Timekeeper

by Alexandra Monir

  Marion’s will was another devastating blow. Instead of Michele moving in with one of her friends and finishing high school in her hometown, Marion had left clear instructions naming her estranged parents in New York as Michele’s next of kin. Less than a month after losing her mother, Michele was forced to move across the country to New York City, enroll in a snooty high school that catered to the offspring of Manhattan’s elite, and take her place as the youngest in the Windsor family line—a role she’d thought she would never have to fill.

  Marion had hidden from the Windsor name—as legendary in New York as the names Astor, Vanderbilt, and Carnegie—ever since Michele was born. Michele always followed suit in keeping their identity a secret, until the fall afternoon when she moved into the mammoth Windsor Mansion on Fifth Avenue to live with her distant grandparents and an entire household staff. All the while, she wondered what could possibly have possessed her mother to send Michele to live with the people whom she herself had escaped.

  The only thing she knew was that this great rift centered around her father. Walter and Dorothy Windsor were incensed when their daughter and only heir fell in love with an unknown boy from the Bronx, and they forbade her to marry the lower-class Henry Irving. Unable to face a life without him, Marion ran away with Henry to Los Angeles on the eve of her high school graduation. The Windsors retaliated by offering Henry one million dollars to leave her, and though they claimed he refused their offer, Marion never believed her parents—for he sure enough disappeared, leaving Marion just before she discovered that she was pregnant. For sixteen years, Michele thought that was the whole story of her no-good, absentee father—until New York showed her the truth. Here, she discovered his powerful skeleton key, and learned of his true identity as Irving Henry … from the nineteenth century.

  When Michele first picked up his key it had responded, transforming from an inanimate object into a moving and pulsing talisman, as if it recognized her touch. To her disbelief, the key sent Michele back in time one hundred years—and that’s where she met the stranger who had haunted her dreams for as long as she could remember. Philip Walker. The man she’d always assumed to be a figment of her idealizing imagination turned out to be an eighteen-year-old boy from 1910.

  From the moment she met him at the Windsors’ Halloween Ball, he possessed her every thought and emotion with a dizzying intensity. The two of them, both lost in their own times, found the elusive place where they belonged whenever they were together. But the hundred years between them proved too great an obstacle. Their wrenching goodbye was still painfully fresh in Michele’s mind, and now that she was away from him, alone in the school infirmary, it suddenly seemed impossible that he could have found a way into the future.

  Michele had moved to New York searching for traces of her mother everywhere she looked. Now, ever since her journey to the past, she found herself searching her modern world for the three of them: her father, her mother—and Philip. Could her desperate dreaming have actually manifested one of them into her own Time?

  When the bell rang Michele jumped off the cot and, after hastily reassuring the nurse that she was fine, sprinted back to Mr. Lewis’s classroom door to catch Philip. She needed to touch him, to know for certain that he was no look-alike, but the living, breathing Philip Walker she loved.

  Michele stopped still when at last she spotted him rounding the corner out of the classroom with his back toward her. She took a deep breath, watching as he stopped to check his class schedule. He raked his hand through his hair in a nervous gesture that she remembered well.

  “Philip.” It came out like a whispered prayer. Though she was a few feet away, he still heard her. Michele held her breath as he slowly turned around, his blue eyes widening when he saw her. But he remained silent, a flush creeping up his cheeks. Her mind raced with confusion. Something was wrong. This wasn’t at all the reunion she had imagined. Why wasn’t he taking her into his arms, holding her close while giddily recounting how he had made it into the future to be with her? And why did she feel so shy and nervous around him?

  “You’re here,” Michele breathed. Her voice sounded different, like it belonged to someone else. “How is it possible?”

  Philip gave her a shaky half-smile. “I’m sorry,” he said in his familiar low, warm voice. “Have we … met?”

  Michele stared at him uncomprehendingly. Was this a joke? But as she waited for the punch line to come, looking hopefully into his eyes, she saw that something was missing from them: recognition.

  “Oh, God.” She was overcome by a wave of shock, and she backed herself up against the wall. “You don’t remember me?”

  Philip shook his head slowly. “You must be thinking of someone else.” He looked closely at her. “What’s your name?”

  Michele felt all the air seep out of her. Just before she lost her balance, Philip quickly reached over to help her upright. As his hand closed around her bare arm, she felt a spark of energy, and watched as he drew in a sharp breath.

  “You feel it too,” she said softly, looking up at him. “You are the same Philip, I know it.”

  Philip let go of her clumsily. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m—I’m sorry,” he stammered. He turned to give her one last questioning look before taking off in the opposite direction, leaving Michele alone, lost for words.

  I was a young girl growing up in Virginia when I first saw what I called The Visions. They looked like human beings, yet I knew there was nothing normal about them. Their faces and clothing, the way they styled their hair, all ranged from the thoroughly antiquated to the wildly newfangled. I knew as soon as I laid eyes on them that they weren’t from my early-1800s world, and furthermore, no one else could see them but me. I learned to keep quiet about The Visions after hearing my family pronounce me “mad” when I tried to point one of them out. The only person who believed me was my grandmother.

  Then the unimaginable happened. After seven days, The Visions solidified. They became real people, men and women who everyone could see, and they adopted the modes and manners of our time. But a series of shocking events always seemed to follow their entrance into our world. Houses burned down from fires with no cause, neighbors went missing, marriages were interrupted, and there was an overall sense of life being thrown off its course. It wasn’t until I was in my twenties that I learned the truth of what The Visions were. That was when my grandmother died, leaving me the precious key that she always wore closely around her neck—along with a letter explaining her secret. She was a time traveler. And now, with her key in my possession, so was I.

  Grandmother told me that we were just like The Visions—that any time traveler who leaves his or her present lives like a ghost, only seen by Timekeepers and those few humans with the Gift of Sight, until they’ve been in another time for seven days. The trouble was, Timekeepers weren’t meant to stay in a different time long enough to impact it. Even the smallest of actions by an outsider resulted in serious consequences. A well-meaning Timekeeper who attempted to reverse a loved one’s death or ill fortune found an even ghastlier outcome. It was clear to my grandmother, and I was equally convinced, that the time traveler’s role was only to observe, learn, and protect the natural Timeline. I knew that our power had to be harnessed and focused. This was how the Time Society was born.

  By the year of its founding in 1830, I had gathered twenty members across the United States. Decades later, as I pen this Handbook in the year 1880, our Society has grown to two hundred. There are other, older coalitions like ours in Europe and the Middle East; for the most part we all exist as allies.

  The Time Society’s purpose has always been to find others who possess the Key and the Time-Traveling Gene, so we may use our gifts collectively and become stronger as an entity, preserving the history of America while protecting its future.

  —MILLICENT AUGUST,

  PRESIDENT & FOUNDER OF THE TIME SOCIETY

  2

  Michele stood in the doorway of the Berkshi
re High School dining room, an airy café filled with white round tables and matching wicker chairs. A long buffet counter snaked through the center of the room, where students lined up to select their dishes. Michele’s eyes scanned the buffet line, but there was no Philip Walker in sight.

  The rest of the morning passed by in a blur, with Michele barely conscious of her classes. She hadn’t seen Philip since he left her outside the U.S. history classroom, but she’d felt his presence all around her. As her English teacher analyzed the hidden messages of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Michele was only present in body, her mind dizzily replaying the brief encounter with Philip. And while her math teacher wrote calculus equations on the board, Michele was busy pondering a far more complicated problem: if this twenty-first-century Philip was the same person she’d been with in the past, how could he not know her? And yet if it wasn’t the same Philip, then how could he possibly have the very same face, the same body and voice and ring?

  As she waited in the lunch line her eyes finally found him, seated at a table filled with the beautiful Kaya Morgan and her perky-pretty trio of girls. She couldn’t tear her eyes away as Kaya and her friends chattered and giggled in front of Philip, all of them no doubt angling to place dibs on the hottest new guy in Manhattan.

  In the short time that Michele had been at Berkshire High, she’d learned that Kaya, a senior, was considered the biggest catch in school. Michele could certainly see why. Kaya was half Japanese and half American, with an exotic beauty that overshadowed the more familiar looks of the other Berkshire girls. She had a body that would let her pass for a Victoria’s Secret model, was captain of the girls’ track team, and with her mother an acclaimed modern artist from Japan and her father a descendant of the legendary J. Pierpont Morgan himself, Kaya was equally embraced by both New York’s aristocratic society and artistic circles. Michele had spoken to her only a couple of times, but she’d liked Kaya right away. She was friendly and smart, not the type to rest on her looks and family name. So Michele watched with a sinking heart as Philip looked at Kaya, captivated. If this was her competition … she didn’t even want to think about it.

  Still, Michele reminded herself, the miracle is that he’s here. Even if he somehow doesn’t remember me yet—I know he came back for me.

  Philip’s eyes met hers across the dining room, and she felt a jump in her stomach. But just as quickly he looked away, like she was nobody. Michele’s chest tightened as she slowly headed toward her lunch table.

  “Hey,” Caissie greeted her when she reached their table. “How are you feeling?”

  Michele set down her tray, forcing a smile for Caissie and the third point of their trio, Caissie’s best friend and secret crush, Matt. “I’m fine. What’s going on with you?”

  “Nothing much, just speculating about the new guy,” Caissie replied, giving Michele a meaningful look. “Since Matt is a total nerd-genius and takes advanced calculus with the seniors, he got to talk to Philip a little.” She glanced over at Matt, who was rolling his eyes at her. “Tell Michele what you found out.”

  “Okay, but if you two are into him, I have to warn you that he seems kinda tied up.”

  Michele followed his gaze to the sight of Kaya murmuring something in Philip’s ear. She quickly turned her attention back to Matt and Caissie before the image could implant itself in her memory.

  “What did you find out about him?” she asked numbly.

  “Not much, only that he’s a senior and he just moved into the same apartment building as Kaya Morgan—you know, the fancy-schmancy Osborne building across from Carnegie Hall. His parents got divorced and that’s why he moved here with his mom from Hyde Park.”

  Michele sucked in her breath, digesting the facts. He’s a senior. So that explained why she hadn’t seen him in any of her classes since U.S. history, which was one of the few juniorsenior mixed classes offered at Berkshire.

  His parents just got divorced. She felt a pang of sympathy at the thought of Philip’s having to leave his dad and his hometown to start over in a new city—just as she’d had to when her mother died.

  He lives in Kaya’s building, the Osborne. That was why the two of them seemed chummy despite this being his first day at Berkshire. Michele felt an envious knot in her stomach at the thought of them going home to the same apartment building every day. And that name, the Osborne … it sounded so familiar.

  “Why do I know that place?” Michele wondered aloud.

  “It’s one of the landmark apartment buildings in the city,” Caissie explained, adopting her scholarly tone. As she spoke, Michele thought if anyone was a nerd-genius, it was Caissie and not Matt. “It opened in 1885 as luxury housing for the rich families of New York, who wanted a ‘hotel living’ experience, instead of having to keep up big mansions like the one you live in. But later on in the twentieth century, it was better known as the residence of artists and musicians.”

  Michele sat up straighter. “Really? Like who?”

  “Well, Leonard Bernstein actually wrote West Side Story there,” Caissie told her. “Legend has it that his music room overlooked the Osborne fire escape, and that’s how he came up with the idea to set Maria and Tony’s classic balcony scene there.”

  “All right, while you two are having this history lesson, I’m going to get more fries,” Matt announced.

  Once he left the table Caissie said under her breath, “Now are you convinced? This new guy isn’t your Philip from 1910, he’s just a normal dude from upstate New York.”

  Not to mention the fact that he told me he’s not the same person, Michele added silently. And yet she didn’t—couldn’t—seem to believe it.

  Michele slipped into the backseat of the Windsors’ black SUV after school, where the family chauffeur, Fritz, was waiting to drive her home. She was still unaccustomed to this ritual of being waited on by household staff. After growing up in a home where money was always scarce, she was torn between pleasure and embarrassment at experiencing the fineries of life. She had the feeling she didn’t deserve any of this, that such an over-the-top lifestyle was too much for anyone, and she was constantly reminded that her mother had disavowed this luxurious existence. But Michele had grown especially fond of Fritz and the housekeeper, Annaleigh. It was clear they both cared about her and were anxious for Michele to be happy in this new life.

  Fritz drove south from the Upper East Side high school, passing Manhattan’s famed museums, distinguished apartment buildings, and opulent hotels, until they reached the white marble Windsor Mansion on Fifth Avenue, standing proudly across from the lush spectacle of Central Park. Michele’s eyes still widened every time the car passed through the wrought-iron entrance gates, giving her a full glimpse of the estate in all its glory, from the Corinthian columns to the palazzo design. The Windsor Mansion had been deemed one of America’s greatest architectural achievements when it was built in 1887. More than 120 years later, Michele found it no less awe-inspiring.

  Following Fritz out of the car, she saw something in the window of the front entrance that halted her steps. A figure dressed in black, surrounded by a foglike veil, was watching her closely. Michele’s palms grew clammy, panic bubbling in her chest as she realized this was the same figure she had seen right after Philip appeared in class—just before she fainted.

  “What—who—is that?” she stammered, looking at Fritz nervously.

  The chauffeur eyed her with confusion. “What are you talking about, miss?”

  Michele pointed straight ahead. “That—that person, or thing, in the window. Don’t you see?”

  Fritz glanced at the window and turned back to her with concern. “I don’t see anything.”

  She looked up at Fritz sharply. How could he not see the strange being? And suddenly an incredible thought occurred to her, remembering the times when she herself had gone unseen: Maybe it’s a time traveler.

  Michele let out a nervous laugh. “Whoa, that’s weird. I—it must have just been a shadow or something.”

&
nbsp; Fritz frowned, looking closely at her. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  She forced her voice to a more casual tone. “I’m fine, honestly. If anything I just need a new contact lens prescription.”

  As she followed Fritz into the house with trepidation, the veil of fog lifted and the creature at the window became clear. She was a real person—a girl about Michele’s age. Her back was still to them as she stared out the window, so all Michele could see was a pile of slithery dark curls atop a tall body dressed in a nineteenth-century black velvet gown.

  So there are other time travelers besides me … and my father. The realization hit Michele with full force and her heartbeat quickened as she thought of Philip. If this stranger in the Windsor Mansion was a time traveler … what if Philip was one too? But that wouldn’t explain why he didn’t know her. Whenever Michele had traveled through time, she always remembered everything.

  “Excuse me,” Michele said quietly, when Fritz was out of earshot. “Who are—”

  But before she even had a chance to finish her sentence, the girl’s image flickered and vanished into the air. Michele felt a cold wave of fear wash over her. Somehow she knew that the girl hadn’t wanted Michele to see who she was.

  What was that? What in the world is going on? Michele thought frantically. Were her instincts right—the girl was a time traveler—or had Philip Walker’s appearance at school turned her into a mental case, complete with hallucinations?

  “Michele, hi!”