The Color of Hope

Chapter 1

Sabrina Thompson stood looking around the living room of her Malibu home, momentarily at a loss. It was a spectacular modern house. Everything was white and open and airy. She and her husband had loved the location and the view of the beach and the ocean. Malcolm had bought it from a famous Hollywood producer for a fortune. They had gutted it and almost completely redesigned it as their romantic weekend getaway, with the eventual intention of using it as their retirement home, their home base from which to travel. Malcolm had had an epiphany three years before when he turned fifty and their youngest child, Colette, “Coco,” left for college in New York, at Parsons School of Design, her lifetime dream. He decided to retire in five years, at fifty-five. They bought the Malibu house as their future home, and planned to sell their enormous Bel Air house after he retired, and live in Malibu between trips. They had already put Bel Air on the market at an enormous price and expected it to take a few years to sell. They weren’t in a hurry since he hadn’t retired yet. It had taken them two years to achieve the look they wanted in Malibu, and they started spending weekends there as soon as the construction and decorating was finished.

They had been empty nesters now for four years. Their oldest child, Justin, had gone to Yale, as Sabrina had. She had majored in Fine Arts, and Justin majored in business and economics and was now doing graduate studies at the London School of Economics for a masters in Economics and Management. He was twenty-five. Elizabeth, “Lizzie,” their second child, had gone to Princeton, then straight to law school at Columbia when she graduated. She was now in her third and final year at twenty-four. Coco had graduated from Parsons six months earlier and was doing an internship at Prada in Milan and loving it.

Sabrina was the daughter of Hollywood royalty. Her father was a famous producer, who had made some of the biggest movies in the industry, and her mother had been a promising young starlet, when they met and fell in love. She had married him at twenty-three, and abandoned her career immediately. He was eighteen years older, and she had been a wife and mother for the rest of her life, and had no regrets about her career. They had been wonderful parents and doted on Sabrina, their only child. Sabrina had followed in her mother’s footsteps and married young at twenty-two. She was a talented artist, and had given up her career aspirations too, to raise her and Malcolm’s three children.

She felt lost at first when the children left for college, and Malcolm had encouraged her to open the art gallery she had always dreamed of. She had opened it in a beautiful space on Melrose Place in L.A., and had fun with it. She treated the artists she represented like her children, and loved their work. She sold their paintings and sculptures at moderate prices to make the work accessible and help advance their careers. It was a labor of love more than a job and she was having a great time with it. She’d owned it for four years, and often traveled to art fairs to look for new artists. She was a talented muralist herself, but only used her talent now for their own homes and select friends. She loved being Malcolm’s wife and her children’s mother. She was a quiet, private person, and had no thirst for celebrity or fame. All doors would have been open to her if she had wanted a career as an actress, but she had no interest in that whatsoever. Her only career aspirations had ever been as an artist, but she was focused now only on the work of the artists she represented, not her own.

Malcolm had come to L.A. from New York to attend USC. He was also an only child, and after college he had gotten a job at a television network in L.A., where he had risen through the ranks, with no help from his powerful father-in-law. He built his career on his own merits. He was twenty-seven when he married Sabrina, and they had three babies in the first three years. At forty he had become the head of the network, and he was happy with the decision he made at fifty to retire at fifty-five. He thought that another five years in a high-powered, ruthlessly demanding job he nonetheless enjoyed would be enough. He wasn’t power-hungry, he enjoyed what he did and was good at it. But he wanted to be free to enjoy life with Sabrina while they were young enough to do so. One of their goals for “after network television” was to buy an apartment in Paris and spend time there too.

The beautiful big home in Bel Air seemed cavernous without the children once they left. Sabrina and Malcolm didn’t need a house that size. It had made perfect sense when their children were young and it was constantly filled with other kids coming and going and spending weekends. They had the house where all their children’s friends wanted to hang out, which they had set up intentionally so that they could keep a good eye on their kids, know their friends, guide them gently, and see what was going on. But once their children left, the house felt sad to both of them. It had served its purpose, and when the house they had redesigned in Malibu was ready, after two years of construction, they put the Bel Air house on the market, after discussing it with their children, none of whom planned to ever live in L.A. again. The fashion world would take Coco to Paris, New York, or Milan. Lizzie had fallen in love with New York, and wanted to pass the bar and work for a law firm there when she graduated from law school, and Justin was enthralled with London, and wanted to spend the early years of his career in Europe for the international finance experience he’d get there.

Even if any of them decided to come back to L.A. eventually, they wouldn’t want to live at home. So Malcolm and Sabrina put their family home on the market at a very hefty price. They were in no rush, and they were having fun together in a more manageable house at the beach on the weekends. It was their love nest, and better suited to a couple with grown children. They didn’t need a big staff to run it. They used a cleaning service, and liked being alone on the weekends. Each of the children had a bedroom, and there were two additional guest rooms. The Malibu house was a blank page. They had no history there, no memories, the way they did in Bel Air, of their children’s childhoods and the happy years they had spent there. The house in Malibu felt new and fresh. It was better suited to their life of the future. Bel Air was the symbol of the past, and didn’t suit the life they were planning after Malcolm retired. They wanted to be free to roam the world.

Malcolm and Sabrina were one of those couples who had done everything right. They had married the right people and were still in love twenty-six years later, and there had been no marital slips or regrets. They had good children, and had brought them up with strong family values and encouraged them to pursue their dreams, just as Malcolm had encouraged Sabrina to pursue hers with the art gallery she loved owning once the kids were gone. She was serious about it and dedicated to her artists. She worked closely with the gallery manager she had hired, Hallie Brooks, who was a skilled artist too, and had a business degree from UCLA. Sabrina and Hallie were good friends and worked well together.

And Malcolm had succeeded admirably at his career. He had made a very respectable fortune, was a responsible person, a good husband and father. He and Sabrina had both lost their parents in the course of their marriage, and Sabrina had her own money, inherited from her parents. Malcolm’s parents had been more modest, and he had made his own fortune and was generous with it. They had a warm circle of friends, but were closest to each other, unusually so.

Sabrina was intelligent, and Malcolm often discussed his hard decisions with her, and respected her opinions and advice. She felt certain that she was married to the best man on the planet and had never looked at another man with interest, although she was beautiful, tall, thin, and blond, and many of Malcolm’s friends envied him. Malcolm and Sabrina were people of integrity, good parents, respected in their community and admired as a couple, even looked upon with envy by some. Malcolm always operated on the theory that good things happened to good people, and he was grateful for what they shared. He didn’t take it for granted. They loved each other deeply and made a conscious effort to do the right thing and honor their word, and it seemed only fair that a steady stream of good things had happened to them in their twenty-six years together. No accidents or tragedies had occurred professionally or personally. They were sad to have lost their parents, but they were of an appropriate age and had led good lives.

A year before, Sabrina and Malcolm had gone to Paris to celebrate New Year’s when their children left after Christmas with their own plans. They always stayed at the Ritz in Paris, and had a favorite suite that felt like home to them. There were adjacent rooms for the children when they went as a family, which they did in the summer when they spent a week together at their favorite hotel in the south of France. The children never missed it. But the New Year’s trip to Paris was a romantic tryst for Malcolm and Sabrina.