Broken Glass
Kel awoke in a sunlit room, sprawled out on his belly, with a crook in his back, and one leg dragging the floor. He scowled in confusion as he peeled open sleep-crusted eyelids - the window in his hotel room faced west, a small blessing he'd grown to appreciate each morning as he fought with the thunder in his head and the churning sea in his belly. The only reason for his room to be so completely bright was because he'd slept literally the whole day away, so that school children were out roaming the streets on their fancy little bikes and roller skates, having already changed into their play clothes for the day.
He smelled soap, and heard the faint roar of a shower. Strange - the water pressure was a joke in this hotel. He could barely hear his own shower. Why in the world would he be able to hear someone else's shower?
He tried to roll onto his back, and was confused by the layer of pillows all lined up in a row next to him, like he'd tried to make a tiny pillow fort. He snatched one up and tossed it to the floor with a grunt, and then stared at it. Bright yellow, just like the sun, like Treatment Room 3, like the long flowing hair on his head nurse.
Oh yeah.
He twisted gingerly, until he was in a mostly upright position on the couch, and tried to drag the offending cushion closer to himself with his bare foot, but he only wound up nudging it further away. He gave up with a sigh, and looked around the bright, cheery living room. It was comfortable in a way that none of his hotel rooms had been, in a way that neither the front seat of his car, or the leather chair behind his heavy wood desk at Rampart had been. It was almost like being in his own bedroom again.
He jumped up and ran to the kitchenette, jammed at the switches on the short wall on the working side of the breakfast bar, yanked at the knobs on the faucet, and gagged into the running garbage disposal. The only thing more vile than brandy-and-bile soaked egg was the sense memory of a perfect comfort perfectly ruined, and the act of forgiveness he found himself half-talked into. And so, rather than contemplate how he planned on getting from Dixie's soulful, sheltering company, to the morally cleansing task he'd set for himself, he watched last night's dinner flow with alarming volume down the grinding drain.
"Do you hear me, Kel Bra- oh... honey." A moment later, water droplets marked a trail across his hot back, and a dripping wet hand came to rest on the back of his neck. "What am I gonna do with you, huh?"
His only answer was to be sick again, repeatedly, until fully spent.
Dix pulled away with a sigh, and wormed around him to the inner sanctum of her tiny kitchen. He could hear her knocking about in the cabinets, and caught the odd glow of the refrigerator light as she began working on breakfast. Just the thought of being stuffed with more food made him gag. But then her damp hand was on his forehead, and he found himself being pulled gently away from the sink. "Here. I'm pretty sure you're on E about now. " She held a glass up to his mouth, but she allowed him the dignity of taking it from her rather than tipping into his mouth herself. "Don't chug. And for heaven's sake, if you hear the shower going, use the trash can next time, please." He started first at the cold sugary sweetness of what he thought was going to be water, and then at the sight of Dixie McCall in her very wet, very soapy birthday suit. She acted like she didn't even notice her nakedness. "You gonna be okay, now?"
He turned away from her and poured the ginger ale down the sink. He pretended not to hear her truncated protest, or her long suffering sigh. "I can handle myself, Dix. This is one of those things most people figure out without ever coming to see us professionals, you know." He winced. "Sorry. I don't mean to sound ungrateful."
She looked pointedly at the empty cup in his hand, but she didn't comment on it. "Yeah, well, fortunately I wasn't expecting a whole lot of gratitude - you are a doctor, after all. World's worst patients and all that."
He smiled halfheartedly. "Go rinse off and dry off, before you catch your death."
"Hmph. No chance of that - if I die, it'll be due to infection from second degree burns." He looked at her in horror. She dropped the wicked grin spreading across her face, and shook her head quickly. "I'm kidding, Kel, I'm fine. It was just a surprise, that's all." She turned around, and showed him her pink, but healthy back. "See? I'm fine." She looked back with a sweeter smile. "Now stay away from my faucet until I'm out of the shower."
"Yes ma'am." He was done anyway. The shock of reconciling with a life he'd thought lost was gone, and all he was left with was the quiet dread of doing the right thing by a man who'd done him nothing but wrong. He didn't relish the task ahead, but he no longer found that he couldn't live inside his own skin. Maybe sending Stanford on his way would give him the closure he hadn't found in other people's beds.
Dixie reemerged from the bathroom, properly dried and covered. "Still hanging on in there," she called as she disappeared into her bedroom.
"Still hanging on," he called back. "Actually, listen." He went and stood by her ajar bedroom door, and kept his eyes on the door knob, and off her reflection in the full length mirror he could see in the crack in the door. "I'm gonna head on out, get a change of clothes. I'll see you at Rampart."
"Nope," she said sharply, and yanked her door open. "Come on, sit down. Sit, sit," she said sharply, and grabbed his wrist in both hands. She yanked him into the bedroom, and shoved him down on the edge of her bed. "And quit pretending to be so modest and uncomfortable, Kel, it's just a body, you see them all the time."
"When they're sick or hurt, Dix. And I don't usually know the people living inside those bodies all that well when I do see them."
"Oh, give me a break. If I collapsed right now from a heart attack, you'd rip off my shirt and give me CPR until the fire department showed up with a defibrillator." She covered her decidedly shirt free chest with one of those latex torture devices that made her full, heavy breasts sit up at rapt attention, and yanked it all around until everything sat exactly the way it always did under her uniform. "You're just putting on airs because I'm your non-sexual friend, and you can see all my sexual bits. Relax, it's just like being in a locker room."
"They don't let your kind in my locker rooms and vice versa, Dix!"
She chuckled low. "They would if they knew what our kind really was, though, wouldn't they?"
Kel rolled his eyes. "Listen, you keep your dirty habits to yourself, and I'll keep mine to myself."
She snorted. "You wouldn't know what a dirty habit was if it slammed you against a wall and tried to stick its tongue in your ear."
"Wouldn't I?"
She paused and looked at him sorrowfully. "Oh. I didn't mean... I'm sorry."
He shrugged and looked away. There was nothing more to say. "I'd better get going-"
"No," she said, and pressed her hand to his shoulder. "Stay with me."
"But I need a shower, and a change of clothes. I smell like an old wino, Dix."
She laughed. "Yes, and you'll get all of that. But I want to go with you, so you don't have to lug all your stuff to your car by yourself."
He looked at her suspiciously. "What do you mean?"
"What do you mean, what do I mean? Come on, Kel. How much are you spending every night out there? Ten, fifteen bucks a night? That's three hundred bucks a month, if you're lucky. And I know you're not staying any place that offers complementary drinks, because you'd have told us all about it by now, so you're paying for your booze, too. You've got to be flushing half your paycheck down the drain - and for what? Because your pride won't let you stay with a friend? Bullshit."
"So... you're going to ride with me to my hotel room and watch me shower?"
"So I'm going to help you drag your junk into which ever car we take to your room, and we'll go into Rampart together, and we'll come back here together at the end of the day, where at least I can monitor how much alcohol you guzzle down before I get some real food in you."
He watched her finish dressing in silence, and tried to feel resignation, rather than resentment, of his fate. (He was only half successful.) Breakfast was an on-the-run affair of pears and cubed bits of cheddar, washed down with a shared mug of yesterday's cold coffee. They left her car in front of her building, and hustled down to his, more than a lifetime away from her front lawn. He offered to take her back, so that she wouldn't be stuck with him all day, but she just laughed at him and made herself comfortable in the passenger seat. Well and truly resigned (and resentful), he drove on to his hotel room in tight lipped silence.
Dixie, on the other hand, was feeling good about life - she had to have been, because she chattered the entire ten minute coastal drive from South Torrance to East Redondo Beach. She didn't stop until they pulled into the motel's parking lot. Then the words died in her throat as she looked around in horror.
Kel winced. He'd not really paid that much attention to how the grounds looked when he'd left in the mornings - he was too busy fighting hangovers and depression and wrinkled clothes to really see anything beyond the hood of his car. But now he was entering the parking lot from the street at a time when he'd normally be leaving, and he was surprisingly clear headed, rather than foggy from another miserable night of bad choices and marginally satisfying vice binging.
Beer cans and newspaper littered the lot, blowing across like the 20th century urbanite answer to tumbleweeds on a harsh, open prairie. Tired looking women leaned against the walls and tugged down skirts too short to wear in public, and puffed on cigarettes dipped in who knew what. The occasional bluecollar retiree poked his head out of a random door to bellow some nonsense to anyone listening (which, of course, meant no one at all), and the occasional bluecollar divorcee would bellow back something along the lines of shut the hell up you useless reminder of my useless ex-breadwinner.
Kel had wanted to live closer to Rampart, true, but he'd gone along with Stanford's choice of domicile in the end, because it was far, far away from these people. These were his grandfather's people, the people his father tried desperately to protect his boys from. These were the people Kel was more than happy to treat, so long as they kept their dirty laundry to themselves. These were the people that kept Kel in medical school, for better or for worse, for noble reasons, and for horribly selfish ones.
And now he was sleeping in the middle of these people, living with them, fucking them. His mother's mother had been right - she'd married into trash, and so she'd given birth to trash.
Shame settled over Kel like a blanket. Last night's bender had done nothing to poke holes in his pride. The morning's nausea was just as unremarkable, a blip in the long list of things that could possibly embarrass Kelly. But to see, really see, how far he'd fallen, to be willfully a part of this world, to revel in it - his parents would cry to see how far he'd fallen. He wanted to cry, himself, but he was all cried out. All he could do was burn in shame.
A warm hand squeezed his thigh gently, and gave it a little shake. "Come on. Those clothes aren't gonna pack themselves," Dix said softly.
"Please don't tell," he blurted out.
"Tell what?" Dix got out of the car and thumped the roof. "Come on, we're gonna be late." She marched around to his side of the car, yanked the door open, and grabbed his arm. She was small, but she was strong - she pulled him out of the car with a grunt, and managed to force him upright without toppling over into a tiny oil slick in the vacant parking slot next to them. "Where's your room?"
"Up," he said, and led her to the back stairs closest to his room. They trudged up to the third floor, and down the hall, to his room at the end of the outer corridor. "It's probably a mess," he warned, and unlocked the door.
It was exactly as he'd left it - clothes strewn everywhich way, wine bottles everywhere, while a soggy submarine sandwich lay half spread out on its waxen wrapper on top of the bed. Dix squeezed in past him, peered at the sandwich, and gave him a rather scolding look. "Gather the trash. I'll gather your clothes." Instead of waiting for him to obey (or even acknowledge) her, she found the tiny closet space where he'd dumped both suit cases, and opened them up. "There's clothes in here."
"Yes."
She looked at the small dresser across from his bed. "You got a problem with using one of those?"
"No point."
She sighed, and began moving clothes from one suit case to the other. "That's fine, Kel. Go on, grab the bottles, start cleaning this place up."
"I thought you were worried about being late."
"That was before I realized there was no chance of getting to the hospital on time. Don't worry, though - this is the last time this is going to happen to either of us. Now would you get to work?"
He didn't want to get to work. He wanted to crawl under the covers and never come out again. But he began gathering the wine bottles and the random piles of food he'd stashed all over the place when he'd grown tired of eating. He took them out to the dumpster, and ducked his head away from the watchful eye of the woman in the office. There were hookers and dope pushers crawling all over this damned hotel, but the lady was giving him the eye.
When he got back to the room, he was surprised to see that it was relatively neat and tidy looking - much tidier than it had been when he'd left with his trash. The clothes were gone, the bed was folded down, and the splintered furniture pieces were pushed into their proper places. Dix had the suitcases on the floor near the door, and was hefting his precious carry all on her shoulder. She was grinning sardonically. "I thought you had bath supplies or something in here. Nearly threw it across the room because I thought it was gonna be heavier. What is it?"
He wrinkled his nose and pointed to the suitcases on the floor. "You look like you're ready to roll, but I still need a shower, Dix."
"No time. Take one at work." She grabbed one of the suitcases, and tried to struggle out the door with it.
"While you're struggling to strip me of the very last shreds of my dignity, I have to say that if you fall down the stairs with that suitcase and break your neck, I'm not gonna feel very bad."
"Liar, you're going to feel like a murderer. Come on, let's-"
"Dixie." It came out sharper than he'd intended, but she stopped and looked at him. "Five damned minutes."
She sighed and trudged back into the room, and dropped the carryon bag on the bed. "I'll be in the car." She went back to the suitcase half way out the door, and wrestled with it. "These are the dirty clothes. You're gonna be very busy in the laundry room tonight, Dr. Brackett." She gave him a dirty look. "Five minutes." Then she crabwalked out the door with her load.
In the end he didn't bother with the shower. A fresh suit and tie did wonders for his appearance, as did a few minutes with a comb and brush and some complementary hairspray. It wasn't his usual grooming method, but it got him out the door and in the car in under five. "I've still got to check out," he said, and began hunting for his wallet.
"I did that."
He stilled, and stared at Dixie. "I see. How much-"
"Forget it. We'll square up at payday."
"No, we'll square up now. How much did you pay for the room?"
She tapped the dashboard. "Let's go, Kel, come on!"
"How much, Dixie?"
"Listen, I paid with my MasterCharge, so it's not like i can do-"
"How much?!"
She rolled her eyes and dug around her bag for the reciept. "Here! You happy?"
He scowled. "Why... why would you put out this much money for me? This is ridiculous. I don't even know what half these charges are, Dix-"
"Kel, forget it. Look, your life is a shambles. Do you even know where your credit cards are? And don't give me any of that I always carry cash stuff, because you don't carry a hundred dollars in cash - you work for the County, remember?"
"But I could have-"
"And you don't need to pay for another night when you aren't staying another night, and I can guarantee they'd have charged you for tonight if you didn't show up to pay until later. I know it. So just take the gift, and start the damned car, Kelly."
He thought about the pile of cash that asshole Scott had dropped in his room his second night without Stanford - the pile that was burning a hole in his glove compartment right now. He almost wanted to reach over and grab it and stuff it in Dix's purse - or maybe down her generous cleavage - but he didn't want to talk about that particular nightmare, didn't want to explain how he was suddenly flush with almost a month's pay out of nowhere. Instead, he vowed to go to the bank and draw out a cashier's check from his joint account with Stan- ah, and there was the swift return of that massive headache. "I'll pay you back at lunch," he grumbled and started the car.
"Kel, you don't have to do that! It's done, the bill's not due until the end of the month, so just-"
"I will pay you back when we break for lunch, Nurse."
"Okay," she said meekly, and looked out of the window. She remained blissfully silent all the way to Rampart.