“What does Alvaro want?” the nurse asked.
“My son still loves her,” Daisy admitted. “I know he does. I see it in his eyes.”
The second birthday party got under way at dinnertime. In bunches, Alvaro’s extended family arrived in the waiting room and chattered excitedly in Spanish until the guest of honor was due to arrive. The tiny area, just outside the burn unit, was jammed with aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends. Contemporary Latin music played softly in the background from a radio someone had brought, and a giant buttercream sheet cake waited to be cut.
When Shawn pushed Alvaro, in his wheelchair, into the middle of the crowd, a roar of well-wishing greeted him. Everyone took turns having his photo taken with the birthday boy. But Alvaro’s sisters, ever protective of their only brother, edged Angie out as she approached to have her picture taken with him.
Crowded out and ignored by everyone but Shawn, Angie retreated to a corner and stood by herself, pretending to watch an old episode of Bewitched on the TV suspended from the ceiling. While everyone else laughed and danced, she folded her arms across her chest and stared at the screen. Trying not to let anyone see as her eyes misted over, she thought about the year before, when she had planned the party for Alvaro and even made the birthday cake herself. Shawn came to her side and held her hand.
Angie felt the tears seeping from the outer corners of her eyes. Determined not to let Alvaro’s family see her cry, she pushed her way through the crowd of relatives, people who had once welcomed her but now looked at her with expressions of disdain and disgust. She got to Alvaro just as the candles on his cake were lit.
Leaning in close so that no one could hear her but him, Angie said, “I love you. I really love you.”
Alvaro couldn’t look at her. “I know you’re leaving,” he said.
“Your family doesn’t want me here. You see that, right?”
Alvaro wouldn’t take sides. How could he? Without Angie, his family was all he had. He wasn’t about to alienate them. He needed them, and they loved him.
“I want you here, but I know you have to leave,” he said, still looking past her.
The candles began to melt into the cake while the two dozen family members and friends waited awkwardly. Angie kissed Alvaro on the cheek. Then she pushed her way back through the crowd toward the elevator at the end of the hall. The doors parted and she rushed in, sobbing into her hands. Shawn reached the elevator just as the doors smacked shut. Angie was gone.
“Blow out the candles!” Alvaro’s family cried, and Alvaro obeyed. As his sisters cut the cake, Alvaro cried, too. He had wanted more than anything else to spend his birthday with Angie, and now she was gone.
He wondered if she would ever come back.
Chapter 22
Alvaro was crying. His stomach ached and his head throbbed. Lunch was meat loaf. He hated meat loaf.
“What can we do for you?” the kindly woman asked, looking at his untouched meal.
“Nothing,” Alvaro said, choking out the word. “I just want to be left alone.”
A week earlier, the nurses in the burn unit had been serenading him with “Happy Birthday.” Now he was in a strange place, in a strange room, with people he didn’t know, and he was miserable.
“The physical therapist will be in to see you soon, honey,” the woman said, handing Alvaro a tissue. “You’re scheduled for the gym this afternoon.”
“I want to be left alone!” Alvaro cried, wiping his tears.
Alvaro had arrived at the Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation a few hours earlier. He hadn’t been there a full day, and already he was expected to go to the gymnasium for physical therapy? He had no intention of leaving his room. Not yet. No way.
Kessler, located in nearby West Orange, was reputed to be one of the finest rehabilitation centers in the country. The nurse who had escorted Alvaro from the ambulance to his room that morning had pointed proudly to the arena-sized gym and explained that five years earlier, Christopher Reeve, Superman, had trained there after a fall from a horse had rendered him a quadriplegic. The center was ranked one of the top two in the country by a survey of physicians published in U.S. News & World Report, and the best facility of its kind on the East Coast. Patients came from as far away as Europe and Japan, and the waiting list was miles long. Mansour had called in plenty of favors to get Alvaro a spot.
Kessler had been in business for fifty years and was considered a pioneer in physical medicine and rehabilitation, the nurse said. Besides spinal cord injuries, the center treated patients with brain injuries and strokes. Some patients were recovering from car accidents; others, from hip and knee replacements or lost limbs.
The gym looked like a big-city health club to Alvaro, with exercise machines and mats on the floor. He had seen dozens of people in there when he looked in, most of them in wheelchairs. But no one else was burned. Not another scarred body in the place.
The only reason Alvaro had left Saint Barnabas smiling that morning was that it meant he was a step closer to home. He wanted more than anything to be back in Paterson with his parents and sisters. Now he thought about what he had left behind. The people in the burn unit had saved his life, and they had become family. More important, he had felt safe with them. They had seen him scream. Seen him cry. Seen his burned body naked and not even winced. How would people here react when they saw him?
Sitting on his new bed, Alvaro conjured up the memory of Sue Manzo bringing him a water gun so that he could soak the rest of the staff, then arguing with the doctors that he should be able to keep it because it was good therapy for his hands. His thoughts drifted to Ann Marie Majestic, who had sat and talked baseball with him for hours after her shift ended, when she could have gone home to be with her family. Andy Horvath had been the only nurse who could soothe him during the tortured hours in the tank room, when his raw burns were scraped until they bled. Sometimes what happened in that tank room was so agonizing that the nurses cried with him, and those were the times Andy would lean in close to his face and whisper that everything would be all right, and just because of the way he said it, Alvaro believed him.
Now there was no Sue Manzo, no Ann Marie Majestic, no Andy Horvath to turn to, and Alvaro didn’t know what to do.
That morning, a cool, sunny Tuesday in late May, the whole staff had gathered around as Alvaro prepared to leave the burn unit for Kessler. As they crowded into his room, everyone had shed tears. Tears of sadness. Tears of gratitude. Tears of pride. Tears, too, because the nurses knew there were many hardships ahead for Alvaro. You could survive cancer and heart disease. Mend broken bones. But burns never went away.
Alvaro had been helped into a wheelchair and was about to be wheeled downstairs to the ambulance waiting outside, when Roy Bond rushed into his room. Alvaro smiled.
“I feel like I’m sending my son off to war,” the husky therapist said, biting his lip. “I love you, man.”
Alvaro looked at Bond and thought he might like to stay in the burn unit for the rest of his life. If he stayed there, he would never have to worry about people staring at him, or ostracizing him, or feeling sorry for him. But then he remembered what Eileen Gehringer, one of his nurses, had told him: “It hurts to see you go, but you are on to better things.” Better things like college classes and movies with friends and driving his car, all the things a regular teenager did. How he wanted to get back to being a regular kid again and not having to worry about stained bandages under his clothing, or waking up on bloody sheets, or hand tremors, or relentless fatigue, or taking a dozen pills a day — pills for pain, pills for depression, pills for anxiety, pills for itching, pills to sleep. He just wanted to play baseball and hang out with his cousins and kiss Angie.
A week earlier, after his birthday party in the burn unit, Alvaro had said to Bond, “In the beginning, when this first happened, I used to think, Why me? But I don’t do that much anymore. In the beginning I was scared that when I went back to school, people would be staring. Now I’m getting
comfortable with who I am. It’s like I’ve been reborn, like I’m starting life all over again.” Now, at Kessler, where he didn’t know anyone, and no one knew him, his resolve was cracking. His untouched lunch had grown cold. Pushing aside the meat loaf, Alvaro turned up the volume on the TV, crawled under the covers, and muffled his sobs with his pillow.
“Hello there!” The athletic-looking woman with the ponytail and pink button-down sweater strode into Alvaro’s room with a grin on her face and a clipboard under her arm. “We’ve been waiting for you for-eh-vuh,” she said, her accent giving away her Long Island childhood. “I assume you are the famous Alvaro! It’s so great to meet you. You’re already a rock star around here, you know. We’ve heard so much about you. I’m so happy you’re here.”
Alvaro looked up from his bed. His eyes hurt from crying so much, and hunger growled deep in his belly because he hadn’t eaten since first thing that morning, before he left Saint Barnabas, yet he couldn’t help smiling at the woman standing over him. She was pretty, he thought, and bubbly, as bubbly as Angie.
“I’m Dr. Benevento,” she said, “and I’ll be in charge of your medical team here. We have some work to do.”
“You’re my doctor?” Alvaro asked.
“ ’Fraid so,” she said, her grin growing into a full-blown smile.
Barbara Benevento had been treating patients at Kessler for three years. She was thirty-nine, single, and a favorite with the patients. She liked to say she had no life outside of her job, except for once-yearly adventures in some faraway place, which this year was to be an African safari, if all things went as planned, and they rarely did.
A physiatrist, or doctor of physical medicine, Benevento specialized in spinal cord injuries, and she had quickly made a reputation for herself at Kessler. Burns were new to Benevento, and she had spent hours on the telephone with Mansour in the preceding weeks, mapping out Alvaro’s treatment plan. What she didn’t know about burns, though, she knew about boys, having grown up the only girl in a family of four brothers. When word had reached her that her newest patient was resisting a trip to the gym and refusing to eat, she had headed straight for his room with a game plan.
“What’s up with the meat loaf?” she asked, glancing down at the shriveled slab of meat on Alvaro’s tray. It had sat there for nearly three hours.
“I don’t like meat loaf,” Alvaro said.
“Me, either,” Benevento said, crinkling up her nose. “I’d rather have a hamburger.”
“Me, too,” Alvaro said.
“I hear you don’t feel like going to the gym,” Benevento said.
“Yeah. Well, I guess I’m tired and I don’t feel good.”
“You worried about meeting new people?”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“You think everyone’s going to look at you because you’re the new guy in town?”
“No one else is burned,” Alvaro said.
“Ah. So you think people are going to look at you because you’re burned?”
“Yeah.”
“Hmm. Do you trust me, kid?”
“I think so.”
“Then try to hear what I’m saying. No one is going to give you a second look. I promise. Everyone in the gym has their own problems. Big problems. They’re too busy trying to get better to pay much attention to anything else or anyone else.
“Now, can I tell you a secret?”
Alvaro was gulping down the last of his lunchtime hamburger, compliments of Dr. Benevento, when his parents arrived the following day, his second day at Kessler.
“Guess what I heard,” he whispered conspiratorially.
“What?” Daisy and Alvaro senior asked.
“Even Superman didn’t go to the gym when he first got here.”
“¿De verdad?” his parents cried. Really?
“Yes, really!” Alvaro said.
Dr. Benevento had told Alvaro that even though Reeve was at Kessler before she got there, she had learned on good authority that it had taken days for him to get up the courage to leave his room and go to the gym for therapy.
“So don’t worry,” she had said during their talk the day before. “You’ll know when you’re ready, just like Superman knew when he was ready. Just remember what I told you. No one will be looking at you, I promise. And the faster we get going, the quicker you’ll leave here to go home.
“Oh, and don’t tell anyone our little secret.”
“So I wasn’t supposed to say anything,” Alvaro was saying to his mother and father. “But I had to tell you because —”
“Tell what?” asked an athletic-looking young man with a brown crew cut, interrupting the conversation as he marched into Alvaro’s room. His name was J. R. Nisivoccia, Alvaro’s new physical therapist, and he had popped in the night before, right after Benevento had left, to introduce himself. Alvaro had taken to J. R. right away. He was only eight years older, he didn’t flinch or look at Alvaro funny, and he liked to talk baseball.
J. R. sat at the foot of Alvaro’s bed.
“Well, my friend,” he said, “you’ve had a day to rest. Do you want to get up and walk around your room, or do you want to hit the hallway?”
Alvaro hesitated, then slowly swung his legs off the bed, placing his feet solidly on the floor.
“Let’s hit the hallway,” he said, his body weak, but his voice strong and determined.
“That’s what we like to see,” J. R. said. “A motivated patient.”
“We’re off,” Alvaro said, looking over his shoulder at his parents as he headed out of his room.
Even Superman took longer than that.
While Alvaro settled into a routine at Kessler, Shawn returned to Seton Hall and registered for the fall semester. It was his first time on campus since the fire, five months earlier. The dean of freshmen studies had made special arrangements for him to register privately with her. She had wanted to take her time with him, she had said, to make sure he was getting every advantage and got into every class he chose. Shawn swept past the other students waiting outside the dean’s office and walked quickly toward the woman who was seated behind a big cherry desk and waving him inside. A window air conditioner that had seen better days cranked loudly behind her, but the room temperature was still sweltering, and Shawn pushed away streams of perspiration that dripped down the sides of his face. Maybe it wasn’t the heat. Maybe he was just excited. Or nervous.
“Hello, Shawn!” the dean said, her mouth forming a big, toothy smile. “It’s wonderful to see you. Now let’s get started.”
Shawn stayed ten minutes and signed up for fifteen credits: three business classes, English, and algebra. He would still be a freshman when he returned to school in the fall, but he was determined to catch up by taking extra courses.
“Will you be living on campus?” the dean asked Shawn, stealing glances at his burned hands as he filled out the necessary forms. Shawn guessed that the dean was around his mother’s age, but she seemed nervous and unsure of herself.
“No,” Shawn said plaintively.
“I understand,” she said. “Is this your first time back on campus?”
No, you don’t understand, Shawn thought. “Yeah,” he answered.
“Was it tough?”
Nah, it wasn’t tough. Three of my classmates died here and I almost died that day, too. My roommate is so badly scarred you wouldn’t even know him now, and his lungs are so damaged that he’ll never run the bases again. And, oh, I noticed you were looking at my hands. They look like something out of a horror flick, don’t they, but . . .
“Uh, no, not really.”
“Good, then. You’re all set, Shawn. We’re glad to have you back.”
“Yeah. Glad to be back.” Don’t know if I’ll stay.
Shawn rose to leave. He thrust his arm out to shake the woman’s hand and noticed that, for just an instant, she hesitated before taking his.
Shawn didn’t linger on campus, nor did he mention wanting to see Boland Hall. The dean hadn’
t offered. She was nice enough, but she seemed relieved when their meeting was over. Shawn thought he understood why. The fire was a stain on Seton Hall. There hadn’t been sprinklers in Boland Hall, and the state had taken over fire inspections at the university after finding that the buildings on campus had not been properly inspected for nearly five years. School officials also had seemed insensitive to the students who were injured in the fire. Right after the fire, Monsignor Robert Sheeran had visited the injured students and spent time with their families in the Saint Barnabas waiting room, but the visits had quickly tapered off after a Seton Hall student was appointed liaison to the families and seemed to alienate some of the medical staff and families. Shawn’s mother thought the monsignor’s visits stopped at the advice of the university’s lawyers, and that had made her even madder than if Sheeran himself had decided to stay away. All these months after the fire, no one seemed to know how the fire had started, or who had set it. Sometimes it seemed to Shawn as if school officials wished people would just forget. Meanwhile, he could end up sitting next to the arsonist in class and he wouldn’t even know it.
Shawn thought about Alvaro. “Now it’s just a matter of time and determination and we’ll be back to school together,” he said to his mother when he got home that day.
“I think if he decided to go back and stay on campus, I’d ask him to room with me, and I’d go back and live there, too. We’ve grown so close. It’s going to be hard if we decide to do that, but I think we could support each other through it. I just can’t handle living here right now without him, knowing he’s still struggling to get better.”
“I know, baby boy,” Christine said. “In time. In time.”
Alvaro’s first time in the gym at Kessler had been as uneventful as Benevento had promised. No one had stopped what they were doing when he walked in. One or two patients may have glanced sideways at him, but he may have imagined that, too. No one else was scarred, but some were totally paralyzed and some couldn’t even speak. The second time was easier, and the third time some of the other patients included him in their conversation. He had been at Kessler six days when he asked that his therapy time be doubled from three hours a day to six. His goals were to increase his upper-body strength using weight machines and to relearn everyday agility tasks: shuffling cards, holding a glass, twisting a cap off a jar.
After the Fire Page 12