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Dennis Whitaker still doesn’t quite know what to do when someone starts crying in front of him. No one really cried back home in Broken Bow, especially given the fact that his older brothers drilled it into him that crying would make him gay. Besides, everyone was too busy around the farm to even think about crying anyways. Comforting someone and wiping their tears was never a skill that he acquired or even thought he needed to acquire while growing up. Crying, he thought, was just a thing that people at funerals did from time to time.
Although, he does vaguely remember trying to help his neighbour, Kinsley Jones, stop crying after she broke her wrist. They were nine, lingering at the desolate playground in front of their elementary school, hands curled around the rusting metal chains of the swingset as their feet kicked around in the tall, overgrown weeds. Kinsley was waiting for her older sister to pick her up, while Dennis was waiting for one of his older brothers to remember that he existed in the hopes that he could be picked up as well. While Dennis swung idly, his feet never leaving the ground, Kinsley started swinging higher and higher, eventually reaching a height where her entire body blocked off the sun for a fleeting second or two.
And then she flung herself off the swings.
Dennis can’t really pinpoint the moment he realized he wanted to become a doctor. Most of it came from a desperation to leave. A desperation to really make something of himself, maybe. He was the baby of his family, nearly a decade younger than his youngest brother; he had already seen three of his brothers grow up into the same person, growing comfortable in the numbing monotony of Broken Bow, Nebraska. Endless acres of farmland; waking up early to feed the animals and to go to church on Sundays, his mom holding his hand tightly like she was afraid he was going to wander off and never come back; waiting for sunsets by the porch, waiting for his parents to tuck him into bed, waiting for one of his brothers to at least pretend to care about him or remember that he had even been born in the first place. Always waiting for someone to care, for someone to look at him.
And maybe that’s why he mentioned Kinsley Jones in his med school interview. His desperation didn’t need explicit stating—his undergraduate degree in theology from Bellevue University and his tired eyes proved enough of that. He talked about being raised on a farm as the youngest boy, laughing about being forgotten or ignored so that the interviewer knew he wasn’t being unnecessarily self-deprecating. He talked about how his mother often said his heart was bigger than he could afford it to be, that he cared too strongly for things that his brothers wouldn’t even give a second thought. He talked about how maybe that quality of caring too much came from all the care he was never given, how that reflected in the way he helped Kinsley Jones, how he had told her a pathetic attempt at a funny story to get her to laugh so that she could calm down until her sister came to pick her up.
The interviewer, a severe-looking brunette woman, peered over her glasses, and had asked Dennis pointedly: “What kind of doctor do you want to be?”
One whose patients know that they’re not alone, that there’s someone in the big wide world looking out for them. A doctor who cares. A doctor who is always trying to care, even when they don’t know the best ways to go about it.
In that sense, maybe Dennis had already been a bit of a doctor when Kinsley Jones threw herself off the swings. Dennis hadn’t seen the horror flickering in her blue eyes, but he had witnessed the sickening crunch that came after she landed on her hand in an attempt to break her fall. Without a second thought, he had crouched down beside her, panic thrumming under his skin as she started to bawl her eyes out.
She was crying so hard that her tiny frame was shaking from the effort, and Dennis, not knowing what to do, started telling her about the time he broke his finger after his older brother slammed the door on it when he was four-years-old. He remembers telling her that his brother, who was already late for school, just found a plain old bandaid from the medicine cabinet and tacked it on, trying and failing to cover up Dennis’ already fully swollen finger. He remembers telling her with as much mirth a nine-year-old child could muster that it took a full 48 hours before his parents noticed his swollen finger underneath the crudely placed bandaid. He remembers Kinsley looking up at him with a confused mix of bewilderment, amusement, and barely placated fear, tear tracks staining her flushed cheeks. He remembers telling her that he now had a finger that was still bent at a slightly offset angle, but that her wrist would look as good as new because she would be able to go to the doctor right away.
“It took them—” still hiccuping from her tears, Kinsley looked up at Dennis with curious eyes “—it took them two days to notice?”
“I have four older brothers,” he had offered with a noncommittal shrug.
Kinsley gave a weak laugh as she sniffled. Her older sister eventually came, giving Dennis a smile of thanks and an offer to drive him back home. He remembers shaking his head, saying that he was sure that one of his brothers promised to pick him up from school. Kinsley’s older sister wore a sympathetic smile. She had known better, but Dennis was an insistent nine-year-old who had strict orders from his parents to wait for his older brother. It was enough to see Kinsley smiling again, waving at him with her unbroken wrist and crying out an enthusiastic, “Thanks, Denny!” out the car window.
And that was probably the only time in Broken Bow he got to practice the art of calming someone down from their tears. It never worked on himself, not really. He’d just rock back and forth on his bedroom floor, avoiding the creaky floorboards and tucking his chin into his chest so no one could hear his stifled sobbing.
He only started getting pretty good at the whole comforting crying people thing during his rotation in Pediatrics—something about his small wet hamster-like demeanour and how it comforted kids, as a young new grad nurse had told him. That whole wet hamster shtick still works pretty well on the terrified kids down in the Pitt, but he’s still learning how to deal with the crying adults. He often stands awkwardly to the side, clasping at his hands and looking down at the floor tiles like they hold divine answers.
Which is all to say that when he hears sobs coming from his best friend’s bedroom after he gets back from a particularly brutal night shift, Dennis freezes in the hallway. He hangs his house keys on the little hooks he put up in the entryway, the metal jangling under the framed photo of the two of them dressed up as cowboys for Halloween. They’re posing in the middle of their entryway, backs pressed together with Dennis having his arms crossed over his fake suede vest—complete with the fringe, because Trinity insisted on it—and Trinity sticking her tongue out as she makes a gun with her hands. It took them four tries to get the perfect photo because Trinity kept telling him that he wasn’t smiling wide enough. He was like another younger brother she never knew she had. His brothers might’ve meant it like a backhanded insult, but he knew that with Trinity, it meant that she cared about him.
They’re both alike in the way that they care too much. Dennis’ mother would probably take one look at Trinity and say that her heart had overgrown her.
He lingers in the hallway after he hangs his keys up, making sure that he isn’t just hearing something from Trinity’s computer.
Dennis has only seen Trinity cry a few times. Once, after she lost a little boy who reminded her too much of her youngest brother. He sat with her out in the ambulance bay that time, sitting side by side on the curb until Trinity’s breathing evened out. Another time, when she got drunk out of her mind and Dennis had to haul her back home from Perlah’s dinner party as she kept sobbing on and on about how he was her best friend, and probably her only friend since her best friend from high school died. Maybe a third time, if he counted the one time they were rewatching Wicked when Trinity was a little wine drunk. And definitely a third time, but just out of the corner of his eye at work.
It was two or three weeks ago during a rare lull in the early morning. He was coming out of the staff lounge when he saw Dana leading Trinity into the stairwell with a gentle, guiding hand on her lower back. It was loud enough in the Pitt that no one could hear, but Dennis could tell that Trinity was crying from how her whole body was shaking and how she was hugging herself tightly. Even when patients yelled at her, Trinity would meet them with her own glare; Dennis could tell that she instinctively drew inwards, though, making her body a little smaller as if to protect herself. And he probably shouldn’t’ve, but he found himself following the two, shoes squeaking against the newly cleaned floors as if he needed to be any more obvious.
Mel came around to ask him for help stabilizing a femur just as Dana caught his concerned face. The stairwell was notoriously echoey, but Dennis didn’t hear anything. All he saw before Mel whisked him away on the case was Trinity tucked into Dana’s fiercely protective embrace, shoulders shaking as the charge nurse whispered something into her hair.
Dana came to find Dennis thirty minutes later, her own eyes rimmed with red.
She clapped him on the shoulder twice before directing him back into the staff lounge. “Drive Trinity back home for me, will you? I’ll talk to Robby.” No room for questioning or arguing—not like Dennis had even thought to.
Trinity was silent in the car. And that was that.
Dennis hadn’t really known what to do.
He still doesn’t know what to do now.
Another choked sob rings out in the empty hallway, the noise strangled like it’s fighting to be unearthed and buried down at the same time. Dennis pads across the creaky floorboards into the kitchen. He knows that whatever words he could say wouldn’t help take all of Trinity’s hurt and pain away. He knows this in the same way he knows that he won’t be able to perfectly heal every patient that comes under his care; no matter how much he wants something, there will always be things that Dennis can only hope of. All he can do is show that he cares.
And with that care also comes knowledge of what’s left in the fridge. There’s at least three containers left of Perlah’s adobo, and somehow the supply of lumpia in their freezer never seems to end. Miraculously, there’s an untouched pint of Cherry Garcia Ben & Jerry’s—which Dennis never fails to bully Trinity about for choosing as her favourite Ben & Jerry’s flavour—left in the freezer as well, wedged in between the precariously stacked ice trays and plastic bags of frozen lumpia.
While Dennis’ mother wasn’t good at a lot of things when it came to raising him, she was always good at making sure that he never went to bed hungry. Something about needing to grow up to be a big strong man like the rest of the men in his family. He often ate alone, with only the dim light above the dinner table to keep him company, but they were always hearty meals that tasted like warm hugs and comfort. Those meals were often his only reminder that despite everything else, he was still acknowledged in his family. Food, in Dennis’ mind, always comes with care.
Fifteen minutes later, he knocks on Trinity’s door as he is trying to position his other hand around a hot bowl so as to not burn all his fingers. There isn’t an answer, but there also isn’t a direct order from Trinity to leave her the fuck alone, so Dennis takes that as some sort of half-answer and opens the door.
“Trin?” he asks, half-wedged into the opening door just in case Trinity actually wants to kick him out. “I made you some food.”
He doesn’t care that it’s barely 8 in the morning and that Trinity usually doesn’t eat until well past noon on her days off. Knowing Trinity, she probably hasn’t slept a wink since she got back her shift at 7pm the previous night, and definitely only ate a protein bar after getting back. The door creaks open slowly and Dennis stands there awkwardly, staring down at his best friend on her bed. She looks completely dejected, looking straight through Dennis even as she tilts her head up to meet his eyes. Even through the darkness of the room, Dennis can see that her green eyes are rimmed with red, and that her pale cheeks are blotchy. Her hands are gripping at her forest green sheets, body tense like she’s bracing for an impact that won’t come.
She’s at least changed out of her scrubs. “I don’t feel like eating, Huckleberry,” she says hoarsely. Maybe that’s a sign for him to leave, but his fingers are almost burning from holding the bowl of adobo, and he’s determined to get Trinity to eat at least something.
“Did you eat anything after your shift yesterday?” he asks, setting down the bowl of food in an unceremonious clatter, squashing whatever sticky notes she taped down to her dusty bedside table. When Trinity goes to protest, Dennis interjects, “And don’t say a protein bar, because you and I both know that those don’t count.”
“Fuck you,” she mumbles. She glowers at the bowl of food like it has personally hurled an insult at her. She looks back up at Dennis. “You can— you can sit down, you know. I don’t bite.”
For a rotation that places so much stress on never judging a patient by their initial presentation, the student doctors they have right now seem to be experts at misjudging the hell out of Trinity. To the other residents, Trinity is just a little too passionate for her own good sometimes; but they all know that she has the competency and the quick thinking to back it up. To Dennis, she’s just his best friend who never really grew out of her theatre kid tendencies. But to the student doctors? They take all her sharp quips and sarcastic remarks at face value and just see her as the brash and slightly bitchy resident. The student doctors are terrified of her. Dennis knows that Trinity hates being called a bitch behind her back, but also knows that she secretly relishes in the students’ fear.
She’ll have to enjoy it before they learn that she really doesn’t bite at all.
The mattress sinks under Dennis’ weight, and he can’t help but let out a little sigh of relief of finally being able to sit down. The soles of his feet throb in tandem to his heart. It’s that insistent and constant thump thump thump that reminds him that he’s alive. Trinity wordlessly lets her head fall on top of Dennis’ shoulder. Her hair is getting longer. She refuses to pay for her haircuts but says that her hands have been too shaky recently from the ungodly amounts of caffeine she drinks throughout her shifts. She doesn’t trust herself; she trusts Dennis even less.
But she does trust him enough to let him into her room, to have her head on his shoulder.
Trinity whispers, “You can just say it.”
“Say what?”
“That I look like shit.” Her voice barely wavers in its assurance.
Dennis furrows his brows. “Well, I wouldn’t say that.”
Trinity snorts, lifting her head to stare down Dennis. “Oh, yea? What would you actually say, then?”
“You look like you had a bad shift but then proceeded not to sleep or eat after it?”
Maybe if Dennis was interested in getting a concussion, he would affirm her. There isn’t a pretty way to put how wrung out Trinity looks—or otherwise, has been looking for the past month. It always gets bad for her during the holidays, when all the anniversaries and invitations from family start compounding into a suffocating weight on her shoulders. She tries not to talk about it, and Dennis tries his best not to bring it up, but most dinners these days end in both of them just sitting and staring at Trinity’s phone lighting up with calls, the screen filled with the contact name of “DON’T RESPOND” until Dennis finally reaches over to silence her phone.
“You’re not supposed to be observant,” Trinity huffs jokingly. She flops on her bed, crossing her arms to press them against her eyes. “That’s my job.”
Dennis rolls his eyes. “Well, we’re both doctors. Some would say that it’s both of our jobs.”
Trinity lets out the frustrated little whine, the sound she makes when she knows she doesn’t have a smart rebuttal. “But you’re basically being nice about saying that I look like shit.”
“Well, you kind of look like you feel like shit?” Both of them pause, neither of them saying a word. “Do you want to talk or should I just shut up?”
Trinity lifts her arms off her eyes, staring blankly at the ceiling instead. Her voice is quieter, barely above a whisper. “I just had a really shitty day. And not those days where I can just blow it off and go to sleep and ignore it. Everything was just shit. Everyone at work was snappy for no reason at all, which made me snappy, and then this dad said I was feeding— feeding ‘sick and twisted ideas’ into his daughter’s head because I had to run a rape kit on her.” Her voice hitches, but she doesn’t stop talking. “And Langdon was just being an asshole in general, which made Robby even more pissed off, and then because Robby’s Robby and he refuses to acknowledge that he has fucking issues and can’t help but take his shit out on other people, he started going on about how I was taking too long with the daughter because he thought I was with my other patient who had a minor sprain— Like I hadn’t just had to hug the girl as she sobbed into my scrubs and begged me to help her for fifteen minutes. Didn’t even realize even though I’m pretty sure I started tearing up right in front of him until Dana came and chewed the fuck out of him.”
The mattress creaks under them as Trinity moves to sit up. Her head is bowed, her hands still gripping at the edge of her bed like she’s holding back from tearing something into shreds. “I was going to get takeout at Yolanda’s, but then she had to cancel last minute because of an emergency surgery. And then I was just going to get takeout by myself, but then my fucking mom called me out of the blue to ask for more money as if she ever cared about spending any money on the shitload of therapy I needed as a kid and— And as if that wasn’t enough, the takeout place we like was fucking closed anyways. Everything was shit, and everything is still shit. I haven’t slept in so long and I have a headache that won’t go away, and I’m— I am just so fucking tired of this, Dennis.”
Trinity is looking at him. She’s crying again, her bottom lip wobbling as hot tears trace over the dried tracks on her cheeks. If there’s one thing Trinity hates doing, it’s crying in front of her friends. Hates the attention and pity and worry of it all, she told him once. Hates it, because as much as tries to move past all of her shit, crying still makes her feel too vulnerable, too small, too much of everything she doesn’t want to be.
Her mother used to yell at her for crying, she told him one time over post-shift waffles. She used to berate her, red in the face, screaming that she had nothing to be crying about. According to her mother, Trinity was just a bitchy brat who dared to believe that her life could be anything other than perfect.
If crying in Dennis’ family made him gay, crying in Trinity’s family made her ungrateful.
Wordlessly, Dennis opens his arms to her. She falls forward, leaving her forehead to rest against his shoulder. They don’t hug. They never really do. But for them, this is enough: Trinity’s breathing evening out as the silence stretches out between them, Dennis looping one arm around her shoulders and patting her head gently. It’s a comfortable dance they do around their pasts, of memories they’d prefer to only allude to. Dennis thinks of it less of avoidance, but more of leaving things in the past in favour of making brighter futures, of living days that aren’t entwined with the existences of their ghosts. Maybe one of his brothers would call him unrealistic. Maybe they’d say that all roads eventually lead back to Broken Bow. Dennis has dreams of being a dreamer, though.
His life is good. In all honesty, he thinks he is living a life that will have him moving further away from Broken Bow that the path leading back to it—the ones that his brothers might argue is the only path to exist—just becomes another one of the dozens of paths he will trek towards in the future. His life is good because he met Trinity, who let him into her home and never took back her promise of making it his home as well. His dreams aren’t of the endless farmlands of Broken Bow when he falls asleep in his own bed.
They stay like that in their awkward side hug until Trinity draws back, face splotchy but with a little half-smile tugging at her lips. Maybe there will be a day where Trinity’s eyes aren’t tinged with that slight glint of embarrassment after she cries, where she doesn’t think she’s a burden or too much to handle or a bother. Maybe that day will come whenever Dennis finally thinks that of himself too.
“Are you still awake enough to go get some really shitty diner waffles?” Trinity asks. If the day shift has their post-shift park beers, the night shift has their half-awake diner runs. They’ll pile into the booths with the tacky vinyl seats and order far more than they can stomach because Abbot is soft and ends up paying for everyone. If their night shifts line up, Trinity and Dennis will always make an effort to sit next to each other—well, it’s more like Trinity will wrangle him into the booth whether he likes it or not, dragging him with an arm looped around his shoulders. They’ll get a pile of waffles and blueberry pancakes to share. Trinity will douse it with syrup until Dennis scrunches his eyebrows up in disdain.
“No,” Dennis answers promptly. He may agree to everything else that Trinity asks of him—evident by how he allows Trinity to compromise the inherent goodness of diner waffles and pancakes with the shitty syrup they dare to disguise as actual maple syrup—but the last thing he wants to do right now is drag himself out of the house again.
“And that, my friend, is why I like living with you,” Trinity chortles, rooting around her bed to find her phone. There’s a polaroid photo of the two of them wedged in the yellowing clear case. “I don’t care if this breaks the bank, I’m DoorDashing this shit. We deserve it.”
Dennis cranes his neck to watch Trinity input their usual diner order on her phone. The bowl of adobo lies forgotten on the bedside table. “What about the adobo?”
“Don’t pout at me, Huckleberry. You’re a full-grown adult,” teases Trinity, taking a sidelong glance at the bowl. “It was appreciated, Denny. I just think I need some, like, unhealthy amount of sugar in me right now.”
By the time their DoorDash arrives—not before their driver sends at least three frantic texts asking which door they should leave the bag in front—Trinity has taken at least three bites of her lukewarm adobo. It’s quickly abandoned in favour of tearing apart their order, though. The both of them are barely running on shitty protein bars and not enough sleep nor water. There’s little shreds of paper and plastic on their tiny coffee table thrown about, and neither of them even crack a shitty joke about ingesting microplastics and miniscule pieces of foam as they forgo getting proper plates and start eating straight out of the styrofoam containers. They have a perfectly good dining table that is often never used for dining. Trinity kicks at Dennis’ legs under their coffee table, ignoring how the mismatched legs creak from the jolt of movement.
They settle into the organized chaos of it all.
Mid-chew, Trinity asks, “How is the night shift treating you?”
When they saw their schedule for the month, Dennis had scowled at just how many night shifts he had. Trinity had teased him about it, telling him that he hadn’t accrued enough craziness to get through the night unscathed.
“Not bad. I think I just miss working days. Makes me feel a little less dead and slightly more like a real human being, I guess?”
Trinity nods along until she finishes chewing. “Would you kill me if I told you I was thinking of permanently switching to nights?”
“No?” He’d miss her, yes, but Dennis has also seen Trinity after her night shifts. Somehow working through the night is a good fit for her; she always comes out into the ambulance bay when Dennis comes to clock in, a sincere and content smile plastered on her face. He still hasn’t been able to figure out what it is about night shifts. He hates that they screw with his already fucked sleep schedule. He hates that he has to keep himself alive just on Red Bulls. He hates that he has to spend the days—his precious sunny days—sleeping, just to clock into work when the sun is starting to set. Trinity, though—night shifts just work. Maybe she just loves the proclaimed craziness of it all. Maybe it’s the fact that Abbot has taken her under his wing, cowboy medicine and all. “Also, why is killing you always somehow an option?”
“Princess and Perlah weren’t wrong when they told us that we’re basically codependent. You sure you wouldn’t wilt like a sad little plant without me?”
Dennis rolls his eyes. “Because you’re obviously my sunshine and rainbows.”
“Yea,” Trinity relents, raising her eyebrows at him like the way she does when she mocks him. Lovingly, of course. “You just figured that out, Denny?”
He ignores her. “Well, I’d miss your sunshine and rainbows personality, but I wouldn’t stop you from switching permanently. Anything to avoid Langdon, right?”
“All things considered, he’s not that bad,” she muses. “And I’d miss the rest of you guys. Mel is the real sunshine and rainbows during the day in that place, anyways. It’s just that Langdon and Robby together make me want to walk out and quit and never come back sometimes. They drive me fucking insane.”
“And Abbot’s better?”
“Abbot’s better. God, he’s so much better.” Trinity laughs, almost like she can’t believe Dennis would even ask her that. “He never yells at me for doing my job, which is honestly just the bare minimum. Dunno why it seems like such a rarity for the men in this department.”
“You should talk to Abbot. About switching permanently. He’d approve it in a heartbeat. He really seems to take a liking to you.”
Trinity purses her lips, her eyes glazing over into that faraway look of hers for a second. It’s a barely there look, one that would be imperceptible to most. Trinity is frustratingly good at slipping away.
Dennis can’t help but scramble to rebuke whatever he said. “Shit, I didn’t mean it like—”
“No, you’re good. It’s just weird to hear that in a way that it’s actually true,” she waves it off. “But yea, he told me a thing or two about adopting strays from the day shift. You think he was calling me a loser?”
“Definitely.”
He finds it endlessly amusing that the medical students also don’t know how much of a loser Trinity Santos can be. She cries when they watch musicals. She’s alarmingly clumsy in the kitchen for someone who has such easy access to scalpels in a trauma bay. She makes shitty jokes and even shittier nicknames.
They finish eating in silence, their exhaustion finally setting in in that bone-deep kind of way. The world outside their apartment seems to finally be waking up, but Dennis just can’t wait to get knocked out for at least 48 hours. Trinity gnaws at her toothbrush as she stuffs all their DoorDash stuff into their already overflowing trashcan, mumbling through a bubble of toothpaste that she’ll take the trash out eventually. She spits out into the kitchen sink and then disappears into her room, not before murmuring a gentle “goodnight.”
The smile she flashes at him before she clicks her bedroom door shut is tired, but it’s genuine. He can tell by how her eyebrows soften.
Left to the quiet of the apartment again, Dennis stands there for a second, trying to remember when he committed all of her characteristic Trinity-isms to memory. He did it for his older brothers, all those eye twitches and pursed lips and huffs of disbelief right before the sting of pain. The remembering of it all had come easily, but that was because the recognition of when his brothers were ticked off was a necessity when it came to growing up. He didn’t grow up like Kinsley Jones, whose older sister didn’t forget to pick her up after school that day when she broke her wrist.
The remembrance comes easily with Trinity as well. But really, it’s born from Dennis’ desire to show that he cares. That he tries to see her and reach out towards her whenever she draws back, slipping into the hazy fog the both of them used to live in. Dennis is clumsy in his own right, more so to do with the fact that he still has no real strategy to comforting Trinity when she cries—and not to do with him constantly changing out of his scrubs due to some unfortunate altercations. But he’d like to think that Trinity sees how much he cares.
Because, at the end of the day, Dennis knows how much that care is reciprocal. Even beyond Dennis living in Trinity’s apartment in the first place, he’s become witness to just how much of him has started to exist in their space. His shirts are mixed with hers on the couch, unfolded and probably wrinkled. When they play music while they make breakfast, Dennis will queue up some country music and Trinity will never object to it—not directly, at least. There’s a place for his keys by the entryway, where both of their shoes are thrown off haphazardly.
It’s a home. Not in the facade that Broken Bow presented itself as. It’s a home that is full of warmth and care and patience. It’s the softness that he was never offered back in the farmhouse.
He’s left Broken Bow for what seems like good. When the realization dawned on him on his first shift at PTMC as an official intern, he thought he’d been more scared. It was such a driving force, the foundation for the gift of care he found himself latching onto much later; he thought that without his totalizing desperation to leave a home that never truly felt like home, he’d be left feeling a little empty. Not entirely without purpose, but just a little lost.
Earnestly, Dennis feels more sure of himself than he’s ever felt before. He just wants to show people that he cares, that he’ll be there for them. He’s still learning, but he thinks he’s getting pretty damn good at it.