Later -- much later, when the panic and the terror had subsided and they were able to look back with a grim numb acceptance -- they were able to construct a clearer picture of what had happened; able to piece together the forensics, able to piece together the what-thens and the and-nexts to build an image of the night Justin had disappeared. Later, after the authorities had marked the case cold, and Lynn had stopped wandering around like Lady Macbeth in the middle of the night, and Chris had been arrested twice and hadn't apologized to anyone for anything in months -- after each bit of evidence led to nothing, after the police detective spoke the fateful words "no sign of foul play", after the FBI agent gently suggested perhaps Mr. Timberlake had left under his own power and simply didn't want to be found -- after all of it, JC disappeared too.

He left messages for each of the others, for his mother and father, for his siblings. Each of them were identical, just a string of softly uninflected syllables. I'm going to find him, and if I can't find him, I'll find myself. I'll have my phone on. Don't wait for me to come back.

There were messages, from the road. Joey checked his voice mail to find a minute of static, punctuated only by broken humming, a single phrase repeated over and over again. After a minute of silence, JC's voice, low and intense: "It's beautiful out here. I'd nearly forgotten how to see the sunrise." Lance, back in college and drowning in the middle of finals, opened his campus mailbox to find a postcard with a smudged and water-stained postmark and a single line on the back: love you, miss you, be strong. Chris caught a glimpse of familiar curls in the back of the club audience on the night he first performed again for an audience, and later he received an email saying "Keep the music alive." For Lynn, once a month, there was a packet of letters, scrawled in JC's spidery handwriting across anything that came to hand, written in crayon and pencil and ink of every color under the sun, telling all the stories of Justin that JC had never told anyone. She kept them tied together with a cord of leather and could never read any of them more than once, but sometimes at night she would take them out and let the letters sift through her hands as though she could read the future by studying how they fell.

Two years after Justin had disappeared, countless months after JC had followed, Joey opened the door of his house to find JC standing there. He was tanned, thin, wearing a pair of jeans that slid over his hips and frayed at the seams, with his hair blown loose and looking as though it hadn't been cut in months. "I'm ready to come home now," he said, and Joey just held the door open and let him inside.

JC never spoke of it, never told anyone where he had been and what he had done, but those terrible first two years changed them all, and JC was no different. "What will you do?" Joey asked him, a week after he had returned, once he had showered and cut his hair and spent an uncomfortable time that felt like forever in fitting himself carefully back into the puzzle pieces of his life.

JC just looked at him. "Make music again. It's who I am. I found something different when I was gone, but some things never change."

The first album received a flood of publicity, of newspaper articles and rumors and whispered incessant commentary; the label had agreed to put it out without question, sight unseen, hoping to cash in on the last bit of mystery surrounding Justin's disappearance. Everyone but JC thought it would be more of the same, familiar pop music -- altered and transformed, dredged through personal pain, colored with hints and shades of it, but familiar still the same. What they received instead was a canvas across which JC had slit open a vein and bled sound.

JC sat down the others, Lance and Chris and Joey, the three of them always his first and most important audience. "I won't explain," he said, standing in front of them, and passed out headphones. "Never explain. Never apologize."

It started with a low slow rush of water sliding into your ears, soft like heartbeats, warm like forever. It was chimes like crystal and a drum like the note that had sounded at the beginning of the universe and behind it all there were women's voices in languages no one understood, rising, falling, wailing, turning their lamentation into polyphony, sliding and falling on top of each other to build a tower of sound. It shifted and curled around itself and cut through all pretense. Joey's cheeks were wet before the second track, and halfway through the third Lance buried his face in his hands and shook, steadily, until it was done, and Chris got up halfway through the fourth track to pace back and forth, three steps either way, never tripping over the cord of the headphones. Each piece was unique, and each one flowed so beautifully from the last that there was no way to distinguish, and halfway through everything else cut out and it was just JC's hands on the piano, octave to octave, pulling, clawing, pouring it all into the sound, leaving nothing behind and nothing unsaid.

When the final chord faded away, no one moved for what felt like an eternity but could not have been more than two or three minutes, and then Chris pulled off his headphones and dropped them to the floor. "Yes," was all he said, looking JC straight in the eye, and walked out the door.

"What are you going to call it?" Joey rubbed a hand over his face, pulled up the hem of his t-shirt to dry his skin.

"Human Voices Wake Us," JC said. "It's the only thing it could be called."

The critics called it the most original work of a generation. The label deemed it "unexpected". It barely scratched the charts, and sold a fraction of what anyone but JC had hoped for it to sell. It won four Grammys and a recording contract for the soprano JC had found, a college junior from Lincoln, Nebraska, whose voice could reach notes that most musicians could barely dream of and sounded like the voice of God in doing so. Seven months after its release, when it could only be purchased via Internet mail-order and in the most eclectic of small independent stores, JC received a letter from a woman in Iowa who said that her son had died of cancer and JC's album had kept her from following.

When the label refused to renew his contract, JC only nodded. He had lost the ability for anger, somewhere, lost the ability for rage and upset and disappointment; it was all tied up in his music, bound in chains of notes and chords. He went home and made a few phone calls. Five days later he had a sixty-voice choir singing overtones for half an hour over synthesizer and electric guitar and doumbek. The second album was released on his own label, and he called it unErrantly and never explained why, and by then he'd lost the original audience and picked up one willing to follow him wherever he took them.

Lance graduated from college with a degree in astrophysics. Joey and Kelly had a boy and named him Randall. The third track on Past Lives Present Tense was called "Baby Stardust, Remembering, Sings The Blues" and mixed Randall screaming to be fed with Chris, uncredited, whispering the coordinates of stars that had died before any of them had been born, wrapped around with the sound of a heartbeat, the violin sobbing like heartbreak. In the middle of it, there was twenty-three seconds of silence, and then the white noise of radio static.

JC knew that he shouldn't be able to sleep with the intensity of it; he should have been pale, shadowed, unable to eat, consumed by the music and the feel of it, the way it rose to his fingers and slid out of him. Instead, he tumbled every night into bed and was asleep before his eyes finished closing, and woke up every morning to channel his life into measure after measure.

Every June 23, the anniversary of his disappearance, they gathered to toast Justin, wherever he might be. Chris and Joey had given up hope years before, closed the doors, declared him dead if for nothing more than their own peace of mind, but JC could feel it in the pulse of the Justin-shaped hole left within him. Wherever he might be, whatever he might be doing, Justin wasn't dead.

Fifty-Two Weeks of Gravity was next, and If If, Then Then after that. JC did the cover art himself, and the dedications always ended with "For Justin, wherever I might find him."

No one ever commented on the fact that JC never, on any of his albums, sang a single note.

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