Maddie was staying at the Alliance Health Center in Jackson. It was a large, imposing red brick campus off Jackson Rd. The car rides there and back were usually noiseless and tense. Evan's parents would never say it out loud, but it was obvious they were both petrified that their youngest child and only daughter had been permanently damaged.

Maddie's arrival had been both an upheaval and a blessing to the family. They had spent the last decade establishing themselves as a quartet when suddenly there was a squalling, messy addition to be looked after. Evan and Jason both noted how much more lively their mother seemed in the months after Maddie's birth.

"Usually moms get depressed after they have a kid," Jason had told his younger brother.

"She's probably happy cause it's a girl," said Evan. He was aware his parents had wanted him to be a girl. It was the whole reason they'd gotten pregnant again.

She was born in mid-October, and her parents named her Madison Shea. She hadn't even made it out of the incubator before they began calling her Maddie.

Evan's mom turned in her seat as they backed out of the driveway.

"Evan, did you make another CD for Maddie?"

"Yeah."

"What is it?"

"It's Lee and Crystal. Their last studio performances."

"I don't think that's a good idea."

"She'll be fine," said their dad. "They let her have her earbuds again. As long as that goddamn Kiss From a Rose song isn't on it."

"It's not," said Evan.

"I'm not comfortable with you giving her that," said Evan's mom. "I don't want to set her off again. She's doing so well."

"It's fine," said Evan. "I just wanted to bring her something. Just thought it'd be nice."

They drove out of the sub in silence.

"I think it'll be fine," said their dad. "It's not like she's never going to hear that song again. If it's going to be bad, I'd rather it be now when she's surrounded by help. I think Evan's right, let her have something. It'll help."

"I'm not comfortable giving her anything having to do with Lee DeWyze."

"You make it sound like it's his fault," said their dad. "The guy doesn't even know Maddie exists."

"I just won't give it to her," said Evan.

"I can ask the doctor when we get there," said his dad. "If he's fine with it, I'll let you know."

Evan's mom sighed.

"Fine," she said. "Ask the doctor first. I don't know why she was ever even into that show."

"Cause of Jason," said Evan. "She'd watch it with Jason, originally."

The conversation went silent. Evan could tell his mother was fighting tears again. Evan put his earbuds in and listened to his iPod and thought about his little sister.

Though they'd always gotten along, Maddie was never as close with Evan as she

was with Jason. While the two of them enjoyed each other's company, Maddie was always more interested in what Jason was doing, what Jason was about. Jason was an anomaly to her, a virtual adult that didn't need to be directly obeyed and therefore could be learned from through experience and wisdom instead of discipline and order. Even his discharge hadn't put much of a dent in her admiration.

In the recent years when Jason had been overseas, the one thing Evan and Maddie had bonded over was American Idol. Maddie started watching it in 2005, the year Carrie Underwood won and the same year Jason enlisted. Maddie had already liked country divas, everyone from Martina McBride and Faith Hill to the Dixie Chicks and Shania Twain. She picked from their parents' old CD collections, uploaded them onto the family desktop computer and walked around with her earbuds in listening to them on her iPod. So when blonde Carrie had come smiling into her audition, Maddie was hooked and stayed hooked.

She loved the competition of the series, loved Simon Cowell and his verbal barbs, and she showed a perceptive ability to predict which contestants would be the top 3 finalists based on the way they were portrayed during the auditions. The only winners she hadn't gotten right were Chris Daughtry from Season 5, who ended up in a shocking 4th place, and Chris Sligh from Season 6, who ended up getting 10th place.

The previous season had been a real snore for Maddie, with the exception of Lee DeWyze and Crystal Bowersox. After Jason's suicide in June she had developed an unhealthy attachment to them. She'd first suffered from a paralyzing hysteria that then cooled to an ominous, tearful silence. Other than that, she hadn't initially exhibited any troubling signs.

The morning after Jason had been put in a black bag and taken out on a stretcher, there had been a grief counselor named Gretchen who had come over and insisted Maddie be brought in for analysis and treatment. Their parents had no choice but to turn Gretchen down, given the sizable cost and the fact that their father's health insurance wouldn't be kicking in for another month and a half. Gretchen had told them she would be in touch, and her concern had proven prescient, for Maddie took a sharp downward turn almost as soon as the bodyless memorial service was over.

Aside from an increasingly disturbing inability to fall asleep, her family noticed that she was absent-mindedly sucking her thumb again, which she hadn't done since she was five. She never seemed to take her earbuds out, eventually to the extent that she couldn't fall asleep at all without them. Then, soon after, she began having to fall asleep in her parent's bed, which she'd never had to do, even as a toddler.

The truly frightening part of it came when she started talking of a place called gloryland, a strange mindscape she said Jason had told her about in a dream. She would awaken in the night clammy and weeping from nightmares. She said she had visions of Jason visiting her and saying he'd been kissed by a rose—a line from one of the songs Lee DeWyze had covered, one of the songs she listened to obsessively on her iPod. The rose had sent him to this place called gloryland.

"It's open," she'd said when asked for a description. "Very open, this field thing. Like a prairie, with lots of long grass. It's really nice. It's windy."

"Where is gloryland exactly?" their dad had asked.

"It's in our heads," said Maddie. "But we can only see it if we're dead."

Evan's parents had allowed this to go on for about a week, telling themselves with increasing desperation that the behavior would pass, but then one Saturday night they had awoken to find her in the kitchen, stark naked and carving into her forehead with a steak knife.

They had rushed her to emergency, Maddie disconcertingly calm as rivets of blood ran down her face, her mother pressing a cloth to her forehead long after the relatively shallow cuts had stopped running.

They had called Gretchen the Grief Counselor and she'd come out to the hospital. Once Maddie's injuries were dealt with by the emergency room personnel-- no stitches, thank God, the cuts were all shallow-- Gretchen had said they needed to go to Alliance and right now.

"She needs to be sedated," Gretchen had told them. "She needs to sleep."

Maddie had gone that night and had stayed there since.

The doctors were pretty certain it was just some kind of temporary psychosis brought on by acute post-traumatic stress, and while Maddie would carry both the physical and mental scars for the rest of her life, a full recovery was more than likely. Just the same, they elected to keep her as long as deemed necessary. The last thing anyone wanted was a relapse.

They fed her an extremely low dosage of sedatives and other drugs. She ate rubbery cafeteria food and she wasn't allowed around sharp objects for the first several days. They made her talk about her feelings and take sleep medication for the first week until she could get through a night without waking up in cold fear, with something new to report on gloryland and what Jason was doing there. They let her listen to her iPod when she was out in the hallway and the game room where they could see her, although she had to give it up before bedtime in exchange for her sleeping medicine.

Her parents and Evan visited several times a week at first, although they began to taper off their visits as her condition improved. The doctors insisted, saying while their presence was helpful they would need to let her come into her own without getting dependent on the idea of them being there every single day.

The ride out to Alliance took about forty-five minutes. Evan listened to his own iPod on the way.

When he wasn't thinking about Maddie, Evan wondered what he would sing for his Idol audition. He knew he'd want to sing rock music if he got onto the show, like Daughtry or the David Cook guy who'd won a few seasons back. If he became an actual musician, he figured he'd like to do something like Radiohead or Coldplay or U2. But he didn't really know.

Truth be told, the thought of performing in front of anyone else had seemed so uncanny and unlikely that Evan had barely given it any serious thought. He didn't even really consider himself a serious music fan. He liked songs that caught his ear and made mix CDs and had a few bands that he admired, but he wasn't an audio nerd and didn't know every bit of trivia about even his favorite bands. He was, at best, a casual listener.

In the car he liked to sing Pearl Jam and Fuel and Kings of Leon and other things that were baritone and 90s and relatively easy. He'd first discovered he could belt to Creed and Default, something he'd never admit out loud to anyone.

A few months ago he'd recorded his singing voice into a tape recorder he'd taken from Jason. He sang I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For while sitting in his car in the driveway one late night. The noises that had come out of the speaker when he played the tape back had embarrassed him so much he'd thrown it straight into the garbage bin. For a few days he hadn't sung at all.

But soon enough the itch had returned, and he'd tried again, starting with more of the low stuff, and he kept practicing. Soon he felt like he was getting better. If he kept trying, he knew he would get better. He sang along with Bono, he sang along with Chris Martin, he sang along with Thom Yorke, Billy Corgan, Eddie Vedder, Julian Casablancas, Jack White, Alex Turner, and Isaac Slade.

"You still going to Nashville tomorrow?" his dad asked, interrupting his thoughts, the dashes of the highway disappearing under the SUV one by one.

"Yeah, planning on it."

"Who you going with?"

"I don't know yet."

"Well, you're not going alone. Find someone."

"I will."