After the Fire: A True Story of Love and Survival (17 page)

But the problem hadn’t gotten better, Jabril said now. People still stared. He didn’t know what to do.

People stared at him all the time, too, Alvaro explained. “Just the other day, I was standing in line at the movies, and this girl about my sister Shirley’s age just stood there staring at me,” Alvaro said. “I decided she was staring at me because
I’m
so cute.”

Jabrill giggled again.

On the ride home from the hospital with Shawn, Alvaro was pensive.

“I need to get out more,” he said.

“Yeah,” Shawn said.

Alvaro watched the trees speed by, a rush of green with splashes of yellow and orange. Another season was about to end, and a new one would soon begin. For so long, all he had been able to think about was himself and getting better. It had to be that way. The task had been all-consuming, so there hadn’t been time for anything else, or anyone else. Today, at the hospital, things had been different. He hadn’t thought of himself or his troubles once, and it had felt good.

“I think I really helped people in there,” Alvaro said, looking at Shawn. “I almost felt normal.”

Shawn turned up the music on the radio.

“Told ya,” he said.

Chapter 25

O
n the first day of the school year, shoving his burned hands into the pockets of his baggy Polo jeans and pulling a Yankees baseball cap over his forehead to hide the scars, Shawn returned to Seton Hall.

When Shawn left home that morning, Christine had felt like her son was going off to kindergarten for the first time. How would he feel once he was back on campus? Would he be able to adjust? Would he feel afraid? Shawn had assured her he’d be fine. The fire was in the past, and he didn’t want to dwell on it anymore. What had happened, happened. It had made him a man. It had brought him closer to his father. And it had given him a new best friend. Shawn had stuck with Alvaro through the most difficult times of his life. He had celebrated with him when things went right, cried with him when everything seemed wrong. He was there the day Alvaro woke up from his coma. He had held his hand when he looked in the mirror for the first time. When Alvaro moved from Saint Barnabas to the rehab facility, Shawn had been his first visitor. And his was the first face Alvaro saw when he finally came home.

Now, Alvaro wanted to return all those favors. He wanted to share this milestone with Shawn, to be there with him when he resumed college life.

Frail, scarred, and bandaged, Alvaro walked on campus, his parents tagging along behind him, searching for his roommate. The sun was brilliant, and students twittered with anticipation as they milled around, searching for their new classes.
I wish
—, Alvaro thought, dodging stares by turning his head or looking down at the ground,
I wish I was well enough, strong enough, to be back at school. I wish I had never been burned and it was me and Angie, holding hands, excited about beginning a new semester.

“I wish I could find Shawn,” he said to his parents, now scanning the faces of the students who passed him.

“I’ve counted four so far,” Alvaro said as he walked. “Friends, people I knew pretty well — they didn’t know who I was.”

Alvaro called out to a girl. “Hey, it’s me. How ya doing?”

“Al? Is that you? I wasn’t sure,” she said, running to him and hugging him gingerly.

“There he is!” Alvaro said, spying Shawn walking into a building a few feet away. “Shawn!”

“What are you doing here?”

“I wanted to be here for you, to wish you good luck on your first day back.”

“Wow,” Shawn said, his eyes filled with gratitude and pride that Alvaro had mustered the courage to come. “It’s so great you came here, Al.”

“I know,” Alvaro said, and they both laughed.

Shawn headed for class, his first of five that day, and Alvaro headed for the parking lot, tired from the trip and ready to go home.

He couldn’t help thinking that only a year ago, he had come to campus as an eager eighteen-year-old who had never spent a night away from his parents. His goals had been pretty straightforward: getting good grades, earning a spot on the school baseball team, and making a pretty girl named Angie Gutierrez happy.

Angie, who was living on campus again, seemed to be avoiding Alvaro lately. It had been days, probably longer, since she’d returned one of his phone calls. He had thought about her the night before, when he was planning his trip to Seton Hall to see Shawn. He mused about how much he loved her, and he wondered why he hadn’t seen her and why she wasn’t calling.

“I can’t go home yet,” Alvaro said to his parents as he took his cell phone from his pocket. “I’m going to call Angie to see if she’s around.”

Angie was agitated when she saw Alvaro in the lobby of her dormitory. She had not known he was on campus until he called to say he was there. “I’ll be right down,” she had said. She arrived in the lobby fifteen minutes later.

“Hi, sweetie,” she said stiffly, ushering Alvaro and his parents to the courtyard outside. “I tried to call you yesterday,” she said, kissing him on the cheek. “Really, I did.”

The former lovebirds were ill at ease. They seemed to be dancing: Alvaro took one step forward, and Angie took one step back.

Mrs. Llanos looked away. Her heart was breaking.

A few minutes of chitchat later, Angie said she had to go. Alvaro and his parents headed for the car.

Taking refuge in the campus café, Angie slumped into an overstuffed couch. She wished it would swallow her up. Everything was so different now, Angie explained to a friend. “Sometimes it’s not even him. It doesn’t even look like him anymore. It’s just hard to see him like that. I’m not embarrassed to be with him, but every time I see him I feel so bad. I’m afraid to talk to him about the relationship. Sometimes I feel like my life just stopped. I can’t meet people. I guess I just want to move on. But I feel so guilty.”

Other students had been scrutinizing Angie. “Even when I go out with friends, people say, ‘How’s Al?’ They throw it in my face.

“In the beginning I was trying to be there for him. When he woke up from his coma, he wasn’t communicating with me. Then he realized I was trying my best, but that wasn’t good enough.

“I’m only nineteen,” Angie continued, wringing her hands and staring into her lap. “I should be able to date other people. I don’t want people putting this on me, that I can’t live because of Al. There’s no right or wrong in this. I know a lot of people will disagree with that. They’ll say I’m bad. I’m the type of person who, like, I hate it when people don’t like me. But you can’t judge someone unless you are in their position.”

Angie had made a decision, she said. She would leave Seton Hall as soon as she could get accepted at a college in another state.

“I feel trapped here,” she said. “The fire is going to haunt me forever. I have to deal with all of his friends watching me. If I was to go out with someone here, no one would accept it. I want to be there for him, but I just can’t be there for him as a girlfriend. I want to be able to have the option to move on, and I don’t feel like I have that option, and sometimes I resent that. I used to bug him all the time, ‘When are we going to get engaged? C’mon, when, Al?’ I really thought I would marry him. If this accident didn’t happen, we would have gotten married and had kids and that would have been my life. But right now, he’s not the one.”

Angie started to cry.

“I sang to him when he was asleep for all those months, but he will never know about it. No one will know exactly what I went through. I guess my love left a while back when people were trying to keep me there. I’ve been trying to live on memories. I tried to stay so focused, to love him, to be there, but it’s just not the same anymore. This is a love story that doesn’t have a happy ending.”

Two days later, Angie drove to Alvaro’s house. He had asked her to come. He wanted to let her off the hook.

“I don’t love you anymore,” he said.

“Oh?”

“No. I’m sorry. I’d like to be your friend, but that’s all I can be. I love you as a friend now. I hope that’s okay.”

Angie looked at Alvaro and saw her old boyfriend. She had never loved him more than at that moment.

“I understand,” she said, hugging him tightly.

Alvaro turned and walked into the house. Angie got in her car and drove away.

Shawn was waiting in the Llanoses’ house for Alvaro when he returned from talking to Angie. He had wanted to be there to catch him, if he needed someone.

“We talked the way we used to talk, and I know she still loves me,” Alvaro said. “We decided to be real close friends for now. I have to become a man, and she has to become a woman. Then we’ll see what happens.

“I’m not ready to be a boyfriend. I will do anything for her, but I can’t hold her or take her away somewhere. It’s not fair to her.

“Before she left, I told her that if she wasn’t dating someone else when I got better, I would be there to take her back.”

But Alvaro knew it would be a long time before he could put the fire behind him. His wounds were still healing and he faced years of surgeries to keep his scarring under control and his limbs from constricting. Pain was still part of his everyday existence and would be for the foreseeable future. As sorry as he had been to see Angie leave, he knew that letting her go had been the right thing to do. The passionate girl with the thick copper hair would be a hard act to follow. Angie had been his first and only love. She was smart and gregarious, and always challenging him. She wrote poetry, and she sang and danced. She was good for him. “And she’s beautiful,” Alvaro said, bowing his head. “To me, she’s beautiful.”

Chapter 26

S
hawn awakened that brisk January morning feeling unsettled. It was the one-year anniversary of the fire. Sometimes it felt as if it had happened yesterday. Sometimes, it seemed like a lifetime ago.

Through his own fierce determination, Shawn had healed faster than anyone had expected. Although his hands would always be severely scarred, he had relearned to use them, and his facial scars were beginning to fade. A month earlier he had been discharged from therapy, three months ahead of schedule. He wanted to put the fire behind him.

But three boys were still dead, and his roommate struggled every day of his life. As much as Shawn would have liked to lock himself in his bedroom and sleep the day away, or go someplace far away and just try to forget everything, he owed it to them to be present at a memorial service commemorating the anniversary.

Shawn drove to the Seton Hall campus with conflicting feelings of pride and dread. Pride in himself for hurdling so many obstacles over the past year. Pride in Alvaro for winning over death. Dread that he would have to face the parents of his dead classmates. How would his mother have felt had she lost him in the fire? He could only imagine the suffering of the families of Aaron Karol, John Giunta, and Frank Caltabilota. He didn’t want to think about it.

Wearing a Yankees cap and a large gold cross around his neck, with his mother on his arm, Shawn strode into Walsh Gymnasium holding his head high. He had stopped wearing his gloves over his scarred hands most of the time. He knew people were watching.
There’s Shawn,
they were certain to be saying,
one of the kids who was burned.

The campus was dressed for the somber service. A large wreath with white roses and lilies was propped in front of a memorial bell tower that had been dedicated to the three dead students. A banner in the gym read, “We will never forget those who were lost. They will be with us forever. God is watching over this time of remembrance.”

Alvaro, flanked by his parents, walked in a few minutes after Shawn and joined his former roommate and his mother in the front row of seats, which had been reserved for the victims and their families. He was still frail, but gaining strength. He looked around the gym. It was filled to overflowing. At least a thousand people had crowded onto the bleachers and into folding chairs, and everyone was wearing small metal lapel pins in the shape of a blue ribbon. John Giunta had been a friend. He missed him.
Why did this have to happen?
he wondered.
Why did my classmates have to die?

Shawn and Alvaro had heard the rumors swirling around campus — that fellow students had set the fire. They had read the newspaper stories saying investigators believed it was arson. And they wondered why no arrests had been made. Still, they felt almost no bitterness.

A week earlier, they had had a rare discussion about it, at Saint Barnabas, where Alvaro was recovering from surgery to loosen the leatherlike scars on his neck, which had limited his head movement.

Somehow the conversation had turned to the fire. “I don’t know who set it, so there’s nobody to be angry at,” Shawn said. “I don’t know how I’ll react if there is a name. You can’t go around hating someone you don’t know. But whoever did this, I don’t think they were trying to hurt anybody. It’s like getting hit with a stray bullet. They weren’t aiming for me.”

Alvaro nodded. He used to think a lot about the fire, he acknowledged, and to wonder how it happened, but he didn’t much anymore.

“I used to get mad because these kids did something so stupid,” he said. “I think they probably lit a fire and it got out of control. Something little got real big. I still get mad when I think about the three boys who died. It makes me feel sad to think of how much their families are hurting. But the kids who died are in heaven now, so at least they’re safe.”

“That’s true,” Shawn had said.

Shawn thought back on that conversation with Alvaro as he waited for the memorial service to begin.
What’s the sense of being angry?
he thought.
It won’t bring the dead boys back. Or erase our scars.
He remembered something Alvaro had said: “Sometimes I think I am one of God’s angels, sent down to do good. Maybe to help people who are not as strong as I am.”

Monsignor Robert Sheeran walked to the microphone, and the gymnasium fell silent.

“This has been a year of brutal loss and terrible consequences,” he began. “Our families have lost more than we should ever have to. But you have not lost everything. You have not lost the blessings of each other nor the friends that stand by your side.”

Shawn looked at Alvaro. Alvaro looked back. They had talked often about moving back on campus one day and had decided they probably would, but only when Alvaro was better and they could live together again. From that first day at Seton Hall, when Alvaro had picked Shawn out of all the other freshmen milling around campus and told his parents, “I think he’s going to be my roommate,” he had known theirs would not be an ordinary relationship. “There’s something different about me and Shawn,” he had later told a friend. “I don’t know what it is. We don’t even have to talk. I sense his strength, and it makes me strong, too.”

Sometimes I think I am one of God’s angels, sent down to do good. Maybe to help people who are not as strong as I am.

Monsignor Sheeran continued to speak. “One year ago, our hearts were broken wide open,” he said. “But now listen to the sound of our hearts healing.”

Shawn bowed his head. “Let it be,” he whispered in quiet prayer. “Let it be.”