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just out of the egg. The early-morning sunshine was shining in through the door glass. The officer screwed up his eyes against the daylight. I suppose we were just silhouettes to him. He opened his mouth, like he was going to say something, but he stopped.
    What?
I said. I realized he was going to tell us there had been a mistake. I wondered if we should run. I did not want to go back in detention. I wondered how far we would get if we ran. I wondered if they would come after us with dogs.
    The detention officer stood up. I heard his chair scrape on the linoleum floor. He stood there with his hands at his sides.
    “Ladies?” he said.
    “Yes?”
    He looked down at the ground, and then up again.
    “Best of luck,” he said.
    And we girls turned around and walked toward the light.
    I pushed open the double doors, and then I froze. It was the sunlight that stopped me. I felt so fragile from the detention center, I was afraid those bright rays of sunshine could snap me in half. I couldn’t take that first step outside.
    “What is de holdup, Lil Bee?”
    Yevette was standing behind me. I was blocking the door for everyone.
    “One moment, please.”
    Outside, the fresh air smelled of wet grass. It blew in my face. The smell made me panic. For two years I had smelled only bleach, and my nail varnish, and the other detainees’ cigarettes. Nothing natural. Nothing like this. I felt that if I took one step forward, the earth itself would rise up and reject me. There was nothing natural about me now. I stood there in my heavy boots with my breasts strapped down, neither a woman nor a girl, a creature who had forgotten her language and learned yours, whose past had crumbled to dust.
    “What de hell yu waitin fo, darlin?”
    “I am scared, Yevette.”
    Yevette shook her head and she smiled.
    “Maybe yu’s right to be scared, Lil Bee, cos yu a smart girl. Maybe me jus too dumb to be fraid. But me spend eighteen monthlocked up in dat place, an if yu tink me dumb enough to wait one second longer on account of your tremblin an your quakin, yu better tink two times.”
    I turned round to face her and I gripped on to the door frame.
    “I can’t move,” I said.
    That is when Yevette gave me a great push in the chest and I flew backward. And that is how it was, the first time I touched the soil of England as a free woman, it was not with the soles of my boots but with the seat of my trousers.
    “WU-ha-ha-ha!” said Yevette. “Welcome in de U-nited Kindom, int dat glorious?”
    When I got my breath back I started laughing too. I sat on the ground, with the warm sun shining on my back, and I realized that the earth had not rejected me and the sunlight had not snapped me in two.
    I stood up and I smiled at Yevette. We all took a few steps away from the detention center buildings. As we walked, when the other girls were not looking, I reached under my Hawaiian shirt and I undid the band of cotton that held my breasts strapped down. I unwound it and threw it on the ground and ground it into the dirt with the heel of my boot. I breathed deeply in the fresh, clean air.
    When we came to the main gate, the four of us girls stopped for a moment. We looked out through the high razor-wire fence and down the slopes of Black Hill. The English countryside stretched away to the horizon. Soft mist was hanging in the valleys, and the tops of the low hills were gold in the morning sun, and I smiled because the whole world was fresh and new and bright.

FROM THE SPRING OF 2007 until the end of that long summer when Little Bee came to live with us, my son removed his Batman costume only at bath times. I ordered a twin costume that I substituted while he splashed in the suds, so that at least I could wash the boy sweat and the grass stains out of the first. It was a dirty, green-kneed job, fighting master criminals. If it wasn’t Mr. Freeze with his dastardly ice ray, then it was the Penguin—Batman’s deadly foe—or the even more sinister Puffin,