Broken Glass
Dix put on her sourest face and stood behind the young couple hovering over the hospital bed. "Out," she said sharply, and pointed at the door.
"Awwwwww! Come on, we just got here, can't-"
"Visiting hours were over an hour ago, and the patient is exhausted, and so am I! Now, get out!"
The woman sighed and kissed the bedraggled man in the bed on the forehead. "Her majesty is putting us out now."
"Out!"
"Some people! Come on, we know when we're not wanted!"
Dix just stared at the pair until they left the room. Then she stretched and yawned and turned back to her patient with bleary eyes. "You still awake there?"
"Sure, Dix. Thanks for rescuing me. I miss JoAnn, but I don't think I want her to get that snuggly with me again for a while. And I'm not even gonna talk about Johnny..."
"What rescue, Roy? Visiting hours really were over an hour ago! I wanna get the hell out of here!"
Roy smiled weakly. "So what are you still doing here?"
"Oh, I figured I'd join the parade of well wishers before I head on home. I'm sure you're sick of all of us by now, but I couldn't help myself."
"Oh, I don't mind the visits, if they come with painkillers."
Dix frowned and checked his drip. "You still in a lot of pain?"
"The sky fell on my head, Dixie, and Johnny's been in my face for the last three hours. Yeah, I'm in a lot of pain."
Dix smirked and checked his chart. "Hang on, I'll get an approval to up your dosage." She picked up the phone and paged for help. When she turned back to him, all pretense of happiness at another visitor was gone - his face was tight with pain, mouth set into a grim line, nostrils flared. "Hey," Dix said. "Tell me where it hurts."
"Easier to tell you where it doesn't hurt." A lone tear trailed down his cheek, but he didn't seem to notice. "I tell ya one thing, Dix. I'm happy to be alive, but... I'm not so sure I'm happy to be awake yet. Not if it means feeling this kind of pain."
Dix pulled up a chair and took Roy's trembling hand. He gripped back, hard. She winced, but she let him hold on. "Sometimes it really hurts to be a hero, doesn't it?"
He surprised her with a laugh. "That's one good thing about this," he said.
"What is?"
"That the Cap's gonna be alright." He stopped and grit his teeth for a minute, and squeezed Dix's hand hard enough to make her hiss. "'M sorry," he gritted out, and started to take his hand away.
"No, no," Dixie said, and grabbed at his hand. "You go ahead and squeeze. I can take it."
"You wanna play the hero now?" But he squeezed her hand again, even harder.
"If you can take a whole ceiling, I can take a handshake," she said, even though her voice was tight with pain.
"You should go to the station when he's back on duty," Roy said. "Stand on his feet or something, make him be your hero. Then the circle will be complete."
"I would if I knew where to find him," Dix said, only half joking.
"Huh? What do you mean, if you knew where to find him?"
Dix used her free hand to dab at the sweat pooling over Roy's furrowed eyebrows. "Never mind that." She looked up as the door swung open, and Mike Morton came in. "Look, Dr. Morton is here, he'll give you something for the pain."
"Dix, what do you mean if you knew where to find the Cap? You know how to get to the station..."
Morton frowned and looked from Dix to Roy. "Settle down there, Roy. Dix, I thought you said you were going home."
"I am going home, right now. I just wanted to say hi to Roy. Hi, Roy. Bye, Roy."
"Wait, Dixie..." Roy's voice trailed off as Dr. Morton began to fiddle with the drip bag, and Dix let herself out of the room with a heavy sigh. She plucked her paper cap off her head and shuffled over to the elevator, as the weight of the week's events settled heavily on her shoulders.
She made her way to the locker room, and changed into her street clothes amidst a bevy of cackling ladies. Most of the nurses in the room with her were strangers to her, ladies she knew only by face, and then only in uniform. She seriously doubted she'd know any of the women from pediatrics or nephrology if she ran into them in the supermarket. They all seemed to know each other, though, and it struck her how very separate she was from most of the nurses at Rampart. Only the nurses who made their way through the emergency ward, and a couple of other head nurses on various floors, ever really made more than a fleeting impression on Dixie. And even then, off the clock, she didn't seem to have anything to say to any of them, nor they to her.
None of this had ever bothered Dixie before, so she didn't know why the hell it was bothering her so much now. But she sat on a bench with one shoe on, a half buttoned blouse, and pantyhose bunched in her hands, listening to a bunch of strange women planning their Friday night together, and wished for just a minute that she had someone to talk to.
"Good night, Dixie," one of the ladies called, and a few more voices echoed the friendly words. The voices were kind. They belonged to nurses, people who made it their lives' work to care for people in pain. If Dix asked them to, she probably would have been included in their night out.
But she couldn't even pull it together enough to say good night before she heard the locker room door squeak open on its rusty hinges. "Night, ladies," she said to the empty locker room.
She emerged from the locker room a few minutes later, and made her way through the quiet back halls of the main hospital, until she landed in the main corridor by the base station. Things were a little busier here, though only a little. It was late, and the good people of South L.A. County hadn't quite gotten themselves busted up enough to come charging into the emergency room yet.
Dix smiled and nodded at people as she made her way to the doors. A flustered young woman with an upside down name badge nearly bowled her over in her rush to get to the admissions desk. Dixie caught the girl and steadied them both against the wall. "Hey, take it easy! Don't wind up one of the patients!"
"Oh, but I will if I don't figure out where these files go! Half the administration is gonna kill me!"
"Relax, uh, Ms. Coltwell." Dix turned her head, trying to read the name. "You're upside down, honey."
"Shit." Then the girl clapped her hands (and a manilla folder full of papers) over her mouth. "Oh, please, excuse me, Ma'am. I-"
"It's alright. If you knew how many f-bombs I drop when the patients aren't looking..." Dixie smiled at Ms. Coltwell.
"...do you work here?"
Dix's smile faltered. "Uh, yeah."
"Are you in admissions too?"
"I'm the head nurse."
Ms. Coltwell wrinkled her forehead. "I thought Ms. Davies was the head nurse."
"She's in charge at night. I'm her boss."
Ms. Coldwell blanched. "You're Ms. McCall," she said flatly.
"Is that a bad thing?"
The girl shook her head quickly, then looked at the files in her hands. "Uh..."
"Do you know where they need to go?"
"Something about the department head? I don't know what that means, though! The only thing I know for sure is, quote, NOT MS. MCCALL. Unquote."
Dix laughed a little. "My bark is bigger than my bite. The head of Emergency is Dr. Brackett," she said, and gestured towards Kel's office.
"Oh. Can... can I go in there? I mean, I don't think anyone is in there right now, and I thought...."
"Give it here." Dix snatched the folders from Ms. Coltwell and marched up to Kel's door. She gave a courtesy knock, though she was sure that at that hour he wouldn't be around, and tried the knob. The door was unlocked, as she knew it would be - there was nothing in his office that was so precious it needed to be locked away, not with a security guard always a few feet away in the lobby. Dix went on in, plopped the file on the blotter in front of Kel's chair, and paused.
There, on the edge of his desk, sat the apple she'd bought him earlier that afternoon. There was a single bite taken from it. "Oh, Kelly," she whispered, and took the apple. She wiped down the mottled ring of condensation it had left on the wood, and walked slowly back out to the lobby.
"Everything okay?" Ms. Coltwell asked, while trying to peek into the office as the door clicked shut. Dixie had no time left for the girl's silliness. She waved her off and left the building, turning the abandoned apple in her hands.
The parking lot seemed to stretch on into infinity. She passed car after car on the long trek to the back of the staff only lot, where she'd parked a thousand years ago, a million miles away. Kel's abandoned apple was getting hot, and Dix's clutching fingers were making soft grooves in the once crisp flesh. It would be an oozing mess if she ever made it to her car. But if it disintegtrated in her hand, then she wouldn't have to confront Kelly with it. It wouldn't exist, and then she couldn't prove he'd pushed it away in favor of... what? What the hell was eating at him?
She stopped short, amazed at her sluggish reflexes, and back tracked three parking spots to her waiting car. "Get your head straight, girl," she growled under her breath, then yanked open the car door, and flopped down behind the wheel. She let her bag and coat slide off the bench, down to the floorboard beside her. The apple rolled out of her limp hand and settled into the crack between the seat and the door. She sat that way for a long, long time, with one foot hanging out of the car, the other hand stretched limply across the seat, and listened to the dull roar of traffic from the street.
After some silent cajoling, she pulled herself together and began to drive. But instead of turning left out of the lot, towards home, she headed right, to the East, to the Harbor Freeway. A few miles from the northern end of the Harbor, all the L.A. freeways flowered into a mass of cloverleaf connections, one of which ought to deposit her in Kelly's backyard. She'd only been to his pretty little house a handful of times, before both the distance and Stanford's coolness kept her in her own neighborhood. She wasn't terribly sure she recalled the way there, but the car seemed to move under its own power towards the quiet pocket of houses that dotted the glitz and grit of Hollywood.
She never understood why Kel had to live clear across town just to please some snooty, snobbish man. She'd never understood why anyone had to change their lives around just to suit the whim of whomever it was they were fucking at the moment; of course that was probably why Kel'd had an anniversary to celebrate last Saturday night, while Dixie had spent what little of that evening she'd gotten to herself with a half dead houseplant. But it also made it hard for Kel's network of friends to get to him in a hurry if he needed it, and Dix was pretty damned sure Kel needed it.
As if the freeway had been reading her mind, the cars on the exchange slowed to a crawl, trapping Dix in the underbelly of one of those precious cloverleafs. The trip into downtown had been quick, but, apparently, the 101 was a parking lot. "Well, that's just great." She gripped the steering wheel with both hands, as if the car's thrumming power would pass through the wheel and give her strength.
Whether or not the car strengthened her was questionable, but what it definitely didn't do was make the slow trickle onto the freeway any faster. Brakelights could be seen for miles ahead, all the way up the bend, close to the Hollywood Bowl. "No way." She bullied her way to the right, and got off at the first opportunity.
She was on semi-familiar ground - the streets up here were just a series of grids, so long as she stayed away from the madness of Los Feliz or Alverado Street. The streets were almost as crowded as the freeway had been, but this she found infinitely more tolerable, as there were streetlights and pedestrians and flashy billboards to contend with. She eeked her way down Sunset, until she began to recognize certain pizza shops and tattoo parlors, landmarks that Kel had given her in his first set of directions to his home.
She rounded the last corner and scowled. Kel's car was not in its usual spot in the driveway, though the back of Stan's fire engine red sports coupe could just be seen through the hedges by the front of the house. "Great," she muttered. She'd come all this way to check on Kel, and he hadn't even made it home. "Probably stuck on the damned freeway." She had a sudden flash of him wrecked out on the side, a victim of his own stubbornness and fallen blood sugar, but she shook the thought out of her head. No point in indulging in such silly fantasy - he might be out picking up dinner or something. "Anyway, that'll teach me to not call ahead..."
She pulled into the driveway so she could turn around, but as her headlights flashed over the house, she gasped and threw the car in park, half in the street. Every single window that faced the street was smashed all to hell. The front door was wide open, revealing what looked like a terrible mess in the usually pristine front room. A long strip of yellow tape flapped from the door where it was still attached to the frame - caution tape, like the kind the cops use in a pending murder investigation. But what really stole Dixie's breath away was the graffitti scrawled across the once pristine buttercream walls in big red letters: BOYFUCKER.
Dixie swallowed down a cry and forced herself to step out of the car. What in God's name had happened here?
"Hi."
Dix jumped and shrieked a little at the voice by her shoulder. A thin young woman stood next to her, smiling faintly at the house. "Oh," Dix said breathlessly. "Hello."
"Sorry." The girl seemed to be watching the house with hunger, like it was feast all laid out for the taking. Dix found the girl's obvious enrapture almost as disturbing as the state of the house itself. "Sorry," the girl repeated, then turned to give Dix her full attention. "Did you know them?"
"Know?" Dix couldn't keep the tremor out of her voice. She wished the girl would go back to staring at the house, instead of trying to peer into her soul.
The girl nodded. "Uh huh. The bachelors," she said with far more drama than Dix thought was strictly necessary.
"I... yes. Well, sort of. I work with one of them."
"Oh yeah? He been to work lately?"
Dix frowned at the girl. "Why?"
She shrugged. "Oh, I haven't seen either of them since Saturday night."
"Saturday night." Kel's anniversary. "Is... is that when all... this happened?" Dix waved her hand at the mess of Kelly's once perfect house.
The girl shrugged a bony shoulder, and absently tugged at a fallen bra strap. "Not all of it. I'm pretty sure the signage under the wall wasn't there this weekend." She looked at the house with the same salivating wonder. "It's been added to, the vandalism. Amazing, the kind of beauty you can find in even the most hateful things..."
Dix's mouth dropped open. "Beauty?"
The girl looked at her with wide, innocent eyes. "Oh, it's horrible, isn't it? How people can treat their neighbors?" Then she turned back to the house with a faraway smile. "But, at the same time, if you take the human equation out of it, and just look at the house as a structure, a commentary on the changing times... it's really a beautiful work of art."
The house had been pretty enough, certainly, but Dix was positive no one in their right mind would ever call the shattered carcass in front of them beautiful. "You said not all of this happened Saturday night. Do you know what did happen?"
The girl shook her head dismissively. "Nah. I wasn't here when it all went down, but from what I've heard my brother and boyfriend say... I guess it all blew up sky high." She shrugged. "I guess Granny was right - always gotta watch the quiet ones."
"Well now hang on a minute," Dix choked out. "Watch the quiet ones for what?"
The girl looked at the house in silence for a while. "I don't really know... no one will tell me. My father says it's not polite conversation to have in front of the ladies." She leaned closer to Dix and took hold of her arm, like they were dear old confidantes. "He'd probably die if he knew what my Women's Studies instructor said to us last week." She patted Dixie's arm. "Have a beautiful night, sister." Then she floated past Dix down the street, until she disappeared into the inky black night.
When Dix returned her attention to the ruined house, she found that she just didn't have the strength to get any closer. With the windows busted and the front of the house throughly branded, there was no reason to venture inside, or to wait for Kelly to return. Strange as the girl had been, Dix knew she'd been telling the truth about Kel not being seen here for a week. He wouldn't come back to this.
Heartsore and worried for her friend, Dixie returned to her car and pulled away from the wreckage, and tried not to cry the whole way back down to her apartment.