After the Fire: A True Story of Love and Survival (16 page)

The reunion with Bond was warm and happy.

“There’s my man,” Bond said, grabbing Alvaro in a bear hug. “You look great. You’ve come a long way.”

Alvaro laughed. “What are you going to do to me today?”

“Just wait,” Bond said.

Daisy and her husband hovered over Alvaro while Bond worked with him. When Alvaro had been a patient at Saint Barnabas, his therapy had been structured around visiting hours so that his parents weren’t there. Now they sat and watched from the time they brought Alvaro in until it was time to take him home again. When Alvaro cried out in pain, Daisy winced and shrugged. Alvaro senior walked away, unable to abide his son’s anguish. They interfered constantly, asking,
Do you need a drink of water? Is he hurting you? Do you want to stop now?

The next day, they hovered even closer.

Are you okay, Alvaro? Does it hurt? Do you want to go home now? Roy, you’re hurting him.

Bond asked Alvaro’s parents to stay in the waiting room after that. They groused but did as they were told, reading magazines or walking the halls until it was time to go home.

Alone with Bond one day, Alvaro confided that his parents were suffocating him. He knew they loved him, but he couldn’t go to the movies with friends without them coming along. The night before, Alvaro said, one of his cousins had offered to take him downtown to the movies. A few of the guys were going, and they thought it would be good for him to get out of the house. If anyone stared at him, they would stand in front of him, his cousin said, “so you feel comfortable.” Alvaro decided to try it. When his cousin came to pick him up, Daisy grabbed her purse and followed them out the door.

“Where are you going, Mom?” he had asked.

“To the movies, with you,” Daisy had answered, looking puzzled.

Bond listened and shook his head. “She’s just trying to protect you, but it’s too much,” he said.

“I said, ‘Mom, it’s just the guys who are going.’ And she started to cry,” Alvaro explained. Daisy wanted to know what he’d do if something happened to him. His friends wouldn’t know what to do. What if people looked at him? How would he feel without her there to protect him, defend him?

His parents did things for him that he should have been doing himself, Alvaro complained. Sometimes he had to tell his father that he could feed himself.

“He picks up my fork and puts food on it and tries to feed me, like I’m a baby. When I’m eating, they keep watching to see if the food’s going to fall off the fork, so then I get nervous and my hand shakes more and it does.

“They just won’t let go,” he concluded. “But I love them so much, I don’t want to hurt them by saying anything.”

“I know what you’re saying,” Bond said. “But you have to tell them sometime. They’re feeling afraid. You’re getting angry. And everyone’s holding everything inside.”

Finally, when Alvaro had been home for two weeks, the pent-up frustrations exploded.

Daisy was helping him take his first shower at home. She was nervous, afraid she might hurt him. Still weak and wobbly, Alvaro was leaning on a shower chair for support. Holding on with one hand, he soaped up with the other, while his mother attempted to cut the bandages off the top of his head. The gauze stuck. Daisy pulled. Alvaro cried out. She pulled harder. He cried out louder.

Finally, Alvaro pulled away from Daisy.

“I can do this myself!” he scolded her. “Let me do it on my own!”

Daisy was not accustomed to such anger from Alvaro. He had never been cross with her before. And he never talked back to his parents. He had certainly never raised his voice.

Trying to help Alvaro, she let go of the shower chair. It moved and he lost his balance. He nearly fell.

Alvaro pushed her away. “You don’t know how to do anything!” he cried. “You don’t do it like the nurses.”

Daisy was stunned.

“Okay, then,” she said, tears spilling from her eyes. “I’m not going to do anything for you anymore. I’m going to get a nurse to take care of you.”

“What are you complaining about?” Alvaro wailed. “I’m the one who got burned!”

“I didn’t want this to happen to you,” Daisy cried, storming out of the tiny bathroom into her bedroom and slamming the door behind her. “It’s not my fault that you got burned.”

Daisy motioned the investigator toward a closed door off the living room of the tidy Paterson apartment.

“He’s in there,” she said shyly.

Frucci opened the door and squinted, trying to adjust his eyes to the darkened room. As he did, a shadowy figure came slowly into focus. The boy sitting on the bed wore an oversize sports jersey and baggy sweatpants. His hands were gloved, and a black knit mask covered his face except for his eyes and his lips, which were swollen and misshapen. A blue Mets baseball cap was pulled low over his forehead, not quite hiding the bloodstained gauze wrapped around his badly burned scalp.

“Are you Alvaro?” Frucci asked, standing in the doorway.

The boy looked up, then quickly averted his eyes. “Yes,” he said quietly.

Frucci closed the door behind him.

“Hi. I’m John Frucci, the investigator from the prosecutor’s office. It’s great to see you, Alvaro. I’ve heard so much about you. Is it okay if we talk a little bit?”

“Sure,” Alvaro replied, still looking away.

Frucci didn’t show it, but he was shaken. The blinds on the windows were all drawn, blocking out the brilliantly sunny day. A TV droned with sports talk. A plate of rice and beans sat half-eaten on the dresser, next to a Coke can with a plastic straw protruding from it. The boy had sequestered himself in this darkened room, away from the possibility of prying eyes, and it looked as if he rarely left.

Frucci tried to be dispassionate about his work. He had been trained that way, after all. But looking at Alvaro, he wanted to cry. He had heard so much about the boy, about his kind heart and how he had always looked after his family. This all seemed so cruel, so unfair. With the flick of a lighter or a match, this happy, handsome young man had had his future annihilated.

“I have to ask you about the fire,” Frucci said gently. “Everyone who was in the building that morning has been questioned, and I need to know what you remember about that morning.”

“No problem,” Alvaro said, glancing at Frucci. They talked for an hour or so. Matter-of-factly, Alvaro recounted the story of how he had fled from the dorm, but he had not seen or heard anything that could help the investigation.

Sitting with Alvaro made Frucci even more determined to prove who started the fire. He had had plenty of motivation before, motivation fueled by the smugness of students who had stonewalled the investigation. Suddenly, Ryan’s fraternity brothers didn’t remember saying certain things during those early interviews. They were either unavailable or obnoxious when investigators tried to speak to them. Some had been among the students subpoenaed during the raid on the bar a few months earlier, but there still was not enough evidence to present the case to a grand jury.

Sean Ryan and Joey LePore, meanwhile, had gone on with their lives as if nothing had happened. Ryan still attended Seton Hall. He partied at local bars and frat gatherings. LePore had transferred to the University of Delaware shortly after the fire, and investigators had kept an eye on him there. Sometimes they would take the three-hour ride down the New Jersey Turnpike and try to talk to his friends there. But they were just like Ryan’s pals — arrogant and hostile. “Why are you doing this?” one girl asked a detective who approached her on the Delaware campus. “Why don’t you just leave Joey alone?”

Frucci had been unnerved by the callousness of the students and by their complete disdain for authority. He wasn’t all that much older than Ryan and LePore and their friends — a decade or so — and it would never have occurred to him, at that age, to thumb his nose at the cops or to lie about something so important.

Frucci couldn’t help wondering,
Why did someone do this? And why won’t they tell the truth?
He wanted to think that there was some good in everyone and that one day these kids would say they were wrong and they were sorry. And he hadn’t wanted to think people could be so bad that they didn’t give a damn about what they did, even when their actions caused others to die.

Maybe they should see this boy,
Frucci thought, looking at Alvaro. Maybe if they saw the damage they had done, saw the pain that had been inflicted, they would find a conscience.

Somehow, he doubted it.

He didn’t think there was a conscience in the bunch.

At first, Alvaro had been against the idea of attending the burn support group meeting at Saint Barnabas. When Shawn first suggested it, Alvaro said he had all the support he needed from his family and his friends. Trying a different tactic, Shawn then said he didn’t really need a support group, either. But maybe it wouldn’t hurt to follow his mom’s advice and try to help someone else.

“I mean, we know about what it’s like to be burned,” Shawn had said. “So why not share? Right? And think of it this way: we’ll be the stars of the meeting.”

Alvaro just laughed. He had no idea that his physical therapists had talked to Shawn, telling him that Alvaro seemed to be slipping in his recovery. He was getting too comfortable staying — hiding, they thought — in his house. Sometimes, Alvaro skipped therapy, his mother calling to say he wasn’t feeling too well or he was just too tired. As many times as Bond had told Alvaro that it was his responsibility to phone when he wasn’t coming, the messages still came from Daisy, and always very early in the morning when no one would be in the therapy room to pick up the phone. Sometimes Daisy called the night before, after everyone was gone for the day. “How do you know you’re not going to feel good the night before?” Bond had asked Alvaro. “I don’t know,” he had replied, embarrassed by the question.

If they could just get Alvaro to come to the support group, Bond told Shawn one day during physical therapy, then they had a fighting chance of undoing the damage that was being done.

Shawn knew that the only way was to appeal to Alvaro’s sense of selflessness and compassion for other people. Sure enough, after a few conversations with Shawn cajoling and badgering him, Alvaro finally gave in.

“Okay,” Alvaro agreed. “But just one.”

A dozen people were gathered in the burn unit’s community room when Shawn and Alvaro arrived on that Tuesday at the end of August. Some were patients in the unit. Others were physically healed but struggling to survive in the real world: a firefighter who was burned while fighting a house fire years ago and seemed to be coping until his girlfriend lit a candle at dinner one night and he fell apart; a utility worker whose wife left him after he was burned by a rocket of flames that shot up out of a manhole; a woman who had dumped a pot of steaming soup on her chest as she lifted it into the freezer, and had terrible nightmares about being set on fire.

“This is Shawn Simons and Alvaro Llanos,” said the social worker who led the meeting. Most of the others knew them from newspaper stories or television accounts of the dormitory fire, and just as Shawn had promised, they were treated like celebrities.

“I thought I read that you died,” the mother of a burned child said to Alvaro.

“Almost,” Alvaro said, fidgeting in his chair.

“Who has a question?” the social worker asked.

One mother, whose six-year-old boy was burned when he was playing with matches near a can of paint and it blew up in his face, worried about people staring at and ridiculing her child.

Shawn took the question.

“People do stare,” he said. “Wherever I go. At the mall. In restaurants. In gas stations. Even in my own neighborhood, where everyone knows me. It’s something I’ve had to learn how to deal with. Sometimes, when I see someone staring, I’ll ask if they want to know what happened to me. They usually get all embarrassed, but I tell them anyway, and everything’s cool. We both walk away feeling okay.”

A man who was electrocuted while working on a train spoke: “I was in my car at a traffic light, and a man pulled up beside me and kept staring at me,” he said. “I rolled down the window, looked over at him, and said, ‘Boo!’ ”

Everyone laughed.

Another time, the man said, he was swimming at a public pool when he noticed someone staring. “So I turned to my buddy and I said, ‘Jeez, I hope this leprosy is drying up.’ ”

Alvaro piped up.

People didn’t just stare at him, he said. They gaped. “I can’t hide my burns with a baseball cap and gloves the way Shawn does,” he said. “I know people look at me and think I’m ugly. But then I have to think to myself that no matter what I look like now, I know I’m still me. I’m still the same person inside that I was before I got burned. And I’m going to get better in time.”

The fire had taught him important lessons, Alvaro said, looking around the room. “I think I’ve learned more because of it. I’ve seen so much that other people haven’t seen. I learned life is so precious, and no matter how bad things seem — say you don’t have money, or you don’t look the way you did once — well, you still have your life. That’s what’s important.”

Pride washed over Shawn as he listened to Alvaro speak. This was Alvaro’s moment, and as much as Shawn loved to be the center of attention, he was going to let him have it.

Shawn sat quietly when the next question came.

A little boy who was seated next to his mother waited for Alvaro to acknowledge him.

It was Jabrill, the eight-year-old who had been playing with matches when his bed caught fire, burning him over most of his body.

Admitted to the burn unit while Alvaro was there, Jabrill had turned to the teenager for comfort and encouragement. The relationship had continued, and he had recently telephoned Alvaro at home with a problem. The kids in the neighborhood were making fun of him because of the way he looked, Jabrill had explained. “Sometimes, when I go out with my mom, people stare.”

“I think they’re probably staring because you’re so cute,” Alvaro had said, and the little boy giggled. Alvaro had talked to him for an hour about ignoring children who were teasing him, finally soothing the young boy.