Read My Soul to Take for Free Online Page B

were talking about the infection. Something about the family from Hong Kong. They had all seen cases like Mami’s.
All
of them. The Asian man said there’d been riots in North Korea. They talked about how fast it spreads, maybe in the air. There’s already a name for it in Puerto Rico:
La Enfermidad de Rezo
. The Praying Disease. Because of the hands. The body seizes up—it makes them look like they’re praying.”
    All the words Carlos had been saving for her spilled from him.
    “Then I slipped out. No one checked my ID on the way out of the gate. The guard was just a kid. I knew it would be a mistake, but I blogged about it. Not everything, but enough. That was the night I called you, before I changed my mind and deleted the page. But the internet is forever. The history was there. By morning, police were knocking on my door. Cameras had caught me at the facility. I thought I was going to prison.
    “My father knew someone in the governor’s office. That’s the only thing that kept me from being locked up. But they said I had to be quarantined because I’d been exposed. I didn’t buy it. The ‘quarantine’ was just a way to try to keep me quiet. If I had admittedmyself to a hospital, I might not have been free to go for a lot longer than thirty days. They’re hiding a plague, Phee. Worse than the flu strains. Right in Puerto Rico!”
    Carlos went silent, emptied.
    A low wind flurried against the house, setting off the cacophony of wind chimes outside their bedroom window. Phoenix wondered if the coyotes were out hunting.
    “I know, Carlito,” Phoenix said in the hushed voice she saved for ballads. “I know.”
    That night, she told her husband about the visit from John Jamal Wright. And the websites he had led her to, and the stories being told. And the Glow she had refused, but now wished she had kept.
    Phoenix and Carlos talked all night long.

Five
    Los Angeles
    One Week Later
    B
lack roads roll beneath a blind-eyed sky
, Phoenix thought, trying out infant lyrics as John Wright’s SUV ferried her and her family high up narrow, darkened Mulholland Drive, past the secluded mansions hidden behind gates, sentries, and jungles. Occasional lights twinkled through the foliage to remind her that they were passing homes instead of journeying through wilderness, although roadside signs at every other house proclaimed that the neighborhood was for sale.
Armored in marble, we can’t hear the children cry
.
    It had been a long time since lyrics appeared spontaneously, and rarer still that lyrics came without chords, so maybe Carlos was right about the gig: once she was on the stage, it would all come back. Like a trained dog.
Thatta girl
—
sing! Play! Roll over!
    “I must be crazy,” she muttered.
    Carlos gave her a baleful look, shaking his head. “You’re fine. Just breathe.”
    After she’d vowed to retire from performing, she was doing a
corporate
gig? Even if Clarion World Health was doing the work it claimed, how could she have convinced herself that singing for eight hundred of Clarion’s handpicked faithful would have any impact outside Beverly Hills? She would reach more people plugging in her amp at Times Square, if she could get security clearance. At least that would have some integrity.
    “Why did I agree to do this again?” Phoenix said.
    “You committed,” Carlos said. “Ride it out, baby.” Slipping intotheir familiar roles already. Phoenix the fragile artist; Carlos her patient wrangler.
    Wright was driving. The young white woman in the passenger seat beside him was stoic, and had barely moved except to tap the keys on her wristphone’s keyboard. Her smile when she had introduced herself in Paso had been tight, forced, as if she was as reluctant to take Phoenix to L.A. as Phoenix was to go. Like Wright, she looked like she was barely old enough to be out of college. Was the company run by kids?
    Phoenix’s mind went back to her new lyrics, which were still missing music.
Waking up is