Throughline: Bleeding Reflections

The hum of the lights was constant, a teeth-on-glass sound that filled the hospital room as surely as the scent of antiseptic and the faint, sour undercurrent of failing bodies. Liesa stood in the threshold, breath held so shallow she could taste the inside of her own lungs, and watched the drama unfold with the nauseating intimacy of someone eavesdropping on a confession meant for God alone.

Claire sat hunched at the foot of the hospital bed, knees pressed together, hands wrapped around a battered three-ring binder so thick its spine was buckled from overuse. Her hair—longer here than in real life—was tucked behind both ears, but the strands had started to escape, hanging limp and dull against her cheeks. She wore a sweater two sizes too large, sleeves rolled so many times the cuffs were a wound coil of blue.

She was nineteen, but the room had done its work: the lines in her face had deepened, and her jaw carried the tension of someone twice her age. The girl radiated concentration. She read aloud in a voice that was both beautiful and mechanical, reciting passages from the binder with the empty conviction of a spell meant to ward off everything that mattered. “Adverse effects include fever, night sweats, disorientation, paresthesia—” She barely paused for breath. “If the titer reaches this point—” She jabbed a finger at the page, her whole body tightening—“then there is irreversible cognitive decline. Long-term, the prognosis is—”

The bed’s occupant, a man in his fifties with the sunken grandeur of someone who once played tennis in the park on Sundays, nodded along, but his eyes flicked not to the diagrams and charts Claire presented, but to her face, hungry for something she refused to offer. His hand, so pale it seemed translucent, trembled on the blanket; once, he tried to reach for Claire’s wrist, but she deftly shifted her arm to turn a page, evading him with a gentleness so practiced it looked like mercy.

“Are you eating enough?” he asked at last. The effort nearly cost him. “You look tired.”

Claire’s lips pressed together in a straight, unyielding line. “It’s finals week,” she said, not looking up from her notes. “I’ll be fine after the exam.”

There was a pause—a chasm between them—and the man tried again. “You don’t have to bring me research every time you visit. I just want—” He faltered, the next word shredded by shame. “—company.”

Claire made a sound, too bright and quick, a performance of laughter. “I like it,” she said. “It keeps my mind busy.” She flicked her gaze to the monitors above the bed, pretending to read the outputs. “You said once you liked when I explained things.”

The man’s smile was a ruin. “I do. But it’s okay to just talk, too.”

She ducked her head, turning another page. The binder was crammed with medical articles, printouts highlighted and annotated in colors so dense that no original words survived. The subtext was clear, at least to Liesa: Claire had weaponized knowledge against the unfixable. If she could only research hard enough, learn enough, explain enough, maybe she wouldn’t have to be here—not really here—while her father disintegrated in the sheets.

Liesa recognized the move. She’d done it herself, in a different context, with different tools. If she was charming enough, pretty enough, clever enough—if she could make the world laugh, or weep, or want her, just for a moment—then maybe she could avoid ever sitting still in the presence of real, implacable need. She’d even done it in The HH, weaponizing her transformation to lose herself in heat, and so she wouldn’t have to face the truth of what she had done to Dawn in the Second Challenge.

She stepped deeper into the room, the tile floor so cold it bit the nerves of her bare feet, and watched as Claire leaned forward, pretending to search for something in her backpack. Liesa could see, from the tightness in Claire’s shoulders, that this was a dodge, a way to avoid the man’s gaze.

He tried once more, his voice stripped to the raw wire: “Stay a little, after you finish. Please?”

Claire nodded, but her focus stayed on the backpack, on the endless, unyielding homework she’d created to buffer herself from this man who had given her life, who would soon lose his own. Liesa felt a spike of anger—at Claire, at herself, at every daughter who had ever let pride or fear or self-preservation stand in for the small, simple act of just showing up.

She blinked, and the world split: the hospital room blurring into a different bed, a different parent, the air perfumed now with violets and cigarette smoke and a sadness older than language.

She was back in Antwerp, in her mother’s apartment, the one with the green Formica counters and the wallpaper that peeled in curlicues at the corners. The bed was too big for the room, and her mother’s body, so fragile and whittled down by a decade of illness, seemed to float on the duvet like a paper boat on the Scheldt.

Liesa’s own hands shook as she held a sketchbook in her lap, drawing spirals on the cover but never opening it, not once. She was home, but she was not there—her soul a thousand kilometers away, in Chicago, with Andy, or in the blur of airports and trains that carried her from one obligation to the next. She spoke to her mother in bright, Americanized English, a language they’d both learned for the sake of upward mobility, but which felt, now, like a thin sheet of plastic wrapped over real emotion. Every word was a shield, every smile a way to say: “I will not break for you. I will not let your pain infect me.”

Her mother’s hands—so like her own, down to the ridged knuckles—were yellowed and stiff. She asked for stories about Liesa’s friends, about her art, about the city where she lived now. Liesa told her everything, except the truth: that she felt unmoored, that she missed Andy with a desperation that bordered on madness, that she could not, for the life of her, figure out how to be anyone’s daughter, let alone this dying woman’s.

She recounted gallery openings, the kindness of strangers, the way the sky in Chicago could open wide and swallow you whole. She never once mentioned the nights she spent crying in train station bathrooms, or the panic attacks that hit when she caught a whiff of her mother’s perfume in a stranger’s scarf. She never admitted to herself, even now, that she sometimes wished it would all just end—quickly, cleanly, so she could finally stop feeling the jagged edge of never having done enough.

Three days later, her mother had ended her own life.

She blinked again, and she was back in the hospital room with Claire, who had abandoned the binder and now sat on the visitor’s chair, knees drawn up, hands gripping her own elbows like she was bracing for a storm. Her father had fallen asleep, mouth open, the uneven rise and fall of his chest mapped by the green glow of the monitors.

Liesa hovered, unseen and unheard, a ghost in a corridor built for ghosts, and watched as Claire let her head drop, forehead pressed to the edge of the bed. The girl’s shoulders shook, but she made no sound; she would not cry, not even for herself. Instead, she muttered fragments of Latin, the words so familiar they could have been a lullaby: “Respice, adspice, prospice.” Look back, look to the present, look ahead. She chanted it again and again, the phrase a life vest in a rising sea of guilt.

Liesa wanted to touch her, to say: “You are not the only one who has done this. You are not the only daughter who has failed to bear witness.” But her hands, in this world, were as insubstantial as fog.

The monitors ticked. Claire’s breathing slowed. The man on the bed reached out, even in sleep, his fingers seeking his daughter’s, and found only the sharp edge of the blanket. Liesa felt it then—the precise moment Claire’s heart cracked, a soundless fracture that would never quite heal.

She looked away, and the hospital room dissolved again, replaced by the view from her mother’s deathbed, the city so close it looked like she could reach out and pluck it from the air. Her mother lay still, so still it took a full minute for Liesa to realize she was gone.

There were no monitors here, no evidence of the moment. Only the clock on the wall, stuck at four seventeen, and the sketchbook in Liesa’s lap, unopened, blank.

She had not held her mother’s hand. She had not said “I love you” in any of the languages they shared. She had not even cried, not really, until years later, when the only witness to her guilt was the dark, empty apartment.

Liesa understood, then, that she had come to the Garden of Glass not to help Claire process her grief, but to learn that she had never processed her own. She was a professional at absence, an expert at leaving before the wound could fester. She wondered, for a moment, if that was why she’d been so eager to vanish from Andy’s life, to break him before he could ever break her.

She looked at Claire, at the way the girl clung to knowledge and recitation as though it could somehow retroactively heal a dying parent. She saw herself in the posture, in the hunger for absolution, in the way the words always came before the feeling.

She realized, with a sickening clarity, that neither of them would ever get what they wanted—not from the dead, at least.

The room went quiet. The hum of the lights faded. Liesa sank to the floor, knees against the cold tile, and let the guilt wash over her. For the first time since her mother died, she did not move, did not flee, did not busy herself with art or errands or the solace of strangers. She simply sat, eyes fixed on Claire’s bowed head, and let the weight of two daughters’ failures pin her to the ground.

She wondered, in a hollow, abstract way, if her mother ever forgave her. If she could ever forgive herself.

The world went white.

The day had the washed-out color of a suburban parking lot in November, sky the same indifferent gray as the sidewalk, the grass underfoot wet under Dawn's bare feet. She stepped between rows of black headstones, gossamer wrap flowing, the names polished smooth by years of wind and rain, and tried not to imagine what it would feel like to rest beneath one. The cemetery lay at the edge of town, past the last gas station and the first empty field, the kind of place designed for quiet exits and minimal fuss.

There was no tent, no canvas arch or display of flowers; just a pit in the ground, a rectangle of sod pulled back to reveal dark, clotted earth, and beside it a casket that looked much too small for the tragedy it contained. A small group had gathered, all of them dressed in black or gray, their winter coats zipped against the cold. Most were strangers to Dawn—old men with hands clasped behind their backs, women who dabbed their eyes with tissues. In the center, close to the grave, a boy in an ill-fitting suit stood rigid, knuckles white on the handle of an umbrella. He stared at the casket with the fixed, haunted intensity of someone who’d spent all his tears before the day even began.

It took a few moments for Dawn to recognize the boy as Andy. He was thirteen, but looked even younger, the lines of his face too soft, the cheeks splotched with red from cold and crying. His parents stood behind him, flanking him like bodyguards, each one with a hand on his shoulder. They seemed old here, worn down to the essentials: the father with his permanent squint, the mother with her red-rimmed eyes, both holding on to their son as if he might float away the second they let go. A few paces back, a woman with hair in a tight bun wrangled two children in matching church coats. There was an old man in a wheelchair, a pair of college-age girls, and a single, large man with a beard who looked out of place, like maybe he’d taken a wrong turn and decided to stay. Some families with children were leaving. One girl with red hair was hunched beneath a tree in the distance, waiting for everyone else to leave.

Dawn scanned the group for Laura’s parents, but saw no one who fit. Maybe they were gone already. Maybe they’d never come.

She almost missed the second child, standing at the far edge of the crowd: a girl with black hair chopped blunt and uneven, a little taller than Andy, wearing a navy dress with white tights. She held her hands in front of her, fingers twisted around a piece of paper, or maybe a flower. She didn’t fidget, didn’t look away, only cried. Her face was red with shed tears. It took Dawn a moment to recognize Emi, and even then, she felt a pinch of shame for how long it had taken.

The service was brief. A man in a black raincoat read a passage from the Bible, his voice flat as a radio broadcast. There was no music, only the drone of the highway beyond the fence and the intermittent squish of shoes in the mud. Andy never moved. He watched as two groundskeepers lowered the casket into the hole, the motion slow and deliberate, the ratchet of the straps making a sound that seemed to echo forever.

The man said, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” and Andy’s mother squeezed his shoulder so hard her knuckles went bloodless. Andy didn’t flinch. He kept his eyes locked on the casket, jaw clenched, tears pooling in the corners but never falling. Dawn had seen this before—the way a body could freeze around pain, refusing to let it out for fear it would never stop.

When the casket finally rested at the bottom of the grave, everyone stood there, waiting for something. The man in the raincoat stepped back, folded his hands, and nodded as if he’d finished a job well done. The old man in the wheelchair tried to cross himself, but couldn’t get his hand to cooperate. One of the children broke away from the bun-haired woman and peered into the pit, then immediately retreated, face pale.

Andy’s father tried to pull him away, but Andy wouldn’t move. He stood at the edge, staring down, like he was trying to memorize the shape of the darkness that had swallowed his best friend. His lips moved, but no sound came out.

Dawn felt something in her chest snap, the old ache she’d learned to ignore whenever her family had needed her to be strong. It was the same look her little brother had worn the day of their grandmother’s funeral—the same frozen horror, the same refusal to let anyone see how much it hurt. Dawn wanted to go to Andy, to wrap her arms around his shoulders and tell him he wasn’t alone, but her legs wouldn’t work. She stayed rooted to the spot, watching from the margin, as if she could do more good by simply witnessing the pain than by trying to erase it.

She noticed, then, that Emi had not moved either. The other mourners were drifting away, collecting umbrellas, gathering in silent clumps near the cars, but Emi stayed where she was, hands clenched around her piece of paper, eyes fixed on the grave. For a long time, she didn’t move at all. Then, in a single motion, she stepped forward, the wet grass barely bending beneath her feet.

She stopped a foot behind Andy. She didn’t touch him, didn’t speak. She just held out the paper—a paper crane, Dawn realized, the wings perfectly folded and pressed flat by the grip of Emi’s hands. Emi hesitated, then reached around Andy and placed the crane at the lip of the grave, as close to the casket as she could manage without falling in. The motion was so careful, so deliberate, that it hurt to watch. Emi let her hand hover above the crane for a moment, then drew back, folding her arms across her stomach as if to hold herself together.

Andy finally turned. He looked at Emi, his eyes red and swollen, and for a second Dawn thought he might say something. Instead, he just nodded—a single, sharp movement—and then let himself be led away by his father, who guided him with a gentleness Dawn hadn’t expected.

The crowd thinned. The old man in the wheelchair was rolled back to a van by one of the college girls. The bun-haired woman corralled her children and marched them toward a battered station wagon. Andy’s family stood by their car, waiting for the rest of the mourners to leave before getting in themselves.

Dawn watched Emi, who now stood alone beside the grave. She stared down at the paper crane, shoulders hunched, face unreadable. Dawn tried to move toward her, to offer a word of comfort, but her feet stayed glued to the ground. She could only watch as Emi bent down, whispered something to the crane, and then straightened up, wiping her nose on the sleeve of her dress.

The words were lost in the wind, but the sound of them carried—a whisper, a promise, a goodbye that no one would ever hear. Dawn understood, in that moment, what it meant to miss your chance. She remembered her own grandmother’s funeral, the way she’d kept her face blank and her voice steady, the way she’d ignored her own grief to manage the food, the guests, the logistics. She’d written a letter for her grandmother, too, but never put it anywhere. It was still in her bedroom, back home, collecting dust in a shoebox. She’d never said the things she wanted to say, never let herself feel the loss in the moment, never let herself be comforted.

Emi’s gesture, so small and perfect, felt like a punch to the gut. It was everything Dawn had never done, every act of tenderness she’d withheld because she thought her role was to be strong. She saw herself in Emi—the way the girl’s body folded in on itself, the way she chose silence over drama, the way she clung to ritual as a substitute for the real thing.

Dawn wanted to tell Emi she was sorry, that she understood, that she wished things could be different. But the words stuck in her throat, unmoving. She watched as Emi turned away from the grave, head down, and walked through the wet grass toward the street, not looking back.

Dawn tried again to move, to follow, but the world felt tilted, the ground spongy and unreliable. The wind picked up, rattling the bare trees at the edge of the cemetery. She blinked, and for a moment, she was thirteen again, standing in her grandmother’s kitchen, counting the minutes until the next thing needed doing. She remembered her own mother’s voice, tight and brittle, saying, “We don’t have time to fall apart, Dawn.” She remembered believing it.

Now, she saw how wrong it was. She saw how much she’d lost by pretending not to feel. She saw how Emi had done the same, and how Andy would probably try to do it, too, and how maybe the whole world ran on the unpaid debts of kids who never got the chance to say goodbye.

The world flickered. The cemetery faded, replaced by the shimmer of the glass corridor, and Dawn found herself on her knees, hands sunk deep in the cold, wet grass. Her face was wet, too, but she didn’t wipe the tears away. For once, she let them come. She let herself miss her grandmother, and her mother, and every person she’d ever lost. She let herself mourn, not just for them, but for all the chances she would never get back.

The world went white.

The examination room was colder than the inside of a morgue, and twice as bright.

Riley was dropped onto a plastic chair, her tailbone meeting the seat so abruptly that the shock vibrated up her spine and rattled the roots of her hair. The walls were the color of nothing—somewhere between blue and white, but also somehow less than either. The air hummed with **** air conditioning and a metallic edge, like someone had piped in a soundtrack of scalpels.

Myra sat on the table, paper gown rustling every time she moved. Her hands, which had once been precise and confident, now flexed open and closed in spasms, as if she was trying to remember how to hold on to the world. Her hair was a mess, the kind of mess that happens not from carelessness but from wrestling invisible demons all night.

The doctors—three of them, all with the same haircut and identical, unmemorable faces—clustered at the foot of the table. They held clipboards with the reverence of priests and did not look at Myra when they spoke. Riley realized, oddly, that the doctors probably looked like that because Myra had never seen their faces.

“The blindness is permanent,” said the lead doctor, his voice set to the frequency of disappointment. “There is ischemic damage to the optic nerve, likely caused by a sudden and severe drop in blood pressure.” He paused, flipping a page. “Your optic nerve is naturally crowded, which predisposes you to this kind of insult. Stress and overuse of caffeine exacerbated the problem, as did the chronic lack of sleep. The use of weight-loss injection **** may have been a contributing factor.”

Myra let out a gasp that was all lungs, the kind of sound that belongs to drowning victims and new widows. Her hands shot up, clawed at her face, then hovered in front of her like she was trying to catch something invisible before it hit her. “No,” she said, voice crumbling. “No, please.”

Riley wanted to look away, but couldn’t. The panic in Myra was so raw, so immediate, that Riley’s own pulse tripled, her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth, her palms blooming wet. She watched as Myra tried to stand and failed, legs buckling under her as she slammed back down onto the table with a hollow thunk.

The doctor cleared his throat. “There is no intervention at this time. You will be referred to Rehabilitation Services, and given resources for the visually impaired. If you have questions, please direct them to—”

“I can’t see,” Myra cried, “I can’t—” Her arms flailed, knocking the clipboard from the doctor’s hand. Papers scattered, and Myra’s breathing went into overdrive, every inhale a staccato stutter, every exhale a choked plea.

Riley **** herself to breathe. She told herself this was what Myra deserved—a life for a life, an eye for an eye. She had tried to hate her, to hold on to the story she’d told herself: that Myra’s casual cruelty had destroyed Laura and sent Riley’s own life spinning into darkness. She had made a truce with her, at Andy’s urging, but she had never truly felt that Myra deserved full forgiveness. But the pain in Myra was too much. It was nuclear, and Riley could not look away from the fallout.

The room was shrinking. The lights got brighter, the voices sharper. Riley’s throat closed down to the diameter of a straw, her own vision blurring as the terror built.

“I’m so sorry,” one of the doctors said, softer now, but Myra was past hearing. She rocked on the table, head in her hands, sobbing in great, racking waves.

Riley stood up—she didn’t remember deciding to—and walked to the edge of the table. She hesitated, then reached out, her hand hovering an inch from Myra’s shoulder. She wanted to say something, anything, but the only word that came was, “No.”

Myra froze, then turned her face toward Riley, eyes wide but sightless, her whole body trembling. Riley tried to steady her own hand, but it shook too much. “No,” she whispered again, voice cracked. “Not this. I can’t bear this.”

The room contracted further. The walls pressed in, the air turned to concrete. Myra’s terror was now Riley’s, too—she could feel it in her bones, a white-hot grief that made her knees buckle.

She collapsed next to the table, her cheek pressed to the tile, and screamed.

Outside the chamber, there was only silence at first. Then the others heard a single, sharp cry of despair—a note so pure it was almost beautiful—and then nothing.

When the glass cleared, Riley was gone, and the Garden was empty but for the echoes of all that had been lost.

The world went white.