“This has been the problem all along,” she said.

“What’s been what problem?” Scarlett said, stifling a yawn.

“My voice. It’s like I have a…cork…a cork bottling up my thoughts…and keeping them from my head. It’s here. Here between my heart and my head.”

She pointed at her throat with the cigarette.

“My voice. My voice is locked up.”

“You sound fine to me,” Scarlett said.

“My inner voice! Are you always this literal? It makes me wonder what they teach you.”

“They’re usually wasting our time with Geometry, French, and American Government,” Scarlett said, looking out the window and yawning until her eyes watered. “We don’t get to our inner voices until next year.”

She could feel Mrs. Amberson staring at her neck.

“Don’t be snide, child,” she said mildly. “It’s bad for your chi. In any case, performers often go through this. When they get blocked, their voice literally locks up. They can’t sing. I saw it all the time in the theater. The throat is one of the body’s great gateways. It carries blood to the head. It carries nerve impulses from the brain to the rest of the body. When you think about it, we are all about our throats.”

Scarlett ignored this and went back to sleep with her head against the cab window. She was jolted awake when the cab pulled to a jerky halt. They had stopped in front of one of the Broadway theaters, terrifying a tourist with a large coffee and an even larger camera. Mrs. Amberson tossed a bill through the opening and sprang out. She led Scarlett down to a door marked CAST AND CREW ONLY.

It was amazingly dark inside that doorway. They were in a little hallway with a warren of rooms, stuffed with racks of clothes labeled with masking tape. Mrs. Amberson picked her way through, finally getting to a staircase leading up into a massive, partially lit stage.

“Over here,” a very deep, very crisp voice called. “And be careful or you’ll kill yourself on those wires.”

A man emerged from the darkness on the other side of the stage.

“Billy!” Mrs. Amberson exclaimed.

Billy was exceptionally tall, with immaculately groomed white hair. He wore a white shirt, light khaki pants, and white shoes. He looked like a librarian, or someone who might run an art museum. He greeted Mrs. Amberson by exchanging cheek-to-cheek kisses. Then, much to Scarlett’s surprise, he gently sniffed her head, like she was a flower.

“You’ve been smoking,” he said.

She looked down guiltily. This Billy appeared to have genuine power over her, and that meant he was interesting to Scarlett. He turned to her now and smiled kindly.

“Amy’s dragged you out at this hour?” he said. “There’s coffee over by the piano, if you need it.”

“O’Hara,” she said, “this is Billy Whitehouse. He can unblock the best, and if anyone needs an unblocking, it’s you. No offense.”

Scarlett said hello and made her way to the pot. She took a seat off to the side, looking around at the endless depths of the ceiling, the miles of cords and cables, the taped Xs all over the floor, the cherry picker in front of the stage. Broadway kind of looked like a construction site during the day.