A New Life

The last thing Arthur Pemberton felt was the seatbelt cutting into his collarbone, and the last thing he thought was, I really should have gotten that brake pad checked.

Then there was a sound like the world folding in half, and then there was nothing, and then there was something that was not quite nothing, which was worse.

He had always assumed dying would be dramatic. Tunnels of light. A booming voice. Relatives waving from a warm, golden distance, maybe his mother, who'd been dead eleven years and would surely have something to say about how he'd let himself go. He'd built up a whole mental slideshow over sixty-one years of half-hearted churchgoing and late-night wondering: pearly gates, or failing that, something with fire and a sulphurous smell and a great deal of paperwork. He'd made peace, mostly, with either. What he had not made peace with, what no sermon had ever prepared him for, was the possibility of neither.

Because here he was - wherever here was - and there were no gates. No fire. No relatives, warm or otherwise.

There was a nightlight shaped like a moon, plugged into a socket near a skirting board painted the pale, chalky pink of the inside of a shell. There was a rug with a road printed on it, little looping streets for little plastic cars. There was a wardrobe with a sticker of a unicorn peeling at one corner, and a shelf of books with their spines cracked soft from reading, and a bed with a quilt patterned in stars, and in the bed, asleep, was a small girl with her thumb near her mouth and her hair fanned out across the pillow like she'd been arranged by someone who loved her very much.

Arthur stood - or did whatever the equivalent of standing was, because when he looked down he did not see feet, or hands, or the beige cardigan his daughter always teased him about - in the corner of this stranger's bedroom, and did not understand one single thing about where he was.

"Hello?" he said, and no sound came out that he could hear, and yet the word seemed to sit in the room anyway, the way a smell does.

He tried to remember the crash. The wet road. The deer, or the shape he'd thought was a deer, at the very edge of the headlights. He tried to remember if there had been a light, an angel, a summons, and found that the memory simply stopped, the way a reel of film stops and flaps against the projector, and then this began: pink walls, moon nightlight, sleeping child, and him, standing in the corner like a coat someone had forgotten to hang up.

He thought of his wife, Marion, forty years married, and wondered if she was somewhere like this too, in some other child's room, equally baffled. He thought of the eulogy someone would have to write, and hoped they'd mention the tomatoes he grew, because he'd been proud of the tomatoes. He thought, with a kind of rising, ridiculous panic, is this it? Is this the whole afterlife - just standing in the dark, watching a child sleep, forever?

He did not know that the girl would wake in four hours and seventeen minutes, rub her eyes, look directly at the corner where he stood, and say, in the matter-of-fact voice of someone remarking on the weather:

"Hello. Are you going to live here now?"

He did not know that yet. For now, he only stood there, an old man-shaped absence in the corner of a stranger's bedroom, waiting for a heaven that was not coming, in a room that smelled like crayons and warm cotton, utterly, hopelessly lost.

Nora Okafor was seven years old, and she had always known there was a corner of her room that felt occupied, the way you can tell a chair has just been sat in even if nobody's there.

She had mentioned this to her mother exactly once. Her mother, who worked long shifts and came home smelling like the hospital, had smiled the tired smile she used for things she didn't have time to worry about, and said, "That's just Mr. Whistle, probably," because Nora had, in fact, already invented an imaginary friend named Mr. Whistle at the age of five, who had since retired to an imaginary bungalow and was rarely heard from.

But this was not Mr. Whistle. Mr. Whistle had never made the corner feel like this - like the air had gotten thicker, like someone was standing very still and trying very hard not to be noticed, the way her older cousin did when he was in trouble and hoping no one would ask him about it.

So on the night that Arthur arrived, though of course she had no way of knowing his name yet, or that he had once been thirty-five, or that he had grown, in his lifetime, the best tomatoes on Marchbanks Road four years running - on that night, Nora woke up at 2:14 in the morning for no reason at all, the way children sometimes do, and looked straight at the corner, and there he was.

He did not look scary. That was the first thing. He looked like a drawing that hadn't quite been coloured in - grey-ish, soft at the edges, wearing what might have been a cardigan, with an expression of such profound and total bewilderment that Nora, who was very used to grown-ups pretending to know things they didn't, found this immediately trustworthy.

"Hello," she said. "Are you going to live here now?"

The grey man's mouth moved. No sound came out of it that Nora's ears could hear, but somehow the words landed in her head anyway, soft, like a voice on the other side of a wall.

"I— I don't know. I don't know where 'here' is. I don't know where I am at all."

"You're in my room," Nora said, sitting up. "I'm Nora. What's your name?"

"Arthur," he said, and then, because it seemed suddenly, urgently important, "Am I dead?"

Nora considered this with the seriousness of a girl who had once spent an entire car ride considering whether clouds had feelings. "Probably," she said. "You look a bit see-through. Grandma Ruth was see-through in my dream after she died, except she had better cardigans." She paused. "Sorry. Was that rude? Mummy says I can be rude sometimes."

"No," said Arthur, and found, to his enormous surprise, that some small tight thing in his chest - if he still had a chest - had loosened slightly. "No, that was not rude at all."

"Why are you? In my room, I mean, and not, like—" she waved a small hand vaguely at the ceiling, at the ceiling and everything beyond it, "-up there? Mrs Davis says that when die we go to the clouds. I think maybe you got lost."

"Maybe. I don't know," Arthur admitted. "I don't know anything. I was in my car. And then I was here. I keep expecting someone to come and explain, but no one has."

Nora nodded slowly, the way she nodded when her teacher explained fractions - not because she understood, but because nodding felt like the responsible thing to do while she worked it out. She was quiet for a moment. Then she brightened, the way children brighten when they hit upon a theory that solves everything.

"I bet," she said, almost bouncing, "that you're my imaginary friend now."

"I'm sorry?"

"My imaginary friend. Everybody has to have one. Mr. Whistle retired to his bungalow ages ago and never even visits, and I've been sort of needing a new one, and you showed up in my room in the middle of the night which is EXACTLY how it's supposed to happen. My friend says her imaginary friend showed up in her bathtub once, so this is completely normal." She said all this in the breathless, tumbling way of someone reciting facts she had only just invented but now believed utterly.

Arthur - who forty seconds ago had been contemplating an eternity of standing mute in a corner, unmourned and unexplained, a man erased from the record of both heaven and hell - found that he did not know what to say to this. It was, of the two options he'd spent his whole life preparing for, considerably stranger than either.

"I don't think I'm imaginary," he said carefully. "I think I might actually be here."

"That's even better," said Nora, with the confidence of someone for whom this was obviously true. "You're a real imaginary friend. Do you want to see my room properly? I have a torch. You're not allowed to be scared of the dark because I'M in charge of the dark in here."

And because Arthur had absolutely nothing else to do, and because there was something in this small serious person's face that reminded him unbearably of his own daughter at that age - the same fierce, matter-of-fact tenderness, the same refusal to be frightened of a thing just because it was strange - he said, "Yes. All right. Show me the room."

She showed him everything. She showed him the unicorn sticker on the wardrobe, which she informed him was named Bartholomew and did not, in fact, exist, which she seemed to think was an interesting parallel worth pointing out. She showed him the rug with the roads on it, and drove a small red car up his invisible leg, giggling when he flinched even though he had no leg to flinch with, really. She showed him the book she was currently reading, about a fox who couldn't sleep, and read him the first page in a fierce whisper so as not to wake her mother, sounding out the long words with her tongue between her teeth.

"Do you have a family?" she asked, somewhere around three in the morning, when the fierceness had softened into the particular drowsy honesty children get right before sleep pulls them under.

Arthur thought of Marion. Of his daughter, Claire, thirty-four now, who would be getting a phone call sometime very soon, if she hadn't already. He thought of the tomatoes, unpicked, rotting slowly on the vine in a garden he would never see again.

"I did," he said. "I had a wife. A daughter. I grew very good tomatoes."

"Are you sad?" Nora asked, with the direct, unflinching kindness that only very young children and very old dogs seem to possess.

"Yes," said Arthur, because it seemed important, in this strange half-lit room, to tell this small person the truth. "I think I might be sad for a long time."

Nora considered this. Then she reached out - not through him, exactly, because her hand found nothing solid, but close enough, close enough that Arthur felt something like warmth, or the memory of warmth, or the idea of what warmth used to feel like when he'd had skin to feel it with.

"That's okay," she said. "You can be sad here. I'll still be your friend even if you're sad. Mr. Whistle was sad for a whole week once, when his imaginary goldfish died, and I let him be sad, and then he felt better. It just takes as long as it takes."

"That's very wise," Arthur said, and meant it more than he had meant almost anything in his life, or now, whatever this was instead of a life.

"I know," said Nora, entirely without arrogance, the way children state true things. Her eyes were closing now, the words slurring softly at their edges. "You can stay in the corner if you want. Or the end of the bed. Grandma Ruth used to sit at the end of the bed, in my dream. It's a good spot. You can see everything from there."

Arthur moved - drifted, floated, he wasn't sure of the verb - to the end of the small bed, and settled there in a way that felt, absurdly, like sitting down for the first time in years.

"Thank you, Nora," he said.

"S'okay," she mumbled, already half into sleep. "G'night, Arthur. Don't let the cars on the rug drive off without me."

"I won't," he said, and watched her sleep, and thought about tomatoes, and his wife's laugh, and the deer that might not have been a deer, and found that for the first time since the seatbelt and the folding sound and the terrible bewildering nothing, he was not afraid.

Outside, the sky was beginning, very faintly, to grey toward morning. In the corner of the room, the moon nightlight kept its small vigil. And at the end of a seven-year-old's bed, in a house he had never heard of, on a street he would never learn the name of, a dead man who had grown the best tomatoes on Marchbanks Road sat quietly through the last dark hour before dawn, keeping watch over a girl who had, without any fuss at all, decided to keep him.

It was not heaven. It was not hell.

It was, Arthur thought, as the window slowly filled with light, something else entirely — something nobody had ever bothered to warn him about, something no sermon had prepared him for, something that turned out, against every possible expectation, to feel remarkably, unexpectedly, like being loved.