After the Fire: A True Story of Love and Survival (10 page)

The two hugged before Shawn turned to leave the physical therapy room after his final session.

“Love you, Roy,” Shawn said.

“Love you, too, kid,” Bond said, pushing Shawn toward the door — pushing him so that Shawn wouldn’t see that he was crying.

Shawn was melancholy as he left Bond behind and headed upstairs to the burn unit to look in on Alvaro. Here he was, celebrating another milestone in his recovery. He should be happy. But how could he be happy when Alvaro wasn’t getting better?

Shawn steeled himself as he walked toward Alvaro’s room. Nearly three months had passed since that frigid Wednesday in January, when he and Alvaro were awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of the fire alarm and crawled out of their room into the dark, smoky third-floor hallway in Boland Hall. He missed his roommate. Missed his incessant teasing about the Yankees, and his contagious chuckle. Missed the way he tidied up his room like a girl and always wore a baseball cap.

“Hurry and come inside!” the nurse cried when she saw Shawn coming. “Come in and talk, because he can hear you!”

Shawn could hardly believe it. Goose bumps popped up on his arms, and his whole body tingled with anticipation. He pulled on the gown and gloves and rushed to his friend’s bedside. “Al! It’s Shawn. What’s up?” he said. His hands trembled.

Alvaro blinked slowly, unmistakably.

Shawn’s eyes widened. “It’s okay,” he continued breathlessly. He wasn’t sure what to say next. He hadn’t been expecting this. Alvaro could hear him. He could even respond. “I’m okay,” Shawn said, talking faster than he could think. “I’m going to get Mets tickets so we can see a game . . . Al . . . you’re going to be okay . . . you’ve been through a lot . . . but I’m going to be right here for you. I’m going to be right here.”

Alvaro blinked harder. Shawn’s eyes filled up.

“He hears me,” he said, wiping away the tears with the back of his gloved hand. “That’s why he’s trying to blink — to let me know he hears me.”

Alvaro blinked again.

Chapter 17

T
en days had passed with no sign of Angie. She had told Daisy she was going to Puerto Rico for spring break, which Daisy thought was curious.
What kind of girl leaves for vacation when the boy she loves is fighting for his life in a burn unit?
she thought to herself.
This is not the Angie I know, the girl Alvaro loves.

Angie had said she needed to get away. She hadn’t slept through the night in weeks and her nerves were frayed. What good would she be to anyone if she fell apart? She had promised Daisy she would visit Alvaro the day before she left for her trip, but she hadn’t come. Then she called again on the day she got back, never mentioning the fact that she went away without saying good-bye, and said she would be at the hospital in an hour or so. So Daisy waited, watching for the unit’s double doors to swing open and her son’s diminutive girlfriend to skip through, her ponytail swaying back and forth. She watched the doors for minutes, then hours. No Angie.

The next day, Angie finally showed up. Daisy and Alvaro senior were rubbing lotion on Alvaro’s feet when she came in. Angie arrived in Alvaro’s room with a copper tan, her thick, auburn hair, sun-bleached with streaks of pale blond, cascading over her shoulders. She still wore Alvaro’s crucifix ring on a chain around her neck, along with her own matching crucifix ring on her left hand. Daisy took that as a good sign. The forced smile on Angie’s face, however, was not.

“Hola,” Angie said, hugging Daisy. Then she greeted Alvaro senior. “¿Cómo estas?”
How are you?

Hurrying to get through her excuses, Angie apologized for not coming earlier. She hadn’t felt well, she said — maybe too much time in the sun, maybe the bumpy airplane flight, maybe a virus or something — and she still had tons of homework to catch up on. Daisy was angry at Angie, especially after her daughters said they suspected that Angie was “checking out” on Alvaro. But maybe her daughters were wrong. Now that she was back, everything would be better. “Entiendo,” Daisy said warmly to Angie.
I understand.

Daisy continued to massage Alvaro’s feet, and Angie chattered on, barely taking a breath between words. The weather in Puerto Rico had been warm and sunny. The island was paradise, the ocean turquoise, just as it looked in the travel brochures, and the people were
maravillosa.
She didn’t know there could be so many friendly people in one place. She hadn’t wanted to come back, not so soon, or — what she didn’t say — maybe not ever.

“What’s new around here?” Angie asked brightly.

No one told her about Alvaro’s waking up. They wanted Angie to be surprised. Alvaro had not stirred the whole time she chattered away. Angie was standing at his side, but her face was turned toward Daisy and Alvaro senior, who were still at his feet. Now, he raised his left arm off the bed, slowly but deliberately. Daisy glanced at her son, then at Angie, who had started to say, “Have you seen Shawn lately?” before stopping midsentence and turning toward Alvaro. A long second passed. Alvaro raised his right arm. Angie’s eyes flew wide open. Then he raised both arms, this time higher and more dramatically, a motion that said,
Angie, I’m here. I’m alive. And I hear you.

The people in the room held their breath, each afraid to exhale for fear the moment would pass too quickly and be gone forever.

Angie broke the stillness.

“Al?” she asked incredulously, breathlessly. “Baby, can you hear me?”

Alvaro moved his fully extended arms, faster this time, up and down, up and down. The heart monitor bleeped from the jump in his heart rate. Angie placed her hand gently on his. She looked down at his bandaged face. His eyes were still partially stitched shut, and she knew he couldn’t really see her, not clearly. His mouth was exposed and he was trying to speak, but he couldn’t because there was a breathing tube stuck in his throat. He formed words with his lips, but Angie couldn’t understand what he was trying to say.

“He’s trying to tell me something,” Angie cried.

“Talk to him,” Daisy said. This was the first time she had seen Alvaro try to speak.

Angie talked about her brother’s birthday party. The whole family was there, kids and all, and there were balloons and a big chocolate cake with thick buttercream frosting, “your favorite.” She talked about the shameful grade she had gotten on a calculus test, an 84. “I could kill myself for getting that grade,” she said. “Can you believe it?” She talked about the computer lab at school. She was spending a lot of time there, the way they had done together, but it wasn’t nearly as much fun without him. “I love you,” Angie said. “And I miss you.”

Alvaro’s mouth was forming indecipherable words. One after the other after the other. All silent, none of them comprehensible.

“He’s talking. He’s talking, but I don’t understand,” Angie whispered hoarsely. “It’s been so long since I’ve been able to talk to you!” she cried. “And I have so many stories to tell you.”

Tears spilled out of Alvaro’s eyes, dampening the gauze mask that bandaged the rest of his face.

“Look!” Alvaro senior cried. “He is crying. Don’t cry, Pápi, please don’t cry.”

Daisy was crying, too, crying because she was seeing the first emotion from her son in months. As much as she hated to see her son weep, she loved that he was feeling something, and knowing her son as she did, she knew what it was.

“Let him cry,” Daisy said. “His tears are the only way he can tell us what he is feeling, and he is feeling love.”

So the boy who had been given a one-in-three chance of living, who had been on the verge of death only weeks before, cried.

Chapter 18

H
ello. Hello. Hello.” The words spilled out of Alvaro’s mouth like a river released from the ice after a spring thaw. A moment earlier, Michael Marano, a burn surgeon, had removed the breathing tube from Alvaro’s trachea, allowing him to speak for the first time since the morning of the fire. It had been ninety days. “Okay, Alvaro, come on now, can you say something to us?” Marano had asked. Eager to test his new freedom, Alvaro didn’t hesitate.
Hello. Hello. Hello.

The first words had been a long time coming. First, Alvaro had to be weaned from the respirator that had kept him alive for the past thirteen weeks. Little by little, the settings had been lowered, decreasing the volume of oxygen the machine pushed into his fragile lungs. Every adjustment forced him to work harder to breathe with the machine. Then he was taken off the respirator completely for short spurts of time, forcing him to do all the work himself, pulling air into his lungs, pushing it out. At first, it was fifteen minutes. Then an hour. Then two hours. The process was exhausting. Sometimes he felt as if he were suffocating as his lungs struggled to do what the machine had done so effortlessly, and no amount of reassurance from the nurses or the respiratory therapists could completely calm him. At times, Alvaro slept the rest of the day after a particularly grueling session off the vent. “You have to work harder,” the therapists would tell him. “Once you’re off the vent, the healing will go faster. The quicker you’ll be able to go home.”
Home,
Alvaro would say to himself, then drag in another mouthful of air and blow it out again. Finally, ten days after the tube was removed for the first time, the machine was put away. The sickest patient in the burn unit was ready to breathe on his own.

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.