After the Fire: A True Story of Love and Survival (9 page)

Chapter 16

T
he nurses in the burn unit marveled at Alvaro’s girlfriend, Angie. They listened when she whispered in his ear: “I’m here, baby. It’s Angie. I love you. I miss you. I’ll be right here when you wake up.” They watched as she closed her eyes, pretending to be someplace else, gently rubbing lotion on his swollen brown feet, the only part of him she could touch. “Where are you today?” the nurses would ask. “We’re on a Caribbean island,” Angie would say. Or “We’re floating on a big white cloud.” They read her letters, notes written in a big, curly scrawl and taped to the wall at the foot of Alvaro’s bed so that he would see them, Angie explained, if he suddenly woke up and she wasn’t there. Sometimes the nurses felt like voyeurs because the letters were so achingly personal, the words of an idealistic young girl desperately in love: “I love you, baby. I love you so much. We will never be apart. Never. God is taking care of you, and I know that when you come out of this, God will give me the strength to take care of you.”

Angie was petite and pretty, with wavy auburn hair and mahogany eyes. The nurses often told her, “Angie, you’re more devoted than most of the husbands and wives of our patients.” Privately, they were taking bets about how long she would last. The nurses had seen families break down from the strain of dealing with burns and the time it took for patients to recover. They had seen wives leave husbands because they couldn’t deal with disfigurement, and husbands walk out on wives rather than stick out the long and difficult process of burn recovery.

The first signs of strain began to surface when Alvaro had been in a coma for nearly two months. Angie came to visit on a Sunday afternoon, after missing a day, which everyone, especially Daisy, had noticed because Angie never missed a day. Her eyes were red and puffy from crying, and her hair hung limply over her shoulders. She usually wore her hair pulled up in a spirited ponytail. She seemed agitated and distracted, not the happy girl who was always trying to cheer up everyone else.

Daisy greeted Angie with a hug, the way she always did. Angie sat next to Alvaro’s bed and stared at his face
. Why doesn’t he do something, anything, to let me know he’s here?
she wondered.
Why can’t he give a sign that he hears me?
As always, Alvaro just lay there, dead to the world, his only movement the rise and fall of his chest as the respirator pushed air into and out of his lungs.

Angie paced around the room for a while, reading and rereading the same cards and letters that people had sent Alvaro, and then left earlier than usual, though not before Daisy asked her what the rush was. Making some excuse about a cousin’s birthday that she couldn’t miss or her father would be angry, Angie fled out the door. One of the nurses caught up with her in the hallway.

“Are you okay?” the nurse asked, patting Angie’s back.

“I hate coming here,” Angie said through gritted teeth. “When you come here every day and you don’t see any change, it’s discouraging. It all seems so hopeless. I know he’s not going to wake up for at least another month, and my body is exhausted.”

“Go home and get some rest,” the nurse said. “It’s okay to take care of yourself, Angie.”

“But his parents will be mad at me,” Angie said.

“His parents will have to understand,” the nurse said.

A few days later, Angie arrived at the hospital, more agitated than before. She had skipped two visits that week. She would not be coming quite as much now, she explained, almost apologetically, to the nurse in the room. Getting a ride to the hospital from Seton Hall wasn’t easy, Angie said. Besides that, she had schoolwork to do, which took up most of her time. And she hadn’t been to the gym in weeks. She was just so tired. Of course, the nurse said, looking at Angie knowingly.

Angie said she loved Alvaro, but she was starting to despise the hospital. The putrid smells. The hiss of the respirator. She didn’t want to start hating Alvaro, too. If only he would talk to her, comfort her. He had always been able to make her feel better, to calm her when she was afraid.

“Take a deep breath,” the nurse said.

The day had begun badly for her, Angie explained, and she started to cry. All of her friends were out doing things — fun things — and she was in her room, listening to music and thinking about everything that had happened. It was as if she had to live two different lives now. In school she talked and laughed with her friends. But then she felt ashamed for having fun when Alvaro was fighting for his life, so she would transform herself into the dutiful girlfriend, spending hours at the side of her comatose boyfriend, hating every minute of it. Angie wanted to live her life, not be trapped in a burn unit. “What’s so wrong about that?” she asked defensively. “I’m a young girl, and young girls are supposed to have fun, right? Right?”

“Right,” the nurse said, nodding sympathetically.

As if the day wasn’t dark enough, Angie saw some of Alvaro’s wounds for the first time. The doctors had removed the bandages from his legs that morning so that his donor sites — places where patches of healthy skin had been shaved off his thighs and calves for grafting onto his chest and back — could heal better. Alvaro’s legs looked like a checkerboard of red, raw flesh. Angie had been stunned by the sight. “Will it get better than this?” she asked with fear in her voice. “It will get better,” the nurse said. “But the scars will never disappear.”
What’s going to happen when she sees his burns?
the nurse wondered. The injuries to Alvaro’s back and chest had been catastrophic. His torso didn’t even look human.

Angie felt as if her head would explode. She hadn’t wanted to admit it, even to herself, but she had been worrying lately about the way Alvaro would look. In high school he had been nominated one of the best-looking boys in their senior class, and he was also voted best dressed. He had always taken pride in his appearance. He wore only brand names. And as shy as he was, he loved to make an entrance. “Baby, do you think I’m cute?” he would sometimes ask Angie before they walked into a club or a party. “Baby, you’re gorgeous,” she would tell him. Angie loved being seen with Alvaro. He was a real catch. In high school, all the girls were jealous when he chose her as his girl. How would it be now? Angie wondered.

“It scares me a little — what he’s going to look like,” Angie told a friend one day. “He was always so self-conscious. I know how he is. He won’t be the same person.”

People were asking too much of her, Angie went on. Especially Alvaro’s parents. “They expect me to be here all the time like they are,” she said. “They expect me to be the perfect girlfriend. They expect me to be a wife, but we’re not even married.”

Then Angie revealed a story from her past. In 1995, she said, when she was twelve years old, her father was trapped in a burning car. His face and hands were horribly burned. For a year after he left the hospital, he hid at home rather than face the stares of strangers. He couldn’t even look at himself, so he took down all the mirrors in the house. When he finally did go out, people stared, just as he had feared, Angie said. She wanted to shout at them,
Stop looking! What is the matter with you?
But she quietly endured her father’s discomfort. It was her discomfort, too, Angie admitted. “Little kids would point. I saw it.”

“I think people think I can handle this with Alvaro better because I’ve been through it,” Angie said. “But I think it makes it harder, knowing what I know.”

She worried that she might not be able to stick it out with Alvaro. “I’m not proud of that, so I try not to think about it, but say he has a big operation and he wants me there for him and I have a big calculus test the next day. I’m eighteen,” said Angie, whose tears turned to sobs. “I’m supposed to be with my friends, chilling and going shopping, and I’m going to be here in the hospital with my sick boyfriend? My life hasn’t been easy. But when I got to college, I was so happy. Everything was perfect. Then this happened and it all just fell apart. Am I going to be able to help him through this? I just don’t know.”

On the third day of spring, Alvaro’s fever broke.

“This is the turning point we have been waiting for,” Mansour told Daisy and Alvaro senior. After three weeks of trying to keep Alvaro alive, the doctors had finally gotten the edge in the battle against the infection that was killing him. If his temperature remained normal for the next couple of days, they would be back in the business of healing him.

Daisy smiled for the first time in weeks. “¡Gracias a Dios!” she cried, burying her head in her husband’s shoulder.
Thanks be to God.

“God is helping the doctors to save our son,” Alvaro senior added.

Alvaro’s fever stayed away the next day, and the day after that, so Mansour ordered his medications to be cut back. The heavy doses of morphine he had been given since the fire had kept Alvaro comatose, and another drug, Norcuron, had kept him paralyzed. By backing off the medication, Alvaro should soon begin showing signs of life, Mansour said.

For days afterward, Daisy sat by her son’s side, looking for something, anything, to indicate he was waking up.
“Bebito,”
she whispered, “I know you can hear me. If you can, give me a sign.” But nothing changed. Alvaro lay there, flat on his back, his eyes sewn partially shut, white gauze wrapping all but his feet and a patch of his face. She began to lose hope again.

Still, she returned. One Tuesday afternoon, seventy-five days after the fire, she squeezed Alvaro’s hand and purred with her usual reassurances. “Alvaro, Mommy is here. If you can hear me, give me a sign, my darling.”

Her son blinked.

“Blink again,” Daisy cried. “Alvaro, honey, please blink again for Mommy!” She was terrified that her eyes had merely played a cruel trick.

A few seconds passed.

Alvaro’s sutured eyelids flickered again.

Daisy ran to the nurses’ station. “My son —,” she cried, “he is waking up! I saw him blink.”

Two of the nurses returned with Daisy to Alvaro’s room. This time, when Daisy asked him to respond, nothing happened. She asked again. Nothing. He probably went back to sleep, the nurses said. Privately, though, the staff chalked it up to a mother’s desperation. The nurses hadn’t seen any signs from Alvaro, and even if he was coming out of his coma, it was unlikely he could comprehend orders. It would take weeks before he was clearheaded enough to understand commands.

But not every nurse was so quick to discount Daisy’s testimony. Ann Marie Majestic, who had been with Alvaro from the beginning, started to talk to her patient on the off chance that he really had responded to his mother. Majestic was fiercely protective and possessive of Alvaro. Once, she yanked the curtain closed around his bed when a man who was visiting another patient stopped to stare. “This isn’t a circus act,” she had snapped. The man had slinked away.

Majestic had been burned as a child when a boiler exploded and scalded her right leg. She still had the scars to show for it. That experience was the main reason she chose burns as a specialty, and she had firsthand experience of what her patients were going through.

Two days after Daisy claimed she’d seen Alvaro blink, Majestic thought she saw something, too. She was talking to Alvaro as she washed his burns in the tank room. “You’re in the hospital because there was a fire on campus. We’re taking care of you. It’s all right, honey. You’re on a machine that is helping you to breathe, and your eyes are stitched to protect them.” Alvaro’s breathing suddenly quickened, so Majestic chattered on. “Angie got out of the dorm without injury. Shawn’s okay. And you’re doing better. Do you understand what I’m saying, honey?”

Ever so slightly, Alvaro nodded.

“You hear me, honey?”

He nodded again.

Majestic had watched Alvaro struggle to live for weeks. When she went home each day, she wondered whether he would be there when she came back. About the only thing he had going for him was his age. His lungs were damaged, and a host of potentially menacing infections festered in his system. His burns still bled so badly that he needed regular blood transfusions, sometimes two a day. A thirty-year-old with the same injuries wouldn’t have had a chance. Majestic admired Alvaro’s grit. His family had told her how shy he was, how humble, but no one had to tell her about his spirit. Alvaro still faced daunting odds, but his will to live was powerful.

“You’re getting better, honey,” Majestic said, and the other nurses and technicians in the room quietly wiped away their tears.

Two flights down, Shawn was about to reach another milestone in his recovery. He was finishing up his last session with Roy Bond, his physical therapist. Bond was a bear of a man with a barrel chest and hands the size of dinner plates. He had started his career at Saint Barnabas twenty-seven years earlier, in the hospital’s linen department, then studied at night to get his degree in physical therapy. Bond was as warm as he was large, and he was genuinely attached to his patients — and they to him. He could get patients to do anything with his smooth, persuasive voice. Shawn was no exception.

It was partly because of Bond that Shawn had kept his promise to return to the hospital every day for physical therapy. When he had started, weeks earlier, he hadn’t been able to take ten steps on level ground without getting so winded he needed to rest. Now he could climb four flights of stairs and pedal a stationary exercise bicycle for twenty minutes straight without becoming exhausted. Shawn still tired more easily than normal, but it would be up to him to regain the rest of his strength.

“Turn out the lights! The party’s over,” Bond said. “What’s that song they used to sing? ‘It’s so hard to say good-bye’?”

Bond tried not to seem sad, but in a way, he was. Shawn had come a long way in a few weeks. They had worked hard together. They had laughed and cried together. Now Shawn was on his way to the next phase of his recovery, a phase that would decide his future. He had passed boot camp, and now the real test began — the test that would determine whether he would live his life as a burn victim or as a man.