Little Bee Read Online Free PDF

church I sat in the front pew, with Little Bee on my left and Batman on my
right. The church was stuffed with mourners, of course. No one from work—I
tried to keep my life and my magazine separate—but otherwise everybody Andrew
and I knew was there. It was disorientating, like having the entire contents of
one’s address book dressed in black and exported into pews in nonalphabetical
order. They had classified themselves according to some unwritten protocol of
grief, blood relatives ghoulishly close to the coffin, old girlfriends in a reluctant cluster near the baptismal font. I couldn’t bear to
look behind me and see this new natural order of things. It was all very much
too sudden. A week ago I had been a successful working mother. Now I was
sitting at my husband’s funeral, flanked by a superhero and a Nigerian refugee.
It seemed like a dream that might be awoken from with relatively little effort.
I stared at my husband’s coffin, strewn with white lilies. Batman stared at the
vicar. He cast an approving eye over the vicar’s stole and surplice. He gave
the vicar a solemn thumbs-up, one caped crusader to another. The vicar returned
the salute, then his thumb returned to the faded gilt
edging of his Bible.
    The
church was falling quiet; expectant. My son looked all around, then back at me. Where’s Daddy? he said.
    I
squeezed my son’s hot, sweaty hand, and listened to the coughs and sniffles
echoing round the church. I wondered how I could possibly explain my husband’s
death to his son. It was depression that killed Andrew, of course—depression
and guilt. But my son didn’t believe in death, let alone in the capacity of mere
emotions to cause it. Mr. Freeze’s ice rays, perhaps. The
Puffin’s lethal wingspan, at a stretch. But an
ordinary phone call , from a skinny African girl? It was impossible to
explain.
    I
realized I would have to tell my son the whole story, someday. I wondered where
I would begin. It was two years before, in the summer of 2005, that Andrew had
begun his long, slow slide into the depression that finally claimed him. It
started on the day we first met Little Bee, on a lonely beach in Nigeria. The
only souvenir I have of that first meeting is an absence where the middle
finger of my left hand used to be. The amputation is quite clean. In place of
my finger is a stump, a phantom digit that used to be responsible for the E, D, and C keys on my laptop. I
can’t rely on E, D, and C anymore. They go missing when I need them most. Pleased becomes please. Ecstasies becomes stasis.
    I
miss my finger most on deadline days, when the copy checkers have all gone home
and I’m typing up the last-minute additions to my magazine. We published an
editorial once where I said I was “wary of sensitive men.” I meant to say
“weary,” of course, and after a hundred outraged letters from the earnest
boyfriends who’d happened to glance at my piece on their partner’s coffee table
(presumably in between giving a back rub and washing the dishes), I began to
realize just how weary I was. It was a typographical accident, I told them. I
didn’t add , it was the kind of typographical accident
that is caused by a steel machete on a Nigerian beach. I mean, what does one
call the type of meeting where one gains an African girl and loses E, D, and C ? I do not think you have a word for it in your language —that’s
what Little Bee would say.
    I
sat in my pew, massaged the stump of my finger, and found myself acknowledging
for the first time that my husband had been doomed since the day we met Little
Bee. The intervening two years had brought a series of worsening premonitions,
culminating in the horrible morning ten days earlier when I had woken up to the
sound of the telephone ringing. My whole body had crawled with dread. It had
been an ordinary weekday morning. The June issue of my magazine was almost
ready to go to the printers, and Andrew’s column for The
Times was due in too. Just a normal