Between the Bath and the Vanity

The carpet received Beatrix's bare feet with the soft, familiar warmth of a house that did not know what she had been doing. The hallway smelled of lavender and timber polish. The light through the windows was the light of a Saturday morning in a Tasmanian suburb — domestic, unremarkable, operating under the assumption that the woman walking through it had slept in her own bed the previous night and had not, in the intervening hours, transited to another dimension, been attacked by a predator, sat on a kitchen floor waiting for dawn, dragged a kayak through alien dust, held a grieving man by a river, learned that a murdered dog had been killed by a human with a blade, and accepted custody of the body when its owner was forced to choose between the dead and the missing.

Duke was in her arms. The bedsheet Jamie had wrapped him in was stained with blood that had dried to the colour of rust, and the bundle was light in the way that absence is always lighter than presence — the weight of a body without the resistance of a living thing pushing back against the hold. Beatrix had carried him through the Portal and into her bedroom and was now attempting to reach the bathroom, because the grime of two worlds was layered on her skin and because the shower was the only ritual available that might create the sensation of a boundary between what she had just done and what she was about to be asked to explain.

Her mother's voice arrived from the stairwell with the timing that only mothers possess. The creak of the stairs announced an approach that operated on its own schedule, unhurried and certain, and Beatrix's body responded to the sound with a panic whose intensity was disproportionate to the stimulus and entirely appropriate to the circumstances. She was standing in a hallway holding a dead dog wrapped in a bloody sheet. The woman climbing the stairs did not know that Clivilius existed, did not know that her daughter possessed a Portal Key, did not know that the red dress had been worn through a police confrontation and a dimensional transit, and could not be permitted to discover any of this through the evidence currently cradled against Beatrix's chest.

The bathroom door opened on an elbow strike that left a bruise on bone. Beatrix wedged herself through with Duke's body pressed to her ribs, kicked the door shut, and slid to the floor with her back against it as the lock clicked into the only position that mattered. The shower went on — cold first, then scalding — and the sound filled the room with a noise that functioned as camouflage for the ragged breathing of a woman who had just hidden a corpse from her own mother in the gap between the bathtub and the vanity unit.

The knock came anyway. Concern filtered through the door in the particular frequency of a parent who suspects something is wrong but has not yet determined what category of wrong it belongs to. Beatrix performed normality from the bathroom floor — a single "yeah" calibrated to sound casual, a "sure thing, Mum" delivered with enough warmth to discourage further inquiry. Her mother's request carried a weight that had nothing to do with Clivilius or shadow panthers or Portal Pirates: she and Beatrix's father needed to speak with her about something important. The phrase landed in the bathroom like a stone dropped into water that was already disturbed, its implications rippling outward into a space that had no remaining capacity for additional crisis.

Duke lay in the shadows behind the washing basket, wrapped in a sheet whose stains would require explanation if anyone opened the door. The shower ran. The steam rose. And Beatrix sat on tiles for the second time in twelve hours. The two settings shared nothing except the woman sitting on the floor and the fact that in both cases, the door between Beatrix and the world beyond it was the only architecture keeping the incompatible halves of her life from colliding.