My fingers danced across the keys, weaving ebony and ivory notes into the familiar tunes I played night after night. The regulars who crowded Billy Joel in "Piano Man" never manifested in my audience, and the nights were long, lonely affairs, only punctuated by the occassional awkward, drunken requests from travelers passing through the tacky airport bar. On most nights, especially during the quiet midweek evenings, my mind was an unmoored ship, drifting toward wishes for a brighter future or reliving the juvenile decisions that had led me to that piano bench in that awful dive.
It was a Tuesday night and my dead gaze had settled on a half eaten apple that had been sitting for an hour or so on a table to my right. The white flesh was oxidizing to an unappetizing brown, and as I drummed out "Hotel California" with lackluster fingers, a lazy fly came to rest on its dull red skin. The sudden scent of sassafrass tea pulled my eyes to the deserted dance floor just as she twirled from the entrance towards my piano. She looked like she'd just stepped off of a plane from Carnival in Venice, decked out in blue silk and feathers. She sported a silver mask that hid her face and muffled her voice. I might have felt a shiver of suspicion or fear if I'd had time to be anything other than surprised by the painted red, plaster lips and pleasantly fragrant smell of the woman who suddenly confronted me over the back of my upright piano. My fingers faultered on a handul of sour notes, and then I simply stopped.
"Settle the bet!" She cried gleefully through her mask.
"What bet? With who?" I sputtered in reply.
She was already spinning away toward the door, her dress a silken, cerulean pool fanning around her waist. "The bet! With Ian! He says you won't take the test, but I know you will. And you'll be a match too!" she called over her shoulder as she disapeared through the door, never to be seen again.
The moment was at once the most extraordinary thing I had ever experienced and completely forgettable. The monotony of my daily life settled in as suddenly as the sassafras scented woman had come and gone, and the event quickly clouded in my mind with a dreamy haze. Like dominoes, the days of the next week fell with the same inevitable predictability as the chords of the chorus to "Sweet Caroline."
The following Friday night, I found myself escorting two drunk business men to the front of the airport to catch their Ubers. As we came to the curbside, the men started arguing about some controversy from work; ill feelings over a stolen client. I jumped in the middle to separate the men just as they began swinging fists, and an admirably solid punch landed square on my jaw. I pin wheeled backwards into the gutter, and though an oncoming vehicle's brakes squealed with the driver's effort to stop, I slammed into the hood hard enough to hear my ribs crack as the air whooshed out of my lungs.
Forty-five minutes later, my manager left me at the emergency room, sprained, bruised, and beaten. I grimaced as I lowered myself into a cool, plastic chair and looked around the waiting room. At two o' clock in the morning on a Saturday, the crowded room buzzed with conversations and stifled groans. It was going to be a long wait. I pulled out my phone to distract myself from the pain as an exhausted looking woman carrying a two year old boy walked from the front desk and sat in the chair next to mine.
"They'll see us soon, Ian," the woman cooed to her child has he burrowed his tiny, fevered face into her neck.
My ears perked up at the mention of his name and I turned toward them in curiosity. Social decorum screamed at me to remain quiet, but it was as though the scent of sassafras and the caress of feathers tickled my nose. The question that followed came out at involuntarily as a sneeze. "What's wrong with him?" I asked.
The woman looked at me with suspicion, but answered anyway, surrender evident in her shaking voice. "We've been fighting leukemia," she sighed. "He gets these terrible fevers, and we wind of here again and again. We're looking for a bone marrow donor, but these things can take time, I guess. we're still waiting for our match."
"I want to be tested for a match," I blurted as I locked bewildered eyes with the stranger sitting next to me in the ER waiting room. The time had come to follow through on the request from my blue lady at the piano bar. The time had come to settle the bet.
During the weeks that followed, I learned to believe in magic, I began to trust in miracles. There was never any doubt in my mind that I would be a match, and when the test came back confirming this, I could only nod and smile. Ian's parents were alternately shocked by the turn of events and grateful. When others asked what motivated me to act, I never mentioned the incident in the bar. No one would believe that a momentary encounter with a masked woman in a bar could turn this man who played the piano into the man who saved a child's life. There are things in this world that will always defy explanation, and sometimes, we have to let the most discordant notes weave themselves together to create their own beautiful song.
