Synchronicity Read online

  Synchronicity

  A.J. Downey

  Contents

  COPYRIGHT

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Also by A.J. Downey

  About the Author

  Published 2020 by Second Circle Press

  Text Copyright © 2019 A.J. Downey

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by an electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. The names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner and are not to be construed as real except where noted and authorized. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events are purely coincidental. Any trademarks, service marks, product names, or names featured are assumed to be the property of their respective owners, and are used only for reference. There is no implied endorsement if any of these terms are used.

  The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  Editing & book design by Maggie Kern @ Ms.K Edits

  Cover art by Dar Albert at Wicked Smart Designs

  1

  Brody

  It was the third anniversary of my wife’s death. I was young. Twenty-two. Too young to be a widow, but I had been with Maia since we were both ten. We had been thick as thieves since the day she moved in across the street, and it only made sense that best friends would transition into lovers. We’d held out until I was seventeen, and she was sixteen. Used protection. Had done everything right…

  We’d had plans, the two of us. Eighteen, both accepted to the same college, looking forward to moving into a little place off-campus, both of us working – her as a barista, me as a busboy. Our parents planned on helping us out with the things we couldn’t afford above and beyond our shitty little jobs in the evenings after class.

  I remember the day like it was yesterday, that we first knew something was wrong. I was in bed, studying, when Maia called out from the bathroom. The note of alarm in her voice had me bounding out of bed as if I could levitate.

  Her mouth was full of blood; the sink, too. She’d been brushing her teeth, and all hell had broken loose. Her gums bleeding in a torrent. She’d complained that she’d been feeling tired. Had been sleeping more than usual. We’d been afraid she’d gotten pregnant. Had picked up a test the week before, but it’d come back negative. We’d made a doctor’s appointment, anyway. It was for two days from then. We’d had to wait that long just to get in.

  She’d never made the appointment. We went to the ER that night where she’d been diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia. She was a rare blood type. Everyone we knew, my parents, her parents, all of our friends, extended family, strangers – we all got tested and none of us were a match. The National Registry came up empty for her. Her college fund went to her hospital bills that weren’t covered by her dad’s stellar health insurance and on experimental treatments. You name it; we tried it, and it was all for nothing.

  We got married in the hospital. She wanted it before she went, and I was all for it. She still, surprisingly, had quite a bit left in her trust for college and her parents insisted on rolling it in with what my folks had set aside for me.

  I moved back home, threw myself head first into my studies to cope and shut out the world. Earned my degree in accounting in record fucking time and landed myself a damn good job.

  From the outside looking in, everything was perfect. Good job, fit, good-looking dude with his own house, a good car, and cash in the bank, but my life was so fucking… empty. Meaningless. I was feeling it tonight, too.

  When Maia was dying, I’d taken to a subreddit for cancer support. I hadn’t visited it in probably more than a year, but I found myself in front of my laptop on the forum and looking for –

  I don’t know what.

  Support? Reassurance? Somebody else in a similar shitty situation?

  All I know was that I was tired of feeling so alone so I logged in, clicked through a few screens and held my breath as the r/cancersupport channel came up and the posts populated. I went to write my own, but for some reason the top post made me pause.

  u/AnnikaSkyWalker 3d

  My (19F) Little Brother (10m) Has Leukemia – That’s Just Where This Shitshow Starts.

  I hesitated and finally clicked on the link. I didn’t know what to expect, but her story certainly wasn’t it.

  So, my little brother who I love more than life itself was recently diagnosed with leukemia and naturally, me, my mom, and my dad got tested to see if we were a bone marrow match, right?

  Not so fast.

  Not only did the universe decide that my little bro needed to be some other blood type than us, it ALSO decided that now, of all times and in the shittiest of ways it needed to out my mom’s affair she had on my dad.

  Tests came back that not only are none of us a match, there’s absolutely no way in hell my dad can be my little brother’s dad too.

  My dad lost his ever-loving shit on my mom right there in the hospital hallway. Marched off and when she and I got home? (We had to take an Uber BTW. He took the car and left us stranded at the hospital.) Yeah, he’d cleared out his shit and is GONE.

  Mom’s devastated and won’t stop bawling in her room. I’m pretty much freshly graduated from high school and my entire college fund has disappeared into the fucked-up American healthcare system, but I don’t even care about that.

  I’m sitting here, by myself, all alone as I type this, and I’m just afraid my little brother is going to die. That he’ll never even get to see high school. I don’t know what to do. He asked where Dad was when we left, and my mom straight up lied to him and said our dad wasn’t feeling well and with little bro’s immune system in the shitter that he thought it was best to stay away for the time being.

  That isn’t going to last long.

  I feel like I am going to have to be the grown up now, and it scares me. I barely know how to boil water without setting the kitchen on fire. How am I supposed to be the strong one in all of this?

  I know it’s probably the worst idea on the planet to ask the internet for help or guidance at a time like this, let alone Reddit, but here I am. Go easy on me guys. It’s been a harrowing few hours to say the least. I don’t actually even know what I am doing here.

  Something about the post resonated. Maybe it was her age. She was a scared nineteen-year-old kid fresh out of high school, and her whole world had just pretty much collapsed in the span of a few hours. I could definitely relate. Made a single lonely night missing Maia seem kind of paltry in comparison.

  The rug had just come out from under AnnikaSkyWalker. I’d been free falling for a while now.

  I didn’t know what to tell her, but I felt compelled to say something. Not that I had much to add to the rest of the comments that’d already been made – most expressing sympathy – some trying to troll the fuck out of her. One even going so far as to call her mother all kinds of fucked-up shit.

  Still, I felt for Annika, if that was her name. I also had a soft spot for the Star Wars reference in her username. Some of my best memories with Maia had been on the couch
cuddling and watching the original episodes, four, five, and six on a rainy weekend, throwing popcorn at each other and laughing. I wanted to be a Jedi. She wanted to be a Sith. I thought it was adorable. Maia had been too good, too pure to ever be one of the bad guys.

  I hit ‘comment’ and stared at the blinking cursor for a long time before I started typing.

  Hey Annika, I know how it feels. I was your age when my wife was diagnosed. We weren’t married then, though. We got married right before she died. It’s our anniversary tonight and I can’t even imagine what you’re going through. I had my parents, her parents, our friends – we all leaned on each other and Maia did her best to hold us up.

  You don’t have any of that, do you? Your little brother is too young, your mom and dad are doing their own thing. I don’t really have much to say that hasn’t already been said but if you need someone to talk to that understands some of what you’re going through on a personal level feel free to DM me.

  I promise. I’m not a creep. I’m sure you’ve heard that before, though. This is Reddit, after all.

  Anyway, I am going to set a reminder on this thread and come back in a couple days and see if you’ve got an update. I know how crazy shit gets and the Wi-Fi and cell service in hospitals are crap, so it doesn’t surprise me that it doesn’t look like you’ve logged in since you posted this.

  Keep your head up. I wish I could tell you more than that.

  I set the reminder bot to remind me to come back and went to log off and digest some of what I’d just read. I went to ‘X’ out of the browser just as my notification icon lit up.

  I froze and checked and had to laugh at myself. It was just a reply to what I had posted elsewhere a day or two ago. Then it pinged again, and this time it was a private message.

  u/AnnikaSkyWalker

  Thanks BrohemianRhapsody

  Some of the comments on my post were expectedly trash, but yours gives me some hope that I might be able to get my shit together. I’m sorry your wife didn’t make it. I’m still hoping that by some miracle, my little brother will. They’ve just started searching the National Database for bone marrow donors. Maybe we’ll get lucky? Feels like the universe can’t really trash on us anymore than it has. When it rains it pours, right?

  I hit ‘respond’ and dove right in.

  u/BrohemianRhapsody

  You get to feel things too. You just need to take the time every now and then to stop and feel them. I wish somebody had told me that when Maia was sick. Nobody can carry the weight of this kind of thing all by themselves, so promise me you won’t try. If you need to, reach out. I’m always here to listen… er – read.

  u/AnnikaSkyWalker

  Thanks for that. I will definitely take you up on it. You’re not much older than me, so that helps. I think I would feel weird talking to someone outside my age range about something like this. Maybe because I’m kind of pissed at my dad? I guess he’s been hit pretty hard, but still he’s not exactly acting like a parent. Everything is just such a mess right now and I don’t feel like I can do anything about it, you know? It’s driving me crazy.

  My name really is Annika. What’s yours?

  u/BrohemianRhapsody

  Brody, and yeah. I’m 22. Seems like a world of difference somehow, but in actuality it’s only like three years. If I ever do or say anything that makes things feel awkward or weird, please, absolutely call my ass out. I really don’t want to come across as a creeper, I just want to help. I mean it.

  You got any friends you can talk to?

  u/AnnikaSkyWalker

  Ahhh, so your username is a play on your actual name, too. You like Queen? My dad does. We used to listen to them on long car rides. I feel like I’ve lost my whole family almost overnight and it reeeeally sucks.

  As for friends? Not many. My dad took a better job, and we just moved us here. It’s been a year, and it’s so different from where we came from. I tried to stay in touch with my friends from back home, but that’s high school life, you know? It was tough enough transitioning from one school to another in the middle of senior year, but then Luke got sick and to be honest? I don’t know how I made it through my last quarter and through finals and all of that.

  The whole thing has been kind of a blur. I guess I should just be happy I graduated at all, let alone with a 3.92.

  What I am really glad about is that Luke got sick or at least started showing symptoms AFTER we moved. We were country bumpkins and now we’re closer to the city and way better hospitals. Blessing in disguise, maybe?

  I wanted to know where she was from and where she had moved to, but I was afraid to ask. Again, I genuinely was trying to help here, not creep her out or looking to score. In fact, that last thought honestly made me a little ill to think about.

  Instead, I focused on answering her questions and kept the focus on what she might need to get through what sounded like a pretty hefty shitstorm going on around her. Jesus Christ, it was bad enough her little brother was sick, but for her dad to just bail on both her and her kid brother no matter what their mom had been up to ten years ago… that was a dick move. It was something that if it had come up in the ‘Am I the Asshole’ subreddit, I would have hands down declared; yeah, bro, you are definitely the asshole.

  u/BrohemianRhapsody

  Yeah, I do like Queen. Bohemian Rhapsody was kind of my wrestling team’s unofficial fight song. We played it on the bus to and from every meet. Those were good times.

  So, Annika and Luke, huh? I take it both your folks were Star Wars fans?

  You should be proud of yourself holding it together and graduating with such a high GPA. I know I had to take a semester off when my wife got sick. I just couldn’t hang. I made up for lost time after she passed though, got my degree early. A lot of hardcore full-time studying. What about you? Got any designs on college? What did you want to be when you grew up? What about Luke? What’s he into?

  u/AnnikaSkyWalker

  You caught that, did you? My dad was the Star Wars fanatic, although the naming convention for me and my brother was a seized opportunity, more or less. My mom named me Annika after some college friend of hers. I don’t know whatever happened to her, she would never tell me. Maybe the friendship bottomed out or she died. God, now with everything going on, I really hope she didn’t die.

  Anyway, when my brother came along, my dad got naming rights and went with Lucas. My mom never even caught on until my dad sat me and my brother, who had just turned six, down for a Star Wars marathon. The look on her face was priceless.

  Oh, God. Maybe a change of subject. I’m starting to cry now, and at least one of us needs to stay sane and hold it together. Right?

  “Not your job, honey,” I muttered under my breath. I mean, I know Annika was an adult when she turned eighteen, but holy shit. I remember that even I was still a kid back then. Shit, I was still a kid in a lot of ways. My mom and dad still called me, and I still went over every Sunday for dinner. They were still my parents and dispensed parental advice, approval, and disapproval where required… Annika was in this weird space in-between kid and adult and had her navigation knocked clean out by her parents all of a sudden becoming as absentee as they could get.

  I got it, I really did, but I sure as hell wasn’t trying to be a substitute parental figure here, either. Just an active listener. Someone to talk to. I couldn’t even begin to imagine how Annika was feeling in some ways. In one regard, I knew all too well, and it was sort of killing me knowing that sickening free-fall she was in, knowing it all too well, yet also having no way to relate.

  My wife had died. Her sibling was dying. I certainly hadn’t had all this extraneous shit going down with it. When Maia had gotten ill, it was pretty straight forward. The anguish was only coming from one direction. Annika was weathering a barrage from every which way, and I felt incredibly sorry for her.

  We talked until two in the morning and I couldn’t have any regrets about it even though it was technically a ‘school night’ in that I ha
d work in a scant few hours by the time we were done.

  2

  Annika

  “I don’t want you to get your hopes up, but we’ve found a good match in the database, they’re being contacted as we speak.”

  “Oh, my God! That’s great. Why wouldn’t we get our hopes up?” I fought not to roll my eyes behind my mom’s back. She just didn’t seem to get it. Just because you were in the database didn’t mean that you had to donate. You could renege at any time for any reason. They could call this guy or girl up and they could be all ‘thanks, but no thanks’ for any reason at all.

  Seemed Dr. Kendrick and I were on the same page. She reached out and touched my mom’s elbow and pretty much explained as much in no uncertain terms.

  There were a lot of things I tuned out, and this conversation was one of them.

  I thought about Brody, wondering if he was on the registry and if they called him up, if he would follow through. It was a pretty big commitment. Time off work, time laid up, sure the procedure was only a few hours and a lot of donors only spent one night in the hospital. Heck, some of them even went home the same day.

  I know, if I ever got the call, that I would do it. Even if it meant I had to travel closer to wherever the recipient was to donate.

  That was the other thing. Travel expenses weren’t always covered.

  “Annika!” my little brother hissed from his hospital bed. I turned around and smiled and went over to him.

  “What’s up?”

  “What’re they talking about?” he asked.

  “They found a match,” I said in hushed tones. “They’re contacting them today to see if they would be interested in saving a life.”