Little Bee Read Online Free PDF Page A

My son had his Batman costume, I still used my husband’s surname, and Little Bee, though she was relatively safe with us, still clung to the name
she had taken in a time of terror. We were exiles from reality, that summer. We
were refugees from ourselves.
    To
flee from cruelty is the most natural thing in the world, of course. And the
timing that brought us together that summer was so very cruel. Little Bee
telephoned us on the morning they released her from the detention center. My
husband picked up her call. I only found out much later that it was her—Andrew
never told me. Apparently she let him know she was coming, but I don’t suppose
he felt up to seeing her face again. Five days later he killed himself by
hanging. They found my husband with his feet treading empty air, touching the
soil of no country. Death, of course, is a refuge. It’s where you go when a new
name, or a mask and cape, can no longer hide you from yourself. It’s where you
run to when none of the principalities of your conscience will grant you
asylum.
    Little
Bee knocked on my front door five days after my husband died, which was ten
days after they released her from detention. After a journey of five thousand
miles and two years, she arrived just too late to find Andrew alive, but just
in time for his funeral. Hello Sarah, she said.
    Little
Bee arrived at eight A.M. and the undertaker knocked at ten. Not one second to,
or one second past. I imagine the undertaker had been silently standing outside
our front door for several minutes, looking at his watch, waiting for our lives
to converge onto the precise fault line at which our past could be cleaved from
our future with three soft strikes of the bright brass knocker.
    My
son opened the door, and took in the undertaker’s height, his impeccable
tailoring, and his sober demeanor. I suppose the undertaker looked for all the world like Batman’s workaday alter ego. My son
shouted along the hallway to me: Mummy, it’s Bruce Wayne!
    That
morning I walked out onto the street and I stood there, looking at Andrew’s
coffin through the thick, slightly greenish glass of the hearse window. When
Little Bee came out to join me, bringing Batman by the hand, the undertaker
ushered us to a long, black limousine and nodded us in. I told him we’d rather
walk.
    We
looked as if we’d been cobbled together in Photoshop, the three of us, walking
to my husband’s funeral. One white middle-class mother, one
skinny black refugee girl, and one small Dark Knight from Gotham City. It
seemed as if we’d been cut-and-pasted. My thoughts raced, nightmarish and
disconnected.
    It
was only a few hundred yards to the church, and the three of us walked in the
road ahead of the hearse while an angry queue of traffic built up behind. I
felt awful about that.
    I
was wearing a dark gray skirt and jacket with gloves and charcoal stockings. Little
Bee was wearing my smart black raincoat over the clothes they let her out of
the detention center in—a mortifyingly unfunereal Hawaiian shirt and blue
jeans. My son was wearing an expression of absolute joy. He, Batman, had
stopped the traffic. His cape swirled in his tiny slipstream as he strode
proudly ahead, his grin stretching from bat ear to bat ear beneath the darkness
of his mask. Occasionally his superior vision would detect an enemy that needed
smiting, and when this occurred my son would simply stop, smite, and continue. He
was worried that the Puffin’s invisible hordes might attack me. I was worried
that my son hadn’t done a wee before we left the house, and might therefore do
it in his bat pants. I was also worried about being a widow for the rest of my
life.
    At
first I’d thought it was quite brave of me to insist on walking to the church,
but now I felt dizzy and foolish. I thought I might faint. Little Bee held on
to my elbow and whispered to me to take deep breaths. I remember thinking, How strange, that it should be you who is keeping me on my feet.
    In
the