Music
The next day, Taylor woke up with the feeling that he needed to do something. He remembered how he had begun to play some music a few days before, when he had found Charlotte’s journal. That had completely distracted him and ruined his mood, but the idea of playing music had made him feel okay for a while. He knew that if Zac was really gone, he would never be able to make music the same way again, if at all, but maybe playing a little could improve his mood. It had always worked before when he was going through something bad. Somewhere, he had journals full of songs he had composed in the days and weeks after Charlotte’s death.
He didn’t want to play any of those, though. He wanted to create something new, just to assure himself that he was still capable of it.
After downing a few cups of coffee, Taylor felt awake and alert enough to tackle the task of making music. He sat down at his piano and cracked his knuckles a few times. In his mind, he could still hear Charlotte reminding him how bad that was for him and how it would someday give him arthritis so that he wouldn’t be able to play. Surprisingly, the memory only made him smile. Maybe he was, finally, healing a little bit.
For a few minutes, Taylor could do nothing but just stare at the keys. The desire to play was bubbling up inside him, but he couldn’t seem to get it to come to the surface. He thought of the songs the band had been slowly working on over the last few months before he had left. They were only small snippets and fragments that might later form real songs. Isaac and Zac were pushing to get another album soon so that it would, hopefully, distract Taylor from the depression he was sinking into. It hadn’t really seemed to work.
Taylor had dozens of excuses for them as to why he didn’t want to make any new music. It had only been a year since their last album, after all, and their tour had ended just a few months before Charlotte’s death. It wasn’t time for a new album. They knew he was just trying to delay it, of course, and they wouldn’t let him get away with it.
Whenever they could, Zac or Isaac would try to ease Taylor subtly into it. Sometimes they would remind him of an old song they had never finished in the hopes of piquing some interest in him. It never worked. Other times, they would just begin playing something and hope that whatever it was would be contagious enough for Taylor to join in. That rarely seemed to work, either.
Taylor just couldn’t. The music had left him along with Charlotte. He tried, on his own, to write about what he felt. He wrote page after page about losing her, but none of them were songs he wanted to share with the world. Those were his feelings and his alone. No one else could or would understand what he was feeling. While it felt good to write about it, a sort of catharsis, it didn’t make him feel any more like going through the whole album process again like nothing in his life had changed.
Then he had left.
Taylor still couldn’t help wondering how things might be different if he hadn’t left. He had no clue why Zac was missing, but it felt a lot like his fault. If he had stayed, if he had worked on a new album in spite of his lack of desire to play music, maybe everything would have been okay.
There was no way to know, Taylor realized. Whatever had happened was over and done. He couldn’t go back in time and change it. But he could try to keep living, in spite of all the reasons he had not to.
With that thought in mind, he finally began to play. It wasn’t anything old and familiar. It was a new melody that seemed to come to him by the second. He knew he should have been writing it down, but he didn’t think he could truly duplicate it anyway. There was a certain emotion to it, a certain feeling unique to that moment, that he wasn’t sure he would ever feel again. The song was a part of it, and it would have to stay that way.
The song lasted for several minutes. Taylor played and played until his fingers began to ache and the song faded away. With it went any memory he might have had of the actual notes. It had felt like he was purging something from his body, and he wasn’t sure if he wanted it back anyway. He was fine with letting the song fade off into the air and never return.
Just as the last echo of the song vanished, the phone began to ring.
Taylor didn’t know who could possibly be calling him, especially relatively early in the morning, but he had a feeling that it wasn’t going to be a pleasant phone call. He jumped up from the piano bench and hurried to pick up the nearest phone. As he did, he saw on the caller ID that it was the police department. That did nothing to relieve his worries.
“Hello?”
“Is this Taylor Hanson?”
“Yes, it is,” Taylor replied, recognizing the detective’s voice.
“As I said before, I want to keep you up to date on the developments of the case. Your brother’s disappearance, I mean. Have you spoken with any of your family today?”
Taylor didn’t like the sound of any of that. He sank down onto the couch and attempted to brace himself for whatever news was coming. “N-no sir, I haven’t.”
“I called your parents first, but I wanted to call you as well,” Detective Davies said.
“Okay,” Taylor replied, growing impatient with the detective’s endless small talk. “What is it? What happened?”
“We found your brother’s car.”
“His… car?” Taylor repeated, not entirely sure what that truly meant.
“Yes,” the detective replied. “In a town outside of St. Louis called Oakville. It was parked by the side of Mississippi, so…”
“You think he jumped,” Taylor replied, cutting Davies off. He could see all too clearly where this conversation was going.
“That is our theory, yes. We’re working with the local police to begin searching later today. And as always, we’ll keep you and your family updated.”
“Thanks,” Taylor said, thinking of nothing else appropriate to say.
“Thank you for your time, Mr. Hanson,” the detective said.
Taylor wanted to say something else, but could think of nothing. He bid the detective goodbye and hung up his phone.
So that was it, he thought. Everything he had feared… the worst possible outcome… was really coming true. Zac was never coming back, and he still didn’t understand why. That letter, wherever it had gone, was the last thing he had of his brother and he hadn’t even read it. There would be no great revelation about why Zac had done it as there had been with Charlotte. He was just gone.
Taylor realized, with a sense of dread, that someone needed to tell Shiloh. She wasn’t technically family, so she wouldn’t be receiving a call from the police. Although he feared her reaction, and wasn’t even sure that he could bring himself to say the words out loud, Taylor realized that he would have to be the one to deliver the news to her.