Steamed

that he was leaving to finish the call somewhere else. He headed toward a corridor at the back of the restaurant.
    Cassie brought me a cappuccino, which was delicious. Nothing can kill a good meal like a finale of bad coffee. I can never understand why some places serve the worst coffee. How hard can it be to buy a good bean and brew a pot? Okay, myself not included. But if I owned a restaurant, I’d buy a coffeemaker that worked.
    When I’d finished the cappuccino, Eric still hadn’t returned, and I was itching for the crème brûlée. Unfortunately for me, my mother’s training prevented me from ordering while Eric was gone. I looked into the kitchen to see whether Eric had invited himself into the heart of the restaurant to pester poor Garrett. I didn’t see my date and practically threw my hands up in exasperation at the evening’s events. Two cappuccinos later, I said to hell with manners and ordered dessert from Cassie.
    “Have you seen Eric?” I asked her. “He left to finish a call on his cell phone and hasn’t come back.”
    She shook her head but promised to look for him. She wasn’t worried that he’d skipped out; as a guest of the restaurant, he’d hardly have run off to avoid paying a nonexistent bill. I wasn’t worried, either; I was annoyed and insulted. If my date could disappear, I decided, I could do exactly the same thing. It could take me a long, long time to touch up my makeup and fuss with my hair; it could take me long enough for Eric to return to the table, find me gone, and sit there all alone wondering where I was. My crème brûlée would have to wait.
    Essence was not, of course, the sort of restaurant with large, garish signs pointing to the restrooms. Looking around, I couldn’t find so much as a small, tasteful arrow and had to ask Cassie for directions. “Down that little corridor at the back,” she said. “Ladies is the first door on your left. If someone’s in there, use the men’s room. Everyone does. It’s the next door.”
    After making my way around a few tables, I entered the narrow corridor, which led to a door prominently marked Exit. The first door on the left showed a stylish sketch of a figure with long hair and a skirt. The door was locked. I took Cassie’s advice and pushed open the second door, the one with a matching sketch of a debonair figure in a coat and tails. Although the door was unlocked, the men’s room was occupied.
    Sprawled on his stomach on the slate floor was a tall man with curly dirty-blond hair. His legs were bent awkwardly, and one arm was stretched out at a painful-looking angle. The man, however, was beyond pain. His head lay in a pool of blood. The blood led away from the blond curls and toward two objects that lay on the tile. One was a mobile phone. The other was a knife with a black handle and a long, thin, curved, and bloody blade.
    I had found Eric.
     

FIVE
     
    I stood under the fluorescent lights in the men’s room for a good two or three minutes while I tried to take in what I was looking at. I couldn’t look away from the repulsive wound in Eric’s neck. The skin was split open, the cut long and somehow clean despite the bright red, glistening blood. I could feel my heart pound and my whole body shiver, but I just couldn’t move. It felt impossible that Eric, who had just been critiquing food and yelling on his cell phone, was lying here on the floor, dead. I suppose I should have dropped down to the tiles to begin some sort of lifesaving attempt. As it was, I was frozen, in part, I suspect, because no one could have survived that dreadful wound. Also, the thought of stepping into the pool of blood churned my full stomach.
    I had visions from the first-aid class I’d taken when I was working as a toddler teacher in a day care center. I knew we had covered CPR, but the only thing I could remember was what to do if a child had the misfortune to get a pencil stuck in an eye. I remembered that one should not to try to pull the pencil out of the eyeball, but rather should tape a Dixie cup over the protruding object. I had raised a question: since most pencils are much taller than Dixie cups, shouldn’t we stockpile some tall, latte-style cups for such occurences? There had been a memorable photograph of some poor child model forced to demonstrate what a Dixie cup taped over the eye looked like, a photo that had sent my fellow teachers and me into gales of laughter. Not helpful here.
    I also remembered that should