The first disaster came at twenty minutes to five, and it came, as disasters in hotels do, through the service door.
A beverage delivery was being brought in for the reception — cases of bottled water, cases of wine, stacked on a hand truck by a young porter who had been told three times to hurry and had finally believed it. The truck's wheel caught the raised brass threshold at the corridor's turn. The top case went. Then the one beneath it went, in sympathy, the way tall stacks do.
Carmen heard it before she saw it: that bright, cascading arithmetic of glass. She came around the corner with her cart and stopped.
Red wine and broken bottles from wall to wall. A lake of it, dark as a bruise, spreading with purpose across the corridor tiles toward the ballroom kitchen doors, carrying shards the way a river carries ice. The porter stood in the middle of it holding the empty hand truck like a man holding a door he has just torn off its hinges.
"Oh," he said. "Oh, no. Oh, no no no —"
"Breathe," Carmen said. "Then get me the big dustpan from the closet and every towel in the bin by the dock. Not the good towels. Move."
She was nearest, and there was no one else: Petra was on the sixth floor with a missing steamer, the day girls had gone at four, and the wine was traveling. She laid towels down as dams. She swept glass — armfuls of it, glittering, treacherous — into the dustpan with the hand brush, working backward out of the flood so she would not track it. The porter, to his credit, stayed and lifted and fetched and said nothing stupid. Twice the wine found her shoes. Once a shard stood up through the sole of the mop's sponge and she pulled it out with her fingers and kept going.
It took thirty-five minutes. Her uniform smelled of a vineyard fire. The porter signed for his remaining cases at the dock with a hand that shook, and went, and she stood alone in the shining corridor wringing the last towel into the bucket when the door at the far end banged and a bridesmaid — twenty-two, lilac silk, hair in architectural curls — came through it at a run.
"Are you — please, is there a — the little girl. The flower girl. She's being sick in the ladies' room, the one by the lobby, and her mother's in the photographs and her aunt's having — please. There's no one."
"Go back to her," Carmen said. "Tell her help is coming. Then find her mother, photographs or not."
The ladies' lobby restroom was all marble and mirrors and a row of brass taps that cost more than Carmen's first car, and in the middle of it, on the floor beside a toilet with the stall door swinging, sat a child of about six in a white dress with a sash the color of lilacs, being sick with the whole of her small body while her aunt — thirty, in a gown the same lilac, kneeling in it regardless — held a wad of tissues and wept quietly from sheer helplessness.
"Oh, thank God," the aunt said. "Oh — she's — I don't — she had the shrimp at lunch, or the heat, or —"
"Heat and excitement and a tight sash will do it." Carmen was already kneeling, unmindful of the marble, of the floor, of anything but the child. "Sweetheart. I'm Carmen. I'm going to hold your hair, and you're going to let it all come up, and that's the end of it. There's no trouble here. Nobody is in trouble."
The child's name was Willa. She was sick twice more, thoroughly, miserably, into the bowl Carmen guided her to, while Carmen held the dark hair back with one hand and kept the other flat and steady between the small shoulder blades, and talked — about nothing, about the roses in the hall, about how the dress would be perfectly fine, about how she herself had once been sick at a wedding, on a much worse dress, in front of a much bigger audience. The aunt laughed through her tears, once, like a person surfacing.
When it was done, Carmen wiped the child's face with a cloth run under cold water, and rinsed her mouth, and set her on the marble step by the sinks with the cloth folded on the back of her neck. Willa leaned against her side with the exhausted trust of a small animal and was asleep, or near it, in under a minute.
"Stay till her mother comes?" the aunt asked. "I have to — the receiving line — I shouldn't have left her at all, I—"
"Go," Carmen said. "She's safe. Send her mother when the photographs let her go."