He heard it first at his mother's hospital bed, woven somewhere between the life support's beeps and the slow gurgle of her oxygen tank.
The second time, it was in the den of his father's home while the old man's revolver slowly slipped from his wrinkled hand. By then, he was hooked.

He'd tried at first to describe the sound, to those who would listen, but he never knew quite what to say. In his more eloquent moments he likened it to the sweetest, softest chorale music sung in a towering chapel hall. In his cups he called it a song that felt like a mother's touch. The rest of the time, he didn't call it anything at all: he'd learned that people didn't like him talking about hearing things. They tended to ask if he'd had help or talked to someone, and he had. The experts recommended pills, most of them, but they had made him quiet. Made him crazy. Made him lose time here and there. Finally he stopped taking them, and stopped scheduling meetings. He had a vague sense that the experts were quietly relieved.

It took a long time until he heard it again after that. Perhaps it was because he believed the experts, for a while. It could have been because he felt he shouldn't, that it was wrong for him to hear. And he made an effort. He went to school, and he went to work. So it wasn't his fault that he came to major in medicine: it just came naturally. And it wasn't his fault a part-time job at the university's clinic became a part-time job at a nursing home, and even then he did not hear it for some time. Even then working with the elderly, at the edge of this mortal coil, many passed away nearly in his arms without one chord of that angelic music. He began to think he really was crazy! But just at the end of his rope, when finally he couldn't stand it any longer--he heard it.

She was only sixty, the woman who died that night. Her name was Alice and she loved chess. He would play her in between his shifts, winning now and then before he discovered she was taking it easy on him. He had spoken with her often: a welcome change from the scattered, aged inhabitants of the nursing home, she told him jokes and funny stories. She said her stay there was temporary, and that she had great plans to see a particular park and its web-footed inhabitants.

And then she was dead.

It was time for their chess match and instead of sitting lively in her chair, legs crossed and a smile on her face, she was in her bed. Her skin was thin and nearly translucent. Her spirit and her laughter were gone. And instead, on the cool breeze grazing the curtains... he heard it. Like an angel's melody. Like a lover's song heard on the doorstep, hat already off. Like a beckoning home. It was gone in minutes, but he heard it ringing in his ears for hours after.

He supposed it was then, examining the fatal dose of sleeping medicine that had been mistakenly given to her, when he truly embraced the fact he was different. He supposed it was then, pocketing the bottle of pills, when he knew what he would do.

Because he would hear that music again, at any cost.