There is a door in this house that has one job, and its job is to be open enough. Not open all the way — I have never asked for that, I am not unreasonable — just open the width of a paw, the width it has always been open, so that I can come and go as the situation requires while she is in there doing whatever it is she does with all that running water. This morning the door was shut. All the way shut. The latch had gone into the little hole in the frame with a click I have heard maybe four times in my whole life, and every one of those times has meant something was wrong.
I sat outside it for a while just absorbing the insult. Then I put a paw against the bottom of it, low, where the gap usually is, and there was no gap. There was wood. There was wood going all the way down to the floor in a way that felt, frankly, aggressive.
I could hear the water start. That part was normal — the pipe knock, then the hiss, then the particular rushing sound the water makes once it finds its rhythm and settles into it. I have heard this sound a hundred mornings from the other side of a door that let me sit on the cold tile and watch her feet through the gap at the bottom of the curtain. That is the arrangement. That is how it has always worked. I supervise. I am not in the way, I am not underfoot, I am simply present, the way I am present for most important things in this house, and this morning I was informed, without a single word being spoken to me, that my presence was not required.
I sat with my nose against the crack where the door meets the frame. There is a smell that comes through even a shut door if you try hard enough, something warm and a little sweet, plasticky in a good way, and under it the plain mineral smell of the water itself. I could smell the shower running and could not see one inch of it happening, and this seemed, the longer I thought about it, like exactly the kind of thing that would only be done to keep something from me on purpose.
I tried the door itself. I stood up on my back legs, which I do not enjoy doing because it makes me feel less substantial than I am, and put both front paws against the flat of it and pushed. It did not move even slightly. Doors that are properly shut do not move slightly no matter how much weight you put behind the pushing, a fact I already knew from other doors in other rooms, but I felt I owed it a real effort before accepting defeat, so I did it twice.
Then I lay down against the door instead, which is a different kind of protest, a quieter one. If I could not get in, I would at least make sure that when she came out she would have to open the door directly into me, so that my objection would be the very first thing she encountered. I put my chin down on the tile, which was cold in the specific way tile gets when there is hot water running somewhere close by and none of that heat has reached the floor yet, and I listened to the water change pitch every so often, the way it does when a body moves through it and interrupts the fall for a second before it starts again.
At some point the water stopped being the only sound. There was a squeak of something rubber, and a thump, low, that I recognized eventually as a foot going down. Then quiet, the kind of quiet that is actually full of small movements you can’t quite place — fabric, a soft slap of something wet being folded, the little scrape of a bottle cap.
I want it on record that I did not move from the door the entire time. Whatever I was doing out there, waiting, sulking, conducting the vigil, I did it without leaving my post even once, even when the vent fan came on overhead and made a sound I don’t especially care for.
When the door finally opened it did not open outward into me the way I had planned. It opened inward, which meant I had to scramble backward out of the way, undoing in half a second the entire strategic position I had spent that whole stretch of time building. Steam came out first, ahead of her, a whole wall of it, warmer and wetter than any air I get to walk through under ordinary circumstances, carrying that sweet plasticky smell at full strength now, mixed with something clean and slightly sharp underneath it. It rolled out over my head and past me down the hall like it had somewhere else to be.
She was wrapped in the towel, the big one, not the tea-colored one from the drawer, and her hair was flat and dark and dripping in a way that changes how her whole head looks for a while afterward. She looked down and said something to me in the voice she uses when she already knows she’s done something that will require an apology, though the words themselves didn’t matter much to me at that point.
I went straight past her ankles first, the way I always do, checking that the smell underneath the shower smell was still the right one, and it was, faintly, holding on under all that steam and soap the way it always manages to. Satisfied on that point, I walked into the bathroom itself, into the warm wet air, and stood in the middle of the wet tile for a moment just to prove that I could, now, if I wanted, though there was frankly nothing left in there worth investigating. The mirror was fogged completely white. A puddle had collected near the drain that I had no interest in stepping through. The whole room smelled used up already, all its good smells spent.
I came back out and sat by her feet while she stood at the sink working the fog off the mirror with the side of her fist in long streaks, and I kept half an eye on the open door the entire time, in case anyone got any ideas about closing it again before I was ready.