The Rebirth of Haven
March thirteenth gifts Arthur with a true friend on a fateful Sunday morning. At the most unexpected of places, Arthur finds a friend in the long checkout line at the grocery store in town. Mother had promised to bake him delicious homemade apple pie, and she had run out of flour in the kitchen. Arthur cringes as his mother tells him, "Thank you, Artie" when she hands him ten dollars. In the checkout line nine year old Arthur grins from ear to ear and feels like an adult, though he can barely look over the cashier to see his favorite brand of candy. There is a little girl lining up in front of him with wide iridescent eyes and long wavy hair, blonde like the wheat fields back home. Arthur's childhood heart sinks when he sees a whole basket of chocolate candy in her hands and all he can do is stare. When the girl pays and is ready to leave, she picks a big chocolate rabbit wrapped in shiny gold and shoves it in his hands.
Arthur's jaws drop in disbelief, and all he can stutter is, "Why?"
"Happy Easter!" The girl smiles and turns to leave, her beautiful hair smells like vanilla essence and green apples. Her eyes shimmer as she turns and walks away. For little Arthur, it is a like a glimpse of Heaven. The golden rabbit rests in his hands and winks at him under the sunset, as if it was alive.
"Who are you anyway?" Arthur shouts, regaining his thoughts.
The girl is far away now; he could only see her black-silhouetted form, as her reply rings in the lively spring air, "My name is Haven!"
On the October thirtieth of three years later, Arthur and Haven are dancing in piles of autumn leaves. A smile lights up the children's genuine faces as they dive into a pile of yellow autumn leaves, which crinkle like potatoes chips under their tiny feet. They are in a little abandoned park, the same park that they went to in early March. But now it has become a tiny confined space of trees, surrounded by yellow and black construction tape, just a splash of color against all the monochromatic, rain-stricken business buildings. It is Haven's birthday tomorrow, on Halloween, and she says all she wants is to find that perfectly grown daisy she had seen when she was a little kid, but now there are only fields of dejected, falling leaves and no sign of the gift of life.
"Daisies are actually a kind of weed," Arthur says.
"That's what makes them even more beautiful!" Haven beams as she kicks up the rusty leaves, which reveals only thirsty grass craving for fresh rain. Little colonies of ants move away, as if sensing a big thunderstorm from the ominous dark clouds looming above. The little stream where they used to swim in early March was dry and silent. The scorched bottom was cracking; empty cans of Coke replaced the diverse and colorful swarm of fish that used to inhabit the same area, in the time of the buoyant, lighthearted spring. Newborn white rabbits dart from bush to bush and Arthur begins to wonder if he will ever find a golden rabbit, one that could show him the way back home when he got lost. In the chilly air tainted with dreamy expectation, black crows sing their haunting and heartbreaking tunes and hide under shady trees, the kind that never loses their needle-like, prickly leaves.
Haven has these pretty freckles, sprinkled across the skin under her wide eyes, eyes like vignetted skies. They spread over the tip of her nose in a way that reminded Arthur very much of constellations. Beautiful constellations glittering in the sky, and they become even more immense when she laughs under the sun and baby green leaves peek out of skinny, limbless trees. Arthur's lips turn upwards into a wide grin when he remembers Haven complaining, 'My freckles are…like…synchronized with the sun and they grow and spread rapidly like blossoms in spring.'
The cold autumn sky seems to waver as he hears Haven calling, "Look! I found a daisy…."
The sleepy December days watch the little town covered in a tranquil white blanket of snow and hears the faint translucent voices of Christmas choirs. In winter the birds fall in an enchanted silent sleep, bare shivering branches hug close to the sky and grandma's bamboos stand out to be the greenest of the green. It is one of the colder days inching slowly towards the Holiday; cold to the point if you stuck out your tongue it would be numb like you've just swallowed an ice cube. Nothing has changed since the winter five years ago from when they'd first become friends and Arthur and Haven endure it together ever since; it helps make winter the warmest weather of all.
In the chilly air, Haven's face, usually tinted with the color of blushing, was unfamiliarly pale. Out the window, the snowflakes linger amongst the foggy air for just awhile longer before falling silently and merging into frozen ground. Arthur is slightly dizzy from the artificial heat blowing at him from a whizzing fan in Haven's luxurious living room. She plays her favorite melodies on the grand piano, her swift hands swaying against the keyboard. The magic plays through her fingertips and it seems to melt away the frigid, wintry keyboard into something alive and breathing.
"Why do you always play sad songs?" Arthur's voice, deep like a lonely well, weaves through the waltzing music sheets.
"Because… they are the only ones that I know," Haven whispers, and her wavering emotions sound through the piano notes as her fingers slide across the wrong uneven notes and Arthur feels something inside of him shatter like a broken vase.
Envious February teaches Arthur that God punishes people by giving them all that they've ever wished for, and then suddenly taking it all away again. And harsh reality, on that brink of jealousy of Christmas celebrations and happy smiles of children, sent Arthur's soul crashing right into a dead end.
Haven is sixteen now, and she learns how to drive a second-hand Volkswagen from her stepfather. The winter road one day is slippery like an ice rink and it makes her car swing out of control. The broken car brake and lunatic-possessed steering wheel abandons her to her volatile fate and she is screaming, screaming for someone to save her. The old car slides over the edge of the road and screeches twenty meters before slamming against the highway fence and flips over on its side. The loud screeching of the car came to a sudden stop and unexpectedly they are left with the stagnant engine humming hopelessly and the hushed, descending snowflakes. Inside she's screaming for someone to discover her, to pull her out, but her chapped ruby red lips could only murmur 'help,' before the swarm of unconsciousness embraces her. Haven is greeted by the colors of the American pride as her broken, glass-splintered body is hauled up a lonely van and sent to be revived on an emergency truck with needles and plastic bottles of artificial magic.
Six prolonged hours later Arthur is sitting in the sterile hospital and he can almost taste the gruesome deaths and fresh blood under the masquerade of lemon spray. He looks at his calloused hands and thinks that time seems to stop when somebody is on the border of death. The man in the stark white robe finally emerges from the emergency room and holds Arthur's trembling hands and tells him, in a husky and raw voice, that it's okay, it's okay.
Arthur is shivering. He doesn't speak.
Haven is his safe place; Haven keeps him from falling over the edge.
Arthur repeats this over and over again to the doctor in the white robe, and the desolate man just keeps shaking his head in denial.
"She will live. But she won't remember you anymore…car accident…trauma…memory loss…" The words of the man in the stark white robe replays in his head and it is like icy ocean waves pulling him under and under. He tells Arthur that the memory loss was happening before the car accident. That she was already very, very sick, ever since in early spring, Easter, the rebirth of God.
A memory flashes in Arthur's mind, something that Haven had said to him one of those days when they'd first become friends… 'Maybe, one day I will forget your name, when your birthday is. But I will never forget your warmth and witty jokes and the thunder in your eyes and the sound of you laughter'
Arthur had frowned, and told her that she wouldn't ever forget him, not now.
Haven had taken his hand in hers and said, 'Our fingerprints don't fade away from the lives we've touched.' But no, no…they fade. Those fingertips, blurring and perishing away just like early morning fog from a car window.
March is angry with the Thankless and finds solace in blowing its complaints in the form of early spring winds, which make the frigid and hollow hospital windowpanes shudder with fear. A translucent IV needle is piercing Haven's slow pulse, suffusing chemicals and artificial blood in her veins. She is awake now, living through the machine pumping life into her frail body. She notices the young man sitting on a folded chair in the vacant room, and her pale face lights up into a happy smile, the same one she had the day at the cashier line.
"Hello. What is your name? You're so kind to visit me."
Arthur tells her his name. Haven's smile is so familiar, but at the same time oddly distant. He notices the empty space in her collarbones- it was not there before. He has flashbacks of the blissful and untroubled Haven from when they'd first become friends. He thinks about the first time they'd met in the cashier line, and all the afternoons spent playing in their favorite park. Arthur turns away to conceal his tears.
"Hey, Arthur, how many days have I been here?" The way she says his name has a different ring to it, the tone of a total stranger.
"You've been here for two weeks. And today, today is March thirteenth…"
Tonight Arthur thinks he is a golden rabbit who burrows in the hard, winter ground, quivering and alone and wondering where all the others have gone.