After the Fire: A True Story of Love and Survival (5 page)

Chapter 7

A
t three in the morning, there wasn’t much to do in a hospital waiting room, and Kenny Simons had that leg-jittering kind of restlessness. A television was on, but the sound was turned off. Fluorescent bulbs on the ceiling lit up the tiny space like Hollywood spotlights, flooding the room with an intense and antiseptic atmosphere.

Kenny was sitting in a wooden chair so hard it didn’t move even as his leg jackhammered into the floor. Nearby, Christine lay curled up on a couch with her eyes closed. Watching the minutes tick by on a large, round wall clock, he tried not to think about the time. Or the lights. Or facing the world with a mangled son. He had always been so proud of his handsome boy. He loved the way his skin had been as smooth as a baby’s, even though he was in college now.
How will Shawn handle being disfigured? How will he handle people staring? How will I?
Kenny wondered, the cacophony of thoughts getting louder in his head.

“I’m worried about how Shawn is going to handle how he looks,” he announced, hoping his ex-wife wasn’t really asleep.

Of course, Christine wasn’t sleeping. She hadn’t slept a wink in the two days since Shawn had been burned. How do you sleep when your child is fighting for his life? How do you sleep when your ex-husband is squirming and fidgeting less than an arm’s length away? Sometimes, Christine wondered why Kenny was even there. He had hardly been a doting father since he’d left them, at her insistence, fourteen years earlier. She hadn’t forgotten the times he’d missed Shawn’s birthday or the Christmas when he neglected to give him a single gift. Shawn had never been more hurt than he’d been when Kenny had told him, years earlier, “I have a new family now. You’ll have to accept your place in the background.”

Christine sat up on the couch and pulled the blanket around her shoulders. “What are you talking about, Kenny?” she asked.

“When I was young, I was handsome like him,” he said. “If he’s anything like me, he’s going to be devastated by this.”

Anything like you? Anything like you? Shawn is sweet and kind. He’s considerate of me and his sister. He thinks about other people, not just himself. Shawn isn’t anything like you.

Christine bit her tongue so her thoughts couldn’t spill out into words. She had always tried to be polite to Kenny. She had never pursued him for any kind of monetary support, and when he had made appearances in Shawn’s life over the years, she had always been gracious. But this was too much.

Shawn was lying in a bed in a burn unit, hovering somewhere between life and death. There was a real chance he would never look back at her, never tell her another funny story, never giggle at one of her silly jokes, never throw his arms around her and say,
Mom, how did I get so lucky to have you as my mother?

Tears welled up in Christine’s eyes. She didn’t hear what Kenny was saying anymore, but he was saying something and she cut him off.

“We’re waiting to see if God is going to spare our child, and you’re thinking about Shawn’s
looks?
What’s the matter with you, Kenny? Instead of sitting here crying about the way he might look, you should be on your knees praying that he’s still with us in the morning.”

It was the last night they would spend together in the hospital.

The team of seven arson investigators had scoured every inch of Boland Hall, looking for clues about how the fire started. Working under bright klieg lights, they formed an assembly line and shoveled debris into neat piles. Then they sifted through every inch of ash and gunk for evidence. When they walked out of Boland Hall after midnight, they had eliminated most of the typical causes of accidental fires. They had checked every electrical socket and wire. They had searched for space heaters and found none. “We believe the area of origin was the couch beneath the bulletin board in the third-floor lounge,” Frucci wrote in his report.

The early investigation revealed that the fire had been searing and quick, a twelve- to fifteen-minute event that probably started with an “open ignition” — a match or a lighter. There was no evidence of accelerants.

The team suspected arson, but they couldn’t prove it. Their only hope was to find someone who had seen something suspicious.

Within twenty-four hours of the blaze, investigators had begun interviewing students. They learned that Boland Hall had been a rowdy place on the night of the fire. There had been parties after the basketball game, and kids were drunk and rambunctious. Boys had been wrestling in the third-floor lounge. The resident advisers had tried to calm them, but it had done no good.

Two students offered a curious observation. From their dorm room, they said, they had heard the sound of paper being torn down, like a banner being ripped off the wall. Then everything had gone silent — until the fire alarms began wailing.

That was helpful information, but the cause remained a mystery. Maybe the banner was deliberately torn down, or maybe it just came down on its own when the tape adhering it to the wall lost its stick. Maybe the two students were wrong about what they had heard. And even if they were right, what did that prove? Frucci was stuck.

Little did he know that he was about to get his first break.

It was Sunday. Investigators had interviewed dozens of students in the four days since the fire and they were frustrated at how little they still knew.

Sean Ryan was one of several students at the South Orange police headquarters that afternoon, a random name on a list of some two hundred Boland Hall residents who still needed to be questioned.

Seated on the other side of a metal desk from his state police interrogator, Sgt. Kevin Dunn, a ruddy-faced Irishman with a crew cut, the boy had seemed calm enough at first.

Yes, Ryan said, he lived in Boland Hall.

Yes, he had been horsing around in the dorm with friends after the basketball game.

No, he didn’t know anything about the fire.

Cops walked in and out of the tiny interrogation room. One hour turned to two, then three. Ryan fidgeted in his chair. He was tired and feeling the pressure. Suddenly, he turned weepy.

The worst thing he had done that night was pull a paper banner off the wall in the lounge, he finally admitted. He certainly hadn’t started any fire. No way.

Frucci watched from his seat in the corner. The air seemed to leave the room. No one breathed as Dunn exchanged a quick look with Frucci. Frucci read his expression as saying
Holy shit.

Frucci and Dunn were thinking the same thing: two students had said they heard the sound of paper being torn down in the third-floor lounge right before the fire alarm rang. The banner was hanging over the same couch in the lounge that arson investigators had determined was where the fire began.

State Police lieutenant Christopher Andreychak was the next to speak.

So, hypothetically, if you knew who lit the fire, would you tell us? Andreychak asked Ryan nonchalantly.

The boy turned cold. “Well, I’m no rat,” he said.

It was a strange answer, Frucci thought, and a telling one.

Dunn turned to his computer and perched his fingers over the keyboard. It was time to take Ryan’s official statement.

Ryan stared at his interrogators. He had said too much and he seemed to know it. He rose from his chair to leave. There would be no formal statement, Ryan said. Not today.

“I’ll be back tomorrow,” he said, walking toward the door.

Would he take a polygraph then? Dunn asked.

Yeah, sure, Ryan promised, fleeing the room.

Dunn looked at Frucci and Andreychak. “That kid’s never coming back,” he said. And that, they thought, was interesting — maybe more than interesting.

There were a couple of reasons why Sean Ryan would not be back to take a polygraph. For one, two days earlier, at a meeting at the local Dunkin’ Donuts, he had made a pact with Joey LePore, his Boland Hall roommate, to say nothing to police about the night of the fire. Ryan and LePore had been best friends since kindergarten, and like all best friends, they had shared plenty of secrets.

Their biggest secret was the second reason Ryan would not be back.

Chapter 8

T
he tank room was the heart of burn treatment. Antiseptic, windowless, and brightly lit with fluorescent lights, it looked like other hospital treatment rooms — except that it wasn’t. It was foul smelling and muggy. Between the heat and the sickening odors of burned flesh and open wounds, medical students were known to faint fairly frequently.

The tank room was what burn patients tended to remember most about their hospital stay — even years later. It was the place where they were taken every day to have their open wounds scrubbed with gauze that felt more like sandpaper or Brillo. Called debridement, the scouring was a fundamental step in burn treatment. Proteins leaked from the wounds and formed a film that looked like the cooked white of an egg. The film, which provided a haven for deadly infections, dried into a hard, waxy scab. When it was scrubbed away early in the treatment process, permanent scarring was minimized and the risk of infections was limited.

Most patients were heavily sedated in the burn unit, but they were injected with booster shots of morphine before they were delivered for their tank treatment. They still felt the pain.

Paul Mellini, the chief tank-room technician, had scheduled Alvaro early. His tank time was exhausting for the staff, both physically and emotionally, and they wanted to get through it as quickly as possible. A tanking usually took an hour or less; Alvaro’s took two hours every time. “Let’s go,” Mellini said as four others followed him into room 4, where the comatose boy lay. Two doors away a two-month-old baby, purposely scalded by his mother in a bathtub and admitted the night before, was screaming. An elderly woman burned in a cooking accident moaned in the room beyond that.

The mood in Alvaro’s room was tense. At five feet ten inches tall and two hundred pounds, Alvaro Llanos was not a small man. With seventy extra pounds of fluids in his body, and grisly, gaping sores branding his torso, he looked more like a decaying corpse than a living human being.

Alvaro was the largest patient in the burn unit, and the sickest. Unconscious, he was dead weight and difficult to handle. The team of nurses and technicians who arrived in his room to take him for his daily scouring in the tank room had had to gear themselves up for it.

On the count of three, Mellini and his team lifted Alvaro off his bed and onto a plastic-covered, stainless-steel shower trolley. They covered him with a blanket and then rolled the trolley twenty-five feet into the tank room and under a trio of shower hoses that hung from the ceiling. The trolley was tipped slightly and another hose was attached from the bottom of the gurney to a drain in the floor. That hose would accommodate the runoff of water, blood, and dead flesh. Mellini tried to keep the atmosphere light. “Save me a piece of birthday cake from the lunchroom,” he said to one of the burn technicians as he raised a pair of shiny silver scissors and began cutting away the bloodstained gauze from Alvaro’s arm.

“Livin’ La Vida Loca” played on a boom box in the room. “Living the crazy life, that’s us,” Alvaro’s nurse, Andy Horvath, declared. Everyone nervously laughed at his comment.

The team cut away the gauze covering every inch of Alvaro’s body except his feet, his eyes, his nostrils, and his lips. Horvath pumped additional morphine into an IV line in Alvaro’s arm as they stripped away the bandages. Soon Alvaro was naked. The room went quiet. From his scalp to his waist, Alvaro was one gaping, oozing wound. His hands, grafted earlier, were a brownish purple, bloated to twice their normal size. His hair had been burned off and his head was red and shiny, and chunks of his ears were missing. The sides of his torso were concave, the burns so deep that the surgeons had been forced to cut away layers of flesh to reach healthy tissue to support the temporary, life-sustaining skin grafts he had received when he was first brought into the hospital. But his back was the worst: a skinless bed of raw red and yellow tissue. Even his legs, which were not burned, had not been spared. So much healthy skin had been taken from his legs to graft onto his torso and his back that they now looked like a patchwork quilt.

Horvath choked up.

“Let’s get to work,” Mellini said.

They soaked Alvaro with warm tap water from the overhead hoses. Then they smeared him with antibacterial soap and began scrubbing his burns with four-by-four-inch gauze pads, the ones patients said felt like steel wool.

While the team scrubbed, Mellini watched Alvaro’s face to gauge how much pain they were causing him. Though out cold, Alvaro grimaced. Then, despite being in a morphine-induced state of unconsciousness, he lifted his right arm as if to ward off the next punch. Nelly Delgado, a grandmother who had worked in the tank room longer than anyone else, was overcome by tears. Alvaro was hooked to a respirator and unable to make sounds, but she knew he was screaming inside. “Okay, honey,” Delgado said, tears rolling out of her eyes. “I’m so sorry I’m hurting you. Poor baby. God help our poor, poor baby.”

Horvath, a gentle man, beloved by the patients and the rest of the staff, stroked Alvaro’s bare hands. He had already become attached to the boy. He had seen the pictures the Llanoses taped to the wall near their son’s bed: Alvaro holding his girlfriend, Angie Gutierrez; posing with his parents and sisters in their kitchen; mugging for the camera with his buddies from Paterson. The photographs showed a beautiful boy with soft, romantic eyes and a cocky smile. Horvath had instantly become fiercely protective of him.

“I’ll take care of his face,” he told the others.

“Okay, Al,” Horvath said quietly as he began his work. “It’s okay. You’re doing fine, buddy. I’m going to clean your mouth now. Good boy. Oh, you have the most beautiful white teeth.”

With the cleaning finished, Alvaro was moved to the other side of the curtain that divided the tank room. There, he was placed under a heat shield to keep him warm. Toni Schmidt, a burn technician, picked up a silver nitrate stick. It looked as harmless as a Q-tip. She touched the end of the stick to one of the open wounds on Alvaro’s right side to oxidize unwanted scar tissue. To Alvaro, it would feel as if he were being burned all over again. How intense was the pain that, even unconscious, the boy seemed to feel it? Beyond imagining. Tears streamed from Alvaro’s eyes. Nearby, a table had been prepared with his new dressings — large pieces of gauze slathered with brownish yellow silver sulfadiazine, a topical antimicrobial cream. The team wrapped the gauze around Alvaro from his head to his ankles, rolled him onto a stretcher, covered him with a blanket, and, at 9:55 a.m., pushed him back to his room.

The procedure had taken one hour and fifty-five minutes. Tomorrow morning it would begin all over again.