After the Fire: A True Story of Friendship and Survival

by Robin Gaby Fisher

  Alvaro’s throat was swollen and raw. His voice was tentative and his speech robotic. But to the doctors, the hellos spilling from the boy’s lips were melodious. Those first words, though fleeting, said everything. Alvaro had survived merciless odds, and his eagerness to communicate told them how much he yearned to return to life.

  Once Alvaro started speaking that morning, he didn’t stop.

  “It feels good to talk.”

  “Please wipe my eyes.”

  “The TV, please.”

  “Cream for my lips.”

  Shawn arrived in Alvaro’s room for his regular noon visit after his occupational therapy. No one had told him his friend was talking.

  “Al, how you doin’?” he began, as he did every day.

  “Chillin’,” Alvaro replied, the word spoken softly but deliberately.

  Shawn did a double take. “What did you say?”

  “Chillin’,” Alvaro said again, this time with more force.

  Shawn wanted to shout with happiness and relief. He knew how important it was for Alvaro to be able to communicate, how much it meant in terms of his recovery, and he was anxious to start bantering with his friend again.

  “Oh no!” Shawn cried. “It was so nice and quiet when you couldn’t talk. Now I’m going to have to put up with all your whining again.”

  Shawn touched Alvaro’s hand. Alvaro squeezed.

  The nurses were eager for Alvaro’s parents to arrive. Like Shawn, Daisy and Alvaro had no idea that their son was talking. Visiting hours began at 12:30 p.m. At 12:35 the Llanoses walked into the burn unit. Shawn and Melissa Kapner, a burn therapist, had cooked up a plan. Alvaro, who was still wrapped in layers of gauze, with only part of his face and his toes exposed, was out of bed and seated in a chair. He could see only shadows through the slits in his stitched eyelids, so Shawn promised to warn him when his parents were approaching.

  “They’re coming,” he cried in a hushed voice when he saw Daisy and Alvaro senior coming down the hall.

  With the Llanoses at the threshold of the room, Melissa leaned over and whispered to Alvaro, who nodded slightly.

  When Daisy and Alvaro senior saw their son, they rushed to him. It was the first time he had been out of bed, and they hovered over him, kissing his cheeks and his hands, thanking God for their good fortune. Their boy was out of bed and sitting in a chair. La gloria a Dios. Glory to God.

  Shawn, leaning against the doorway, his arms crossed over his chest, watched and waited. Pangs of excitement pricked the back of his neck. He saw Melissa pat Alvaro’s knee. Showtime.

  “Hi, Mommy,” Alvaro said, his voice soft but clear. “Hi, Pápi.”

  Alvaro senior dropped his cane and fell to his knees. He draped himself over his son’s lap. “My son!” he cried. “Oh! My son.”

  Daisy stood there, dazed. How long had she waited to hear her son’s voice? How many prayers had she said, asking to be able to hear him say Mommy again? How many nights had she gotten on her knees and begged to be able to tell him she loved him and to hear him say, I love you, too, Mommy, even if it was just one more time, so she could cherish it in her memory forever?

  Daisy felt the deepest joy she had ever known. More even than when she had given birth to her only son, which she didn’t mind telling people had been the happiest day of her life. She felt as if a splendid sun was bathing her in warmth, soothing her from the outside in. She smiled a joyous, deeply felt smile.

  “He is better,” she said softly. “He is really better.”

  Nurse Majestic stood in the doorway, watching the celebration. She had been there for every one of the small victories. The first nod, when Alvaro acknowledged hearing her voice. The first time he moved a finger, then an arm. His first words. Hello. Hello. Hello. She had shared the family’s joy with every step forward, and she knew the hardest part of the journey lay ahead. Phase one of the treatment, when the staff did nearly everything to keep the patient alive, was ending. Now it was up to Alvaro to lead the way forward. But for the moment, this was enough.

  Within days of being released from the respirator, Alvaro was begging for water. Three months had gone by without a drop of water passing his parched lips. “Water!” he cried, with the desperation of a man stranded in the desert. “I want water.” He wasn’t allowed to have it. A cardinal rule in the burn intensive care unit was that patients were only allowed sustenance packed with calories. He couldn’t afford to waste his appetite on water. He needed milk shakes and ice cream to hasten his healing. Human nature being what it is, because water was forbidden, Alvaro craved it even more, especially now that he was no longer hooked to a breathing machine. All burn patients did. The staff had seen people pull the bags off their IV poles to try to get to the saline inside. They had seen them under sinks, trying to lick the condensation off the pipes. They had seen them trying to gulp the water sprayed from the hoses in the tank room.

  “I’m sorry, but you can’t have water,” Hani explained.

  So Alvaro settled on Cherry Coke Slurpees, sucking down as many as were brought to him. The nurses marveled at Alvaro’s appetite, and they couldn’t believe his sunny disposition. When he didn’t have a straw in his mouth, he engaged them with his charm and his wit.

  Alvaro remembered only one thing from his long, deep sleep: being taken to the tank room to have his burns scraped and scrubbed. He had hated it when he heard the multitude of quick footsteps and garbled voices approaching in the morning, because he knew it meant he was going somewhere to be tortured.

  “I heard you were causing a ruckus in the unit today,” one of the tank-room nurses kidded as she prepared to take him for his morning debridement.

  “Me?” Alvaro asked, managing to make his weak, slow voice sound incredulous. “You’re . . . the . . . one . . . who . . . causes . . . a . . . ruckus.”

  “Oh yeah? Well, I heard you were banging pots and hollering and causing all kinds of trouble.”

  “Must . . . have . . . been . . . a . . . ghost,” he said.

  “Okay, hot shot,” another nurse said. “You think you’re so smart. Let’s see if you remember my name. What is it?”

  “Superwoman,” Alvaro shot back without skipping a beat.

  From the photographs on the wall — which was all there was to go on for months — the nurses had assumed Alvaro was macho and tough. The boy in the pictures looked at the camera with a cocky expression, a look that said, I’m hot and I know it. They hadn’t expected the sweet, funny kid who emerged from the coma.

  They didn’t yet know the Alvaro who lay awake at night, worrying and remembering.

  Chapter 19

  Do you know how long you were asleep?” Daisy asked Alvaro one morning as she rubbed lotion on his bare, leathery hands.

  “Yes,” Alvaro said. “Three months. One of the nurses told me.”

  Steeling herself, Daisy pursed her lips and sputtered the question everyone wondered about but didn’t want to ask.

  “What . . . do you remember about the fire?”

  “Everything,” Alvaro said without hesitation. “I remember everything.”

  The answer had surprised Daisy, surprised even the doctors when they heard. After all that Alvaro had been through — running for his life, his whole body on fire, the racking pain of his devastating burns, the morphine-induced coma — no one had expected him to remember much about what had happened that January morning in Boland Hall. The memories of burn patients were often blunted by amnesia, the doctors had explained to Daisy and Alvaro senior; it was the brain’s way of protecting them from the psychological trauma of a terrifying event.

  Mansour had suspected that if Alvaro remembered the fire at all, his recollection was likely to be scant and confused. It wasn’t so. The fire played out in Alvaro’s head like a motion picture rewinding itself, time and time again. Sometimes, when he was alone at night, unable to sleep, he closed his eyes and the tragedy cinematically replayed, not a single terrifying detail omitted.

  There he was
, walking Angie to her room at three in the morning, then e-mailing her good night when he returned to his room, something they always did. He had fallen asleep quickly that night, into a deep sleep, which had been usual for him before the fire. He remembered Shawn waking him because the fire alarm was ringing. At first he was annoyed because he was sure it was another false alarm, Alvaro told Daisy, but Shawn had kept at him — C’mon, Alvaro. You have to get up, Al — until he finally got out of bed. He remembered Shawn opening the dorm room door, and the feeling of sheer terror at seeing the blinding, black smoke surging through the hallway. He followed Shawn out, then lost his roommate instantly in the darkness.

  Then he had been on his hands and knees, Alvaro recalled, disoriented, frightened, and suffocating in the smoke. I have to get out, he remembered telling himself. I’m not going to die here. The heat was so searing that at one point he hesitated, not sure whether to turn back and try to find his room again. He couldn’t see his hand in front of him. Panicked, he decided to go ahead and crawl toward the stairs near the student lounge on his floor. Just as he did, his clothes caught fire, and flames quickly engulfed his torso. He could feel his back being incinerated, see his clothes burning off his body and falling away.

  He had stood up to run — it was instinct, just wanting to get away as quickly as he could — but the flames intensified. Everything started to blur, and his vision narrowed to the size of a pinpoint. He knew that if he fainted he would burn up, so he willed himself forward. It took everything he had to take one step and then another. As he did, he recognized the stairway leading down. He was on fire, stumbling down the stairs, when suddenly a boy and a girl seemed to just appear. He didn’t know where they had come from. Maybe he was already dead, he thought, and the boy and girl were angels who had come to rescue him from hell. The angels began beating him with their jackets, the boy screaming at him, Run! Run!

  Doing as he was told, he had lurched and then tumbled down the rest of the stairs to the main floor of the dormitory. As he did, he could hear Angie’s voice calling his name. Alvaro. Where are you? Al! The first floor was clear of smoke and he could see students staring at him as he ran, ran as fast as he could, toward the front doors. Through the blur of his delirium, he could still make out the expressions of horror on their faces. He had made it to the main lobby, but finally he couldn’t take another step and dropped onto a couch. Every inch of his body hurt, and he was so cold. He sat there, shivering, studying his hands and arms. His skin, he had noticed, was bubbling and shedding off in sheets. A group of students had surrounded him, saying, Don’t worry and Everything will be fine. He thought he was probably okay and took a second to thank God that he wasn’t more seriously injured. As he sat on the couch, trying to make sense of what had happened, a girl who identified herself as a nursing student put an oxygen mask over his mouth. Someone else removed the gold chain that hung on his chest. It was red hot and had begun to melt into his neck.

  Alvaro paused and took a deep breath.

  “Then what happened?” Daisy asked, holding his hand.

  “The last thing I remember is being put on a stretcher and carried outside toward an ambulance,” Alvaro recalled. Everyone had moved away as he passed by.

  “I was worried that you and Pápi wouldn’t know where they took me,” Alvaro said. “And I was thinking about Angie and Shawn. I wanted to go back in the dorm to make sure they were okay.”

  Daisy used the palm of her hand to wipe away her tears. Then, taking a tissue from a box at Alvaro’s bedside, she wiped away his tears, too.

  “How did this happen, Mommy?” Alvaro cried. “Why did it happen?”

  “Solamente Dios sabe,” Daisy said. Only God knows.

  There would come a time, and very soon, when Alvaro would want to know more about the fire. Then it would be up to Shawn to tell him what no one else had wanted to: that three students had died that morning in Boland Hall, one of them Alvaro’s friend.

  Solamente Dios sabe.

  In fact, Alvaro wasn’t the only one looking for answers. Investigators were working overtime to try to make sure that the truth about what had happened did not become yet another casualty of the blaze. They had their work cut out for them.

  Chapter 20

  In the story of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, there is a tall mirror. “A magnificent mirror, as high as the ceiling, with an ornate gold frame, standing on two clawed feet,” the story goes. It is called the Mirror of Erised. An inscription carved in an arc around the top reads, “Erised stra ehru oyt ube cafru oyt on wohsi.” Read backward, it says, “I show not your face but your heart’s desire.”

  “I dreamed about Alvaro last night, and in my dream he was looking in that mirror,” Denise Pinney told her colleagues in the burn ICU one morning. “And in my dream, when he looked in the mirror, he was whole again.”

  Alvaro would look at himself for the first time in an ordinary handheld mirror. He yearned to see a familiar face when he peered at himself in the glass, but he suspected it was not to be.

  Only two weeks earlier, he had asked his mother if his looks had changed. If he looked like the other burned people he had seen. There were no mirrors in the burn unit except for one on the wall in the nurses’ lavatory and one in a drawer at the nurses’ station. There was a reason for that. The staff wanted control over when a burn patient saw himself, and they wanted to be there to offer support when it happened.

  Alvaro was too afraid to ask the nurses how he looked. It had taken all of his nerve to ask his mother, and he was terrified of the answer. Once, he had tried to steal a glimpse of himself in a stainless-steel paper towel holder in the tank room, but his image was a blur through his partially stitched eyes.

  “Is my face burned?” Alvaro had asked that afternoon, when he and Daisy were alone in his room.

  Daisy had been dreading the question. She worried that if her son knew he was so badly disfigured, he wouldn’t want to live. He would give up after he had come all this way. Mansour had told Daisy right from the start that Alvaro would never be the flawlessly handsome boy he had once been. His appearance had been forever altered by the fire, and no matter how much reconstructive surgery he had, he would always look burned.

  That didn’t mean Alvaro couldn’t live a productive life, the doctor said. He seemed like a boy of great character, the kind of person who could look inside himself and use his own inner strength to build a future. Yes, Daisy had said, that was Alvaro. Beautiful inside and out. That’s what everyone had always said: “Oh, Daisy, what a wonderful, beautiful boy you have.” There wasn’t anyone who compared with Alvaro.

  As much as Daisy adored her son, though, as much as she loved the person he was, she was having a difficult time accepting the way he looked. His good looks had been destroyed by the heat and the flames in the dormitory that morning, and as thankful — so very thankful — as she was that he’d survived, she was still anxious about how people, especially strangers, would react to him.

  Alvaro’s ears had been partially burned off, and his once smooth, brown skin looked like melted wax. The scarring had already distorted his facial features, and the doctors said that would actually get worse as his burns continued to heal and his skin pulled tighter.

  How could she expect Alvaro to accept the way he looked when even she was having trouble handling it? Daisy was ashamed of that, but it was the truth.

  And so she hedged when Alvaro asked about his face. And then she lied.

  “Only your eyelids were burned,” she said. “They will get better.”

  “What other parts of my body were burned?” Alvaro asked, his voice shaking and filled with uncertainty.

  Daisy took a deep breath. “Your arms, your back, your chest, and your neck. But don’t worry — plastic surgery will take care of everything, and you will be as good as new.”

  “Okay,” Alvaro said, hardly convinced that his mother was telling him the truth.

  When the physical therapy team heard about the
conversation, they were beside themselves. Of course, Daisy had the best intentions, but lying was the worst thing she could have done. A cardinal rule of the burn unit was never to lie to a patient. The sooner burn victims were told the truth, the faster they were able to deal with the loss of their former selves and work toward accepting their healed but greatly altered bodies.

  “This is our fault,” Catherine Ruiz, head of occupational therapy, fumed. “Alvaro should have seen himself already. Why hasn’t he seen his face yet?”

  Melissa Kapner, Alvaro’s primary therapist, knew they had failed Alvaro.

  “I guess we were sort of putting it off,” she said.

  Ruiz was certain that Alvaro basically knew the truth. She was just as sure that he was silently torturing himself with anxiety about how he looked.

  “Get the mirror,” she said to Kapner, a relative newcomer on the staff. “He needs to see his face.”