Timeless (2 page)

Michele shook her head wonderingly. It never ceased to amaze her that her mom had such an optimistic outlook on Michele’s love life—or even still
believed
in love—after all Marion herself had been through in that department.

“I’m serious,” Marion insisted. “And in the meantime, are you using all this as fodder for your writing?”

“Oh, you know it,” Michele said wryly. “Lots of angsty song lyrics and poems.”

“That’s my girl,” Marion encouraged. “You’d better let me read some of it soon.”

“Once I edit everything down to perfection? Sure,” Michele
said with a grin. “And I think I will take you up on burgers at the beach.”

Even though she was more than a little skeptical of Marion’s predictions about her love life, Michele always felt better after confiding in her. It had been the two of them against the world since Michele was born, and there was never a problem or a heartache that Marion couldn’t fix with her stubborn resolve and humor.

“Honey, you’re looking pretty pale,” Marion noticed, eyeing her with concern. “Did you sleep well last night?”

“Not really. I woke up in the middle of the night after dreaming about Mystery Man, and then it took me forever to fall back to sleep.”

“So you saw him again,” Marion said, her eyes lighting up. “Do tell.”

“Mom, I know you think the dreams are cool and all, but I can never meet this guy in real life,” Michele reminded her. “So the whole thing is actually really irritating.”

“Well, I think it’s romantic. Maybe it’s your subconscious telling you not to worry about Jason, that you
will
find someone special.” Marion glanced at her watch. “Yikes, it’s seven-thirty! You’d better go get ready.”

“Okay, I’ll be back in fifteen.” Michele hurried to her room and changed into a fitted white tee, Abercrombie jeans with a skinny metallic belt, and a pair of black flats. She quickly ran a brush through her hair and dabbed on some concealer and lip gloss before tossing the three beauty essentials into her messenger bag.

Michele found Marion waiting in their Volvo outside the
bungalow. As they set off toward Santa Monica, Marion flicked on the CD player. “I want you to hear my latest discovery,” she said. “Well, maybe that’s not the most accurate description, since she’s a Grammy-winning artist who’s been around for decades. But I only recently heard about her, and she just might be my new favorite singer—after my grandmother, of course.”

Michele curiously waited for the music to start. Her mom had such eclectic taste she never knew what to expect. This music surprised her. It managed to be heavy and light all at once, both breezy and aching. As soon as she heard the opening chords of the two Spanish guitars and the swaying Brazilian rhythm, Michele felt like she was transported to an exotic paradise. But when a woman with a deep, husky voice began to sing in Portuguese a melody rich with minor keys, Michele instantly knew that she was singing about pain. And yet the song wasn’t sad, exactly.

“Nostalgia,” Marion explained. “That word she keeps singing,
sodade
—it’s the Portuguese word for a nostalgia so intense we don’t have a direct translation for it in English.”

“Wow.” Michele picked up the CD case and looked at the cover photo of the singer, who appeared to be in her sixties or seventies. Her name was Cesaria Evora. Michele and her mom listened to the rest of the song in silence, and as the final chords played, Michele asked, “What does it make you think of?”

Marion paused. “Home,” she said so quietly that Michele almost wondered if she had misheard.

She stared at her mom. “Really?”

But they had just pulled up in front of her school, Crossroads High. Marion didn’t answer; she just smiled at Michele
and smoothed back her daughter’s hair. “See you at lunch, honey.”

“Bye, Mom.” Michele gave her a quick hug. “Love you.”

“I love you too. Good luck with—you know.” Marion gave her a meaningful smile before zooming off, her long auburn hair flying behind her.

Michele dashed to her locker and found her best friends waiting for her, Amanda typing away on her iPhone and Kristen inspecting herself with a compact mirror. Seconds later, the girls were heading down the hall to class, arms linked as they chattered. Michele was conscious of eyes on them as they passed, but the stares were mainly directed at her friends. Amanda was a leggy blonde budding model, while Kristen was the star of the soccer team. Michele had to admit that growing up with both the school beauty and the star athlete had made her conscious of how painfully ordinary she was in comparison. In her most private moments, she’d fantasized about returning to school after summer vacation as a new and improved Michele. She would transform herself from the girl-next-door type into a mysterious, stunning beauty, and she would finally gather the courage to take her mom’s advice and submit her song lyrics to record labels and singers, becoming a wunderkind songwriter—

“Uh, earth to Michele!” Amanda waved a hand in front of Michele’s face. “Did you hear what I just said?”

Michele gave her friend a sheepish smile. She really needed to quit daydreaming in public.

“No, sorry, what?”

“I asked if your mom has any ideas for our Halloween costume this year.”

“Oh, right. She’s taking me out for burgers this afternoon, so I’ll ask her then. But we still have over a month left.”

“I know, but since we’re hosting a party this year, our costumes have to be
extra
fabulous,” Amanda said importantly. “I mean, people have come to expect a lot from your mom’s designs.”

Michele chuckled. “Okay, well, don’t worry. You know she can live up to the hype.”

Every year since they were little, the three girls had coordinated their costumes, with Marion designing and sewing their ensembles. From trick-or-treating as kids to Halloween partying now that they were older, Michele loved the sense of belonging she felt as she and her best friends sauntered into the night, arm in arm, wearing their beautiful costumes.

The three girls hurried into their first-period junior-senior economics class just as the final bell rang. As Michele slid into her seat, she couldn’t help glancing at Jason. She tried to ignore the familiar pang in her chest at the sight of his sandy dark-blond hair and brown eyes, which were focused away from her.

“Morning, class,” the teacher, Mrs. Brewer, greeted them. “So, in keeping with our study of the history of commerce, today’s lecture will cover one of the greatest commercial merchants in American history.”

Michele froze. She was pretty sure she knew who Mrs. Brewer was referring to.

“August Charles—” Michele felt her whole body tense up, as it did whenever the name was mentioned.

“Windsor,” Mrs. Brewer finished. “Of the famed Windsor family. He was America’s first multimillionaire. August Charles was born to a poor Dutch family in the year 1760, but from childhood, he was known for his brilliant mind and fierce ambition. At the age of twenty-one, he began a career in fur trade, which was the start of his meteoric rise to fortune through trade and real estate. His descendents furthered the empire by gaining control of the burgeoning New York railroad …”

Mrs. Brewer’s voice seemed to fade as Michele looked around at her classmates, some of whom were listening and taking notes, the rest clearly zoning out. But none of them would ever have believed that Crossroads High’s own Michele Windsor had been born into this very family.

Marion had often said that hers was a cautionary tale for all Manhattan heiresses, that privilege came with a dark underbelly that few could see. Their neighbors in the laid-back Los Angeles town of Venice Beach all thought of Marion and Michele Windsor as the average single mom and daughter, with no connection whatsoever to that famous East Coast family of the same name. And that was just the way Marion liked them to be: anonymous. So while Michele’s aunts, uncles, and grandparents lived in New York splendor, spending their summers in Europe and snagging invitations to White House dinners and Broadway premieres, Marion and Michele struggled to make ends meet on Marion’s modest clothing-design income, with Michele’s after-school waitressing job providing some pocket money.

It would have been easy to feel bitter about the injustice of it all during the painful times growing up when there wasn’t enough money for Michele to go to sleepaway camp with her friends or buy the cool clothes and cutting-edge gadgets everyone else had. But Michele knew she had no right to complain, since she never would have been born if it hadn’t been for Marion’s exile.

When Michele was old enough to understand, Marion had told her the story, just once. It was a story that had left an indelible imprint on Michele’s mind, one whose details she could call to memory at any instant, without ever having to pain her mom by bringing up the subject.

In 1991, the sixteen-year-old heiress Marion Windsor fell in love with Henry Irving, a nineteen-year-old from the Bronx. They met in a photography class at the Museum of Modern Art, and Marion was instantly fascinated with him.
“He was so … completely different from every other boy I knew. It was like he came from another world. Everything about him, even his name, seemed special and unique to me.”
Michele remembered how her mom had stopped at this early point in the story, swallowing hard and taking a few deep breaths, as if gathering the courage to continue.
“He lived alone—his parents were far away—and that made him seem so much older and more mature than everyone else. I’d become so used to the grungy guys of the nineties, with their low-slung baggy pants that were practically on the ground, their slouching, and the careless way they would treat us girls. Well, that first day of class when I met Henry, he was standing tall and well dressed, and he actually took off his cap as he introduced himself to me, just like a gentleman. I was hooked right then.”

As the class progressed, Marion grew to love the look of fierce concentration on Henry’s face as he studied a print, the way he could see the beauty and worthiness in objects and settings that no one else would bother to photograph. He had a different way of looking at the world, and it drew Marion to him like a magnet.

“I was desperate to get to know him, so one day I decided to just bite the bullet and sit next to him in class. And what do you know, that was the day the teacher had us work in pairs with the person sitting next to us,”
Marion had told Michele in a voice that sounded tremulous and different from her own.
“Halfway through class, I could somehow tell that he was just as taken with me. He asked for my phone number, and we went on our first date that Saturday night.”

The relationship soon grew serious, and Marion was unable to believe her good fortune as Henry fell in love with her. But her conservative, strict Windsor parents considered this boy from the opposite side of the tracks a nightmare of a choice for their only child.
“At first they thought it was just puppy love, a passing phase. So even though they disapproved, I wasn’t forbidden to go out with him. We were together through all of my last two years of high school. But during my senior year, my parents started forcing me to go on dates with their friends’ sons and attend these ridiculous debutante parties to meet boys they had preapproved. Henry and I both knew that I was getting closer and closer to being trapped by my last name and what it meant.”

When Marion was eighteen and approaching her high school graduation, Henry decided to solve the problem for them—by proposing. He was ready to start a life together. Marion had
always known that he was the one for her, and she ecstatically accepted.

“I wasn’t expecting my parents to be happy about it … but I never could have imagined their reaction when I told them the news,”
Marion had said, her eyes darkening at the memory.
“Mom cried all night, and Dad ranted and raved about how I was the last in the centuries-old family line and that marrying Henry would disgrace the Windsor name. With no brothers, I was expected to marry a businessman who could run the Windsor empire, someone from a solid old-money family who would also help the Windsors continue their reign over Manhattan society.”
Needless to say, Henry was neither. But Marion loved him and refused to give him up.

“It will never work for you two to be together. New York won’t accept it, and neither will we,”
Marion’s mother had declared. So Marion and Henry decided they had no choice but to leave New York … and the Windsors. As Marion explained to Michele, at the age of eighteen, how could she even contemplate spending the rest of her life without the person she loved most in the world? Henry had some money saved up from his part-time job, and a friend from their photography class who had recently moved to Los Angeles offered to take them in until they found a place of their own. So Henry and Marion began planning for a new life on the West Coast.

On the evening of June 10, 1993, the day after Marion’s high school graduation, she stuffed her most important belongings into a backpack subtle enough to go unnoticed by the household staff, and waited nervously for her parents to leave for a dinner party. Half an hour after they left, Henry arrived to
pick her up. Marion took one last look at the beautiful bedroom she had spent eighteen years growing up in, then stole through the house. She left a note in her mother’s parlor on the second floor, then hurried out the front doors and into Henry’s arms.