to picture that, too.
“It’s … what it might look like if the sun could rise and set at the same time.”
Her mother’s descriptions were always better.
When Brody was born, then whisked away with Doug to the NICU, her mother had grasped her hand and leaned close to Sela’s ear while the doctors worked to stanch the bleeding between her legs.
“Stopped in your tracks by Brody,” she’d whispered. “Describe him for me.”
Sela had caught only a glimpse of the infant, but it had been enough. “The biggest dream,” she’d said, “in the tiniest body I’ve ever seen.” And she’d burst into tears.
“Child of your heart,” her mother had amended later, resting her unmoving eyes on Brody. “Fighting to give you both the future you deserve.”
Ecca had been her only real comfort then. Sela never managed to outgrow that: When something wondrous happened, wanting her mother. When something terrible happened, wanting her mother.
Maybe, if Sela stared at Carcassonne long enough now, its moral would find her at last. It still felt right to have come here, wrong as it seemed to be doing it alone.
If you didn’t get out in the world, you could forget what a beautiful place it was. Filled with stained-glass windows, and arched doorways, and open arm staircases, and high, curved balconies. With the expansive sound of live music on an outdoor stage. With those big, boisterous families who resemble one another so strongly you know at a glance they’re a clan. With wafts of sugar, even now, from the creamery next door, smelling of a special treat, a reward, a smile.
Those things might have been beyond her reach just now—forbidden, even. But if such impossible everyday beauty existed, surely there was more to keep her fire lit for. If the ordinary could in fact be extraordinary, maybe she could find the only thing she truly wanted that she had even a slim chance of conjuring: the right actions or words or feelings to draw her sister closer and set her free at the same time. And the strength to embody a paradox of her own: opening herself to one possibility while resigning herself to another outcome beyond her control.
Sela couldn’t be half a sister to Caroline any more than Sela could have ever been half a mother to Brody or half a daughter to Ecca. The fact that she could be half a wife to Doug was the reason she no longer was. If this second meeting taught her anything, it was that Caroline was the same way—all or nothing, and clearly uncomfortable stuck in the middle. With her parents, with Keaton and Walt, and with her.
No matter that when it came to Sela, her father chose nothing. Just as well, unfair as it was that he had all in ways Sela never would: a spouse who loved him enough, for better or worse, to go to great lengths to keep him, and stood by him even now; a daughter, son-in-law, grandchildren. He might have suffered a heart attack, but he had people taking care of his heart.
Well, Sela could take care of her own.
She might not have the energy, but she had the firepower to dream up a thousand better ways to live, to reach out and make one of them true. To imagine taking Brody’s little hand in hers and stepping with him inside the frame of this etching, up those weathered stairs, into the formidable fortress, and up the highest tower, where they could admire the hilltop view of the whole walled city of Carcassonne, the mountainous haze in the distance, the tiers of green below.
So far away, foreign. Yet not so different after all, once inside, from their Blue Ridge mountain home.