An American Beauty by Shana Abe

Author:Shana Abe [Abe, Shana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington Books
Published: 2023-02-16T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 31

Clara

En route from Merced to Sacramento, 1878

There was a particular magic to trains. Clara had realized that years ago, all the way back to when she climbed aboard one of her father’s railroad cars for the first time. She’d been not quite nine then, clinging to her mother’s hand on that swarming New York platform, both terrified and thrilled at the prospect of a prolonged journey with both of her parents, of being trapped inside that enormous train like a butterfly in a bottle. It was before the transcontinental railroad had been fully completed; they’d had to go all the way down to Panama and back just to get from New York to California.

Within hours, she was enraptured.

Clara had loved every bit of it, from their brightly plush and bejeweled palace car (like the inside of a genie’s bottle from a fable), to the food served in the dining car, to the way the stewards always smiled at her so kindly as they brought her an extra cookie or slice of pie for dessert. She loved watching the land streak by the windows in all different colors, forests and prairie and sometimes the sea in the distance. She loved the depots when they stopped to refuel, every one of them different yet somehow all the same: the same wooden platforms, the same rumpled travelers, the same sense of urgency in the air, everyone thinking and talking about where they were to go next.

But most especially, she loved sleeping on the train at night. It was so easy to drop into her dreams while rocking gently back and forth in her berth, her body thrumming with the tick-tick, tick-tick rhythm of the tracks beneath her. Young Clara felt safe and not alone somehow, as if the train itself was her friend, her protector. A magical friend who would send her to sleep in one place and let her awaken in another, like Clara and the train were stationary but the world itself had rotated around them, landing them someplace new every morning.

Even after so many years, that magic had not dimmed.

It was all so much quicker now, of course, so much more convenient. Father’s locomotives could whisk them across the country in just a matter of days, a modern marvel. Yet even though the times had changed, the technology had improved and the famed golden spike that linked the West Coast to the East was housed in a museum somewhere, Clara still considered the train her secret friend, her magical protector, where nothing could go wrong. She could still fall asleep at night soothed by the familiar tick-tick, tick-tick of the steel wheels skimming the tracks, and awake refreshed and cheerful. The world would still spin around her while she dreamed, and every morning still landed her somewhere wonderful and new.

So she was humming a little under her breath as she strolled through the train that was putting miles between her and the impossible beauty of Yosemite, this miracle of

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.