Page 6 of The Dream Hotel

S ara’s passport lay on the desk, askew. If only Segura had stamped it before he was called away, she would’ve been done with the security screening and on her way to passenger arrivals. But he’d left so quickly she hadn’t had a chance to protest that her family was waiting for her downstairs, that she had reservations for lunch at a trendy place in the South Bay. The officer who’d barged in on the interview asked her if she wanted a cup of coffee; there was a fresh pot in the RAA lounge.

“No, thanks,” she said, barely able to disguise her exasperation. She resented this interloper, whose appearance had caused her yet another delay. The longer this procedure took, the further away she was from lunch with Elias. “I don’t drink coffee.”

“No coffee?” He sank into the chair opposite her and sipped from a steaming mug, closing his eyes at the pleasure of it. “Man, I don’t know how you do it.”

She shrugged. Ever since she’d gotten a sleep-aid device, she rarely needed coffee, though she used to drink as many as six cups a day. Restful sleep had obliterated her cravings for caffeine. “The taste doesn’t appeal to me anymore.”

“The taste is the best part,” he said, sipping noisily from his cup. He had thinning brown hair and a face drawn out of soft lines: round eyes, chubby cheeks, a bulbous nose. His name tag said Moss. Unlike Segura, he carried a huge weapon in his holster, which made him look a bit out of place, especially with that tanned couple frolicking on the big screen above him. A Glimpse of Paradise , the slogan read.

The ad taunted Sara. Although she had grown up in California, where the islands exerted a magnetic pull every winter break and summer holiday, she had never visited Hawaii. Every year, while her friends traveled to O‘ahu or Maui, her parents packed the family to Morocco, in the process trading Sara’s teenage fantasies of tattooed surfers for the stark reality of gaping relatives. From the spectator she aspired to be, she found herself overnight an object of spectacle. Surrounded by aunts and uncles she didn’t know, and cousins with whom she could barely communicate, Sara spent a few weeks each year like a defendant in a courtroom, answering questions about her hobbies, her grades, her friends, or else listening quietly while the adults compared, in minute detail, life in one country to life in the other.

For their honeymoon, Sara had suggested to Elias that they go to Kauai, whose evergreen trails she has long wanted to see, but he wanted to visit Prague. He had even found a way to pay for the trip with fellowship money he’d received for his graduate work in speech pathology. “All we have to do,” he said, “is settle on the dates.” Then he pulled out his phone to look at his calendar. Sara was taken aback; she’d expected they would have a discussion before deciding on a destination, but Prague was a fine idea, too, especially if it didn’t cost them as much. “Okay,” she said. Those were the good days, when a disagreement between them was nothing more than a chance to discover a new city together. They spent a week in Prague, rising from their hotel bed late in the morning to explore the Castle or take a stroll down thousand-year-old streets.

As time passed, Sara found it harder to overlook Elias’s habit of making decisions without consulting her. Some of it was no doubt her fault. Once, when she kept dragging her feet about picking a new dishwasher to replace the one that kept flooding the kitchen, he ordered one online and installed it while she was at work. But another time, he traded in their old Toyota for a new Volvo without warning, only calling her from the dealership to sign the paperwork for the title. She was watching a film documentary on PBS, and she had to mute the sound to make sure she’d heard him correctly. “You did what ?” she asked. “How can you buy a car without talking to me about it?”

“We did talk about it. Remember you said the Toyota was on its last legs? It needed to be done, so I did it.”

“You didn’t tell me you went car shopping!”

“It’s not a big deal.”

“Not a big deal? Are you fucking serious right now?”

“Sara.”

“What?”

There was a shuffle of footsteps; Elias was stepping outside to continue the call. “We just replaced the batteries on the Toyota six months ago. And now it needs a new transmission. We can’t keep spending money on repairs, it doesn’t make sense. You said that yourself the other day.”

“That’s fine, but we should discuss it first. You can’t just waltz into the Volvo dealership and pick one. We can’t afford it, Elias. We can’t.” With the word can’t, Sara’s mind flashed to the red-lined box at the bottom of her student loan statement. When they got approved for a mortgage on their apartment, the broker had joked that the deal was held together by bubble gum and shoestrings. Didn’t Elias realize how careful they had to be with money?

“Sure, we can. I got a fantastic deal from Lauren.”

“Who the hell’s Lauren?”

“The saleswoman at Volvo. We went to high school together. Remember that picture of the senior recital? She’s the brunette standing behind me. Anyway, she posted about this incredible deal on Nabe, I messaged her about it, and she gave it to me. I need you to come down, so we can get the title sorted out. And can you bring me my blue jacket? They have the AC on full blast here, it’s getting chilly.”

This impulsiveness was a source of recurring tension between them, even though it was what had drawn Sara to Elias in the first place. She liked that he made decisions quickly, that he didn’t spend hours outlining every possible scenario and its likely consequences, that he didn’t care if he failed or made a fool of himself. The habit of caution was deeply ingrained in her, no doubt because she was raised by a scientist, but compounded, surely, by the simple fact that she was a woman. If she was catcalled or harassed while she was on a run, she took a different route the next day. If a colleague mistook a comment for a come-on, she analyzed what she’d said, trying to figure out what word or turn of phrase might have given him the wrong impression. And after her experience with Nabe, she reread every post, no matter how trivial, before publishing it. To be a woman was to watch yourself not just through your own eyes, but through the eyes of others. Elias, on the other hand, was untethered from any judgment except his own, which she found exotic and irresistible all at once. She tried to quiet the voice inside her that told her Elias didn’t need her—or didn’t need her opinion, at any rate.

So whenever he talked about having a baby, she was reluctant. She could scarcely imagine him compromising on all the big decisions that came with starting a family, from picking a name and finding a pediatrician to choosing a daycare. They had their finances to consider, too; she wasn’t sure they were ready to take on the responsibility of a child. Besides, they were young; they should be enjoying late nights and morning sex and impromptu trips out of the country, not saddling themselves with more responsibility.

But Elias didn’t want to wait. Female fertility starts declining by age thirty, he would say, we have to start trying because it could take us a while. The back-and-forth lasted for six years, during which the subject became increasingly touchy, as likely to end in a fight as in extended periods of wounded silence. When Sara forgot to pack her birth control for a weekend in New Mexico, she wondered if it was not an unconscious form of abdication; she was tired of the protracted disagreements.

The twin pregnancy took them both by surprise. Sara developed morning sickness so acute she couldn’t get out of bed, and on the rare days when she did manage it, spent her time fighting back her nausea. Elias, on the other hand, met the challenge with cheery aplomb; he repainted the guest room, set up the nursery, researched strollers and car seats online. You have enough on your hands, he would tell Sara at night, rubbing her back and helping her readjust the support belt that the obstetrician recommended. How did other women develop pregnancy glow? Sara couldn’t even bear to look at herself in the mirror. Her skin was sallow, her ankles were swollen. Every morning, waddling out of the bedroom into the kitchen, she looked at the Nimble screen above the counter, which listed the days remaining to full term, and smarted at how many she had left. The constant reminders Nimble sent her about her low intake of iron and folic acid only added to her stress. The last month of her pregnancy was pure agony. She couldn’t sleep, couldn’t walk, couldn’t rest until she went into labor. When she saw Mohsin, his head slick with afterbirth and his face tied in a disapproving grimace at the world he was entering, she understood, in a way she never had before, why the procedure was called a delivery. Mona came three minutes later, screaming at the top of her lungs as soon as the doctor eased her out of the womb.

If one baby was a miracle, two were a revelation. Nothing could have prepared Sara for how much her life would change after the birth of the twins. The sheer impossibility of soothing one baby while the other was screaming. The crushing guilt of it, too, for how could she ignore a crying baby? As if aware of how long he had waited for them, and how much he had wanted them, the twins soothed easily when Elias was in charge, falling asleep in his arms within minutes. But not with her. These tiny creatures depended on her, and yet she couldn’t feed, burp, change, and put them back to sleep without making at least five mistakes along the way.

Time was no longer something she had in abundance, to spend as she saw fit, but a precious commodity that needed to be parceled out carefully. Something as ordinary as a meal or a shower required planning, deployment, and execution with military precision. Like a recruit at bugle call, she met each day with a mix of terror and resignation.

She pulled out her phone again. Though the cracked screen distorted the numbers, she saw that fifty minutes had passed; they wouldn’t make it to Mimi’s now. She was famished, and wished she hadn’t slept through the breakfast service on the plane.

Across the desk, meanwhile, Officer Moss was sipping his coffee peacefully.

“Did you just start your shift?” she asked, more out of boredom than interest.

“Uh-huh. It’s my last day on rotation this week.”

“That must be nice.”

“Got any plans this weekend?”

The casualness of this question irritated Sara. Of course she had plans—eating a leisurely lunch with Elias, taking a long shower when she got home, playing with Mohsin and Mona, reading to them before bed—plans that this officer and his colleague at the RAA were disrupting. Her irritation quickly boiled to anger. “Is there a supervisor I could speak with?”

“A supervisor? What for?”

“I’ve been here over an hour,” she said. “The other officer was about to stamp my passport when he was called away. I really don’t understand the reason for this delay.”

“It’s not gonna take much longer. It’s just procedure.”

“Procedure because my name is Hussein?”

“Ma’am. We’re all professionals here.”

“Then why don’t you stamp my passport?”

“I don’t review risk reports.”

“I thought you said you were a professional.”

Moss didn’t speak to her after that. Once he finished his coffee, he started texting on his phone, occasionally smiling at his screen. When a teenager with an oversized scarf around his neck was brought into the waiting room, Moss repositioned his chair so that he could keep both the teenager and Sara in his line of sight. What did he think she was going to do? Make a run for it? It was all so ridiculous. She tried texting her husband yet again, but there was no use.

Elias was probably trying to keep the twins entertained while he waited for her at Arrivals. She felt bad about the lengthy delay. She had spent four days in London on her employer’s dime, had gone to the Tate Modern and the V she was expected to be quiet and docile in her encounter with officers, no matter what they said or did. This realization renewed the pressure she felt to defuse the situation, a pressure that only worsened her anxiety.

“Ms. Hussein, it doesn’t help your case when you make a false statement to law enforcement.”

“What false statement?”

“Your employer didn’t pay for your airfare.”

“Oh,” she said, realizing as soon as the word left her lips that the camera must have recorded her shock. “Well, I can explain that. The Getty doesn’t give us expense cards for conferences. I have to charge the plane ticket to my personal Amex and then file for reimbursement. But I can’t get reimbursed until next week because the office is closed during Christmas. I can assure you that the museum is paying for this trip. They’ve paid for all my previous conferences.”

A long moment passed, during which the only sound was the clicking of the mouse. Sara felt beads of sweat traveling down her back; the smell was impossible to disguise now. She wondered who was watching at the other end, parsing her facial expressions for signs of deceit. “Are you seriously considering that a false statement?”

“The algorithm considers everything. I told you that already.”

“I did not make a false statement. It was just a manner of speaking. The museum is paying for this trip as soon as I give them my receipts.”

He shushed her, then leaned closer to the screen. This behavior baffled Sara. Had she miscalculated when she gave candid answers to all his questions? She should’ve been more careful, she realized with mounting horror. Now it was too late; he was using her words against her. A moment later, Segura turned to her again, his face full of concern.