Chapter 4: The Garden
Sunday, August 13, Boston, Public Gardens, Afternoon
August in Boston. The air hung thick and motionless, the kind of heat that made breathing feel like work. Even the shade beneath the old elms offered little relief, just a slight dimming of the glare while the humidity stayed constant, carrying the green smell of sun-baked leaves and something sweeter underneath, flowers giving up in their beds.
Anya moved more slowly than usual. Ted noticed but said nothing, walking beside her at whatever pace she set. Her hand found his occasionally, then released, as if she couldn’t decide whether she wanted the support or the freedom. Sweat beaded at her temples despite the shade.
“You okay?” he finally asked.
“Fine. Just hot.”
But she wasn’t fine. He could see it in the way she squinted against light that wasn’t particularly bright. The way she kept touching her temple, a gesture so habitual now that she probably didn’t notice she was doing it. The headaches had started in April. Four months of her insisting it was nothing, stress, too much screen time, not enough sleep.
They walked toward the footbridge, the one that arched over the lagoon where the swan boats drifted in lazy circles. An older couple sat on a nearby bench, dressed in their Sunday finery despite the heat, tossing bread crumbs to pigeons that scattered and regrouped in endless hungry waves. The scene should have been peaceful. Ted couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong.
Halfway across the bridge, Anya stopped. Her hand shot out and grabbed the railing.
“Need a break?” Ted moved closer, took her free arm. “We should sit.”
“Yeah.” Her voice came out thin, strained. “Give me a second.”
Her knuckles whitened on the iron rail. Ted watched her breathing change, becoming shallow and rapid. Her other hand pressed against her chest. Below them, the swan boats continued their circuits, families laughing, children pointing at ducks, the world going on with its Sunday afternoon while his wife gripped a railing like it was the only thing keeping her upright.
“Anya?”
She didn’t answer. Her face had gone pale, the color draining so fast he could watch it happen, her skin turning the gray-white of old newspaper. Her knees buckled. She started to collapse as if someone had cut the strings holding her up.
Ted caught her before she hit the bridge decking, his arms wrapping around her, lowering her as gently as he could manage. Her body was limp in a way that terrified him, boneless and heavy, her head lolling against his shoulder.
“Anya!” He eased her onto her back, cradling her head. Her eyes were open but unfocused, staring at something he couldn’t see. “What’s wrong? Talk to me.”
Her lips moved. No sound came out.
The swan boats slid sideways in her vision. She could see them, distantly, but they wouldn’t stay still. The horizon tilted at an impossible angle, the bridge rotating slowly around her while the sky became oppressive and the water rose up and everything fragmented into pieces that didn’t fit together.
She tried to say his name. The word was there, clear in her mind, three letters she’d spoken ten thousand times. But the pathway from thought to speech had closed. Her tongue wouldn’t move. Her throat wouldn’t cooperate. She was locked inside her own skull, watching the world break apart through eyes she couldn’t control.
Ted’s face appeared above her. She could see his mouth moving, could see the fear in his eyes, but the sound arrived delayed and distorted, like hearing through water. Her pulse raced in her ears, drowning everything else.
Then, slowly, the world began to reassemble.
The sky settled back into place. The bridge stopped spinning. Sound returned in fragments: Ted’s voice, urgent and frightened. Birds. The distant laughter of children. Her own breathing, ragged but steadying.
“I’m...” She blinked. Swallowed. Her mouth was impossibly dry. “Fine.”
“You’re not fine. You just collapsed.” His hand found her pulse, fingers pressing against her wrist. Too fast. Thready. “We’re going to the hospital.”
The older couple from the bench had approached, the woman already kneeling beside them, her face creased with concern. “Can we help? Is she alright?”
“She fainted. I need to get water.” Ted looked around, calculating distances. “Can you stay with her?”
“Of course, dear. We’re not going anywhere.”
Ted ran. The nearest vendor was back near the park entrance, a hundred yards that felt like a mile. His mind raced through possibilities, each worse than the last. Blood clots. Stroke. Aneurysm. Brain tumor. He’d spent twenty years with a neuroscientist. He knew too much about what could go wrong inside a skull.
He bought water, Gatorade, a granola bar, and ran back. Three minutes, maybe four. It felt like an hour.
Anya was sitting up now, the woman beside her with a gentle hand on her arm. “The sun’s so bright today,” the woman was saying. “You have to be careful in this heat, darling.”
“Here.” Ted cracked the bottle with shaking hands.
Anya drank the entire bottle in long desperate swallows. Water ran down her chin and she didn’t care. Over the next few minutes, color crept back into her face. The trembling in her hands subsided. The woman and her husband watched until Anya sat up and smiled weakly at them.
“I’m okay. Really. Thank you.”
The couple nodded, gathered their things, moved on with backward glances and murmured concerns. Ted helped Anya to a bench in the shade. They sat while the afternoon shadows lengthened, watching the swan boats circle and the pigeons squabble over crumbs.
Ted cataloged symptoms without meaning to. The way she held the water bottle with both hands because one wasn’t steady enough. The slight tremor in her fingers. The careful, measured way she breathed, testing whether her body would cooperate.
“We’re going to the ER,” he said.
Anya stared at the water. She was quiet for a long moment, and when she spoke, her voice was flat. Resigned.
“This isn’t the first time.”
Ted felt something cold settle in his stomach.
“The headaches started in April. And now this.” She took another sip, her hand trembling slightly. “Fuck me.”
“Jesus, Anya. You’re smarter than this. You can’t ignore these things.”
“Yeah.” She held out her arm, watching it quiver in the afternoon light. “Probably not good.” A pause. “It could be nothing. Stress, dehydration, too much caffeine.” She met his eyes. “Or it could be something... unfortunate.”
“So we go to the ER.”
“If I thought it was an emergency, I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you.” She held his gaze with the stubbornness he knew so well. “But I’m not a doctor. I study how brains work, not what makes them break. I need to talk to Imani.”
“Now?”
“I’ll call her tomorrow. Get a proper workup. I’m not spending the night in an ER when I can get actual answers from someone I trust.”
“Anya—”
“I’m fine.” That look. Immovable. The same expression she’d worn in grad school when she’d insisted on finishing her dissertation defense with a 102-degree fever. “We’ll go home. I’ll rest. Get that look off your face.”
They sat another ten minutes. She finished the water, ate the granola bar in small careful bites. Her breathing steadied. The color stayed in her cheeks. When they finally stood to leave, she was already talking about the NRI data again, about the scanning sessions they had scheduled, about the paper they needed to write.
Ted let her talk. But he watched her walk, noting the slight hesitation in her left step, the way she held his arm a little tighter than usual. He filed it all away, adding to the catalog of small wrongnesses he couldn’t ignore.
Their house welcomed them with familiar shadows, the evening light filtering through shoji screens, the smell of old wood and the books that lined every wall. Ted opened windows, set the box fans to pull air through, trying to make the space breathable in the August heat. From the living room, Coltrane drifted from the tube amp, filling the silence with something other than worry.
They cooked together. Anya diced vegetables while Ted prepared the fish. Twenty years of shared kitchens had made their movements synchronized, wordless. She worked more slowly than usual, pausing between tasks, but she worked. That was something.
“I should write the paper this weekend,” she said, scraping peppers from cutting board to pan. “Strike while the data’s fresh.”
“Just no mention of Invita’s project.” Ted adjusted the heat under the fish. “I don’t want to piss Susan off.”
“Obviously.” Anya’s knife slowed on the onion. Stopped. She set it down, one hand going to her temple.
“Anya.” Ted’s voice sharpened. “I’m calling Imani. Now.”
“Yeah.” She leaned against the counter, eyes closed. “Maybe I should lie down for a bit.”
He walked her to the bedroom, helped her onto the bed though she insisted she didn’t need help. She lay back against the pillows and didn’t argue when he pulled a light blanket over her. That, more than anything, told him how bad she felt.
He stepped into the hallway and texted Imani: “Concerned about Anya. Fainted in the park today. Excessive fatigue. Faintness has been going on for months, she says. What should we do?”
The reply came quickly: “Bring her in for a full checkup. Could be neurological or could be nothing, but she needs checking. Talk in the morning.”
Neurological. The word landed. Neurological. He knew what Imani meant. They both knew what she meant.
Ted returned to the living room. Found his guitar, the vintage Martin he’d restored himself, and settled into the chair by the window. His fingers found a quiet melody, something meandering and gentle. The notes filled the room, mixing with the evening sounds from outside: traffic, birds, the distant laughter of neighbors.
He played while she slept. The apartment darkened around him. He played through the dinner that sat uneaten on the counter, through the transition from dusk to dark, through the hours when he should have been sleeping himself. Every few minutes he walked to the bedroom door and listened for her breathing. Counted each inhalation. Waited for the exhale.
He tried not to think about the way she’d looked on that bridge. The way the color had drained from her face. The way her eyes had lost focus, staring at something he couldn’t see. He tried not to think about what it would mean if the woman who’d dedicated her life to understanding the brain was destroyed by her own.
He played until his fingers ached. Played until the street sounds faded and the city settled into its late-night quiet. Played until exhaustion finally claimed him, his head dropping back against the chair, the guitar still cradled in his arms.
In the bedroom, Anya dreamed of neurons firing in patterns she almost understood. Signals racing down pathways that should have connected but didn’t quite meet. Timing that was off by milliseconds, by fractions of fractions, but enough. Enough to make everything fall apart.
She woke once in the deep hours of night, disoriented, her head pounding. Through the doorway she could see Ted silhouetted in the chair, the guitar across his lap, his head bowed in sleep.
She watched him for a long moment. This man who had loved her for twenty years. Who had believed in her work when no one else did. Who would be here, she knew, through whatever was coming.
She closed her eyes and let the darkness take her again.
But for now, in the quiet dark, there was only breathing. Only the faint smell of fish they hadn’t eaten, and the silence of a house where something had changed, irrevocably, even if they didn’t yet know what.