After the Fire: A True Story of Love and Survival (11 page)

Chapter 19

D
o 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

I
n 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.”

“Right now? . . . Right
now?
”

The most seasoned members of the burn team squirmed when it was time for the mirror to come out. This was Kapner’s first time, and the anticipation made her feel nauseated. Alvaro was one of the sweetest young men she had ever met. She wanted to protect him, but she knew that hiding him from himself wasn’t the way to do it.

Kapner went to the drawer and pulled out the mirror. It was gray plastic with a long handle, the kind found in any discount drugstore. It was much too ordinary for the task at hand, Kapner thought. She rubbed her hand over its smooth, flat surface and hesitated before heading to Alvaro’s room.

When she finally walked through the door, she found Alvaro sitting in a chair by his bed. He smiled when he saw her. She smiled back, then held up the mirror and slowly sat down on the corner of the bed, opposite him.

“It’s time for you to see yourself,” she said in a voice so gentle that Alvaro could hardly hear her.

“What?”

“It’s time for you to look at yourself.”

Alvaro’s eyes widened. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m scared.”

“Of course you’re scared, sweetie,” Kapner said, wishing she were someplace else. “I’m scared, too. But you have to do this. Look, we’re all friends here. You can scream. You can cry. We’ll be here for you. You have to do this, Al.”

Tears streamed down Alvaro’s red, leathery cheeks. It had only been the night before that he had lain awake, lamenting how the students at Seton Hall would stare at him, at the new, burned Alvaro Llanos. When the doctor had removed the stitches from his eyes a couple of days earlier, he had seen his hands for the first time, when the nurse changed the dressings, and he hadn’t slept much since. These hands didn’t look like his hands — they were mottled and bumpy and scary looking. When he studied them, he broke down and cried.

Al had been happy after his hands had been bandaged up again. He thought maybe he would wear gloves for the rest of his life so that no one else would see what his hands looked like. But he couldn’t very well hide his face, could he?

Alvaro’s thoughts were interrupted by a knock at the door. He looked up and saw Shawn standing there. He was smiling.

“You didn’t think I was going to miss this, did you?” Shawn asked, walking to Alvaro’s side.

Shawn had been downstairs in occupational therapy. One of the therapists had told him what was happening. He had excused himself, saying he was sorry, he would be back later to stretch his hands, but right now he needed to be with his friend.

Shawn sat on the arm of the chair.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Alvaro said, looking up at Shawn.

Kapner placed the mirror on Alvaro’s lap. He refused to look at it, looking instead at Shawn, who had tears in his eyes.

“C’mon, Al,” Shawn said, gently prodding his roommate. “We’re in this together, remember? I’m here for you. It’s time.”

“Al, pick up the mirror,” Kapner said gently. “You have to pick it up and look at yourself.”

Alvaro took a long, deep breath. Holding on to Shawn’s arm with his left hand, he reached for the mirror with his right. Shawn could see his friend was trembling.

Slowly, Alvaro drew the mirror to his face. He stared at his image for a long moment. At first he said nothing as he studied his eyes, then his cheeks, then his chin.

“What’s that?” he asked finally, pointing to a dark patch of skin below his mouth.

“Your chin has been grafted,” Kapner said. “Your cheeks were not. You still have beautiful eyes, and a beautiful mouth.”

Alvaro looked back into the mirror and seemed to freeze. Shawn squeezed his friend’s hand as Kapner groped for her next words. The tension in the room was suffocatingly thick. Shawn thought he might be sick.

“Shawn is going through the same thing,” Kapner said, but Alvaro seemed not to hear. He just continued to stare into the mirror.

“Al,” she said. “Al, look at Shawn’s face.”

Kapner motioned to Shawn. He pulled off the surgical mask that covered his face from the bottom of his eyes to his chin. The mask was required in the burn ICU, and every time Shawn had visited Alvaro, his face had been covered. Now, for the first time, he took the mask off, revealing his own burned face to his roommate.

Alvaro looked from the mirror to Shawn.

“See, Al,” Shawn said pleadingly. “I look like you. I told you, we’re going to get through this together.”

Alvaro silently studied Shawn’s face. The moment seemed more like an hour to Shawn. Then Alvaro looked into the mirror one last time. He wouldn’t tell anyone what he saw, but it wasn’t anything like the face he had grown up with. It wasn’t the face of the boy his parents had been so proud to introduce, and it wasn’t the face of the person Angie had fallen in love with.

This isn’t my face,
Alvaro thought as he stared at himself.
This isn’t me. I hate this face.

“Okay,” Alvaro said finally, his voice filled with resignation. He put the mirror down on his lap. A sense of revulsion rolled through his entire body.
I’m so ugly,
he thought.
What am I going to do?