Night Train to Lisbon by Emily Grayson

palace of sorts, Carson thought to herself. The water was so inviting in the distance, and the house itself seemed both foreign and comfortable.
    Once inside, they all toured the rooms, walking across the ubiquitous cool red stone tile. Carson’s bedroom seemed like something not only from another country, but from another century. In the middle of the room was a simple white bed surrounded by a gauze netting that gave it a magical quality. On the wall above the bed hung a cross, and the walls themselves were rough and painted a simple white. Simplicity: that was the dominant sensibility at work here.
    â€œI love it,” said Carson, and as the days passed she did love it there in the Villa do Giraldo. She and Jane and Lawrence went exploring the region, stopping to make the trek up to the Palacio da Pena, and the ruins of a Moorish castle known as the Castelo dos Mouros, which loomed with seeming precariousness from the boulders high above the town proper. As Carson stood so high above the town, she looked down on all of it, and then turned so she was facing southward, toward Lisbon. Somewhere in that teeming city, Alec Breve was sitting, or walking, or eating lunch, or thinking about Carson, or not thinking about her at all.
    Three days had passed since the train trip, andthere had not been a word from him. Carson had been determined not to let this trouble her too much, but thoughts about him persisted, especially at night, keeping her awake as she lay beneath the veil that was draped around her bed to keep out industrious mosquitoes.
    She was always traveling on that train now. The sights of Sintra, the sinful midnight suppers of crustaceans and drawn butter, her uncle’s wry and vivid descriptions of the local history and architecture, the distant lapping of the waves as she lay in bed at night, the intoxicatingly salty air that greeted her with the first morning light—none of these fully distracted Carson. She might be lifting the hem of her skirt and stepping delicately across the very stones, as her uncle assured her, where navigators once stood as they stared across the Atlantic and wondered what lay on the other side, and Carson would find herself thinking instead about that night on the train. When it happened, as it happened, she had wanted it not to end, had wished she could find a way to make it last and last. And in a way, she had. That night hadn’t come to an end after all. Carson was trying her best to push all thoughts of Alec from her mind, yet again and again she found herself returning to him, and flushing with the warmth of those memories, and wondering, What if?
    What if she had allowed herself to linger longer? What if she had defied the reasonable expectation of her aunt and uncle, waiting awake back in their sleeping compartments, that theirniece would return to them at a decent hour? What if she’d told Alec in that one windswept moment on the rear platform of the train how she really felt about him? What if he’d told her that he felt the same way about her?
    What if she hadn’t acted in such a cavalier manner toward him in the train station in Lisbon?
    Stop, she told herself. Just stop. Those first days in Sintra she told herself this—tried to tell herself this—again and again, until she had scolded herself raw. She knew she was torturing herself, recalling over and over again that brief period on the train, the wind in her hair, the weight of Alec’s jacket on her shoulders, his askew smile hovering above her, drawing nearer, until his lips parted, and then she always told herself: Stop. Don’t think about it.
    Until the night she asked herself: Why not?
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    As she lay awake within the womb of her mosquito netting, the question suddenly appeared to her. Why stop? What was the harm in thinking about the night she’d spent on the train to Lisbon? For one brief, thrilling moment, anything had seemed possible; everything had seemed perfect.