After the Fire

by Robin Gaby Fisher

  As tenacious as he was proud, Shawn wasn’t about to go back on his promise to himself that he would be out of the burn unit in weeks, not the months the doctors had predicted. On a Monday afternoon, days before the staff had thought he would be ready, he left intensive care for step-down. His mother arrived early to escort him on the short walk between the two units. It was a watershed moment, the few steps representing so much in terms of how far Shawn had come on his journey back from the fire. Dressed in a blue hospital gown and slipper socks, with a nurse carrying the oxygen tank that was fitted to a mask over his mouth, Shawn walked the corridor as if in a victory march. Mansour had told Christine that once Shawn awoke from his coma, he would probably progress fairly quickly to step-down. That’s when the hard work of recuperation would begin. But no one had expected him to move this fast.

  “So soon?” Sue Manzo asked as Shawn passed the nurses’ station on his way to his new room.

  “I told you,” Shawn said, grinning.

  “Yes, you did,” Manzo said.

  But Shawn had still not told anyone — not even his mother, and he told his mother everything — that he had seen Alvaro. He had stopped asking about his roommate after he had glimpsed him that first time. He knew no one would tell him the truth. Sure, they were trying to protect him, but they should have known he would find out. Shawn couldn’t get Alvaro off his mind, and he couldn’t forgive himself for turning the wrong way out of their dorm room, either. He would keep that to himself, too, until he could tell Alvaro that he was sorry, sorry that he had let him down. But every time he passed room 4 and peeked in, nothing seemed to have changed. Alvaro lay there, tubes snaking between bags of fluids and blinking machines and his mummified body, a nurse or doctor always at his side.

  Now, walking past room 4, Shawn glanced sideways, looking at the bed where his friend lay motionless, still unconscious. This was Shawn’s last chance to look in on his friend; the ICU was behind closed doors, and once he walked through them to the step-down side, he would have no official reason to return except to see Al. After today, he would only be able to wonder about Alvaro — wonder about how he was doing — and Shawn knew he would be wondering about him all day long, from the moment he first woke up in the morning until sleep finally overtook him at night.

  “C’mon, Son,” Christine said, pulling on Shawn’s arm. “This is so exciting, Shawn. We’re going to step-down. Before you know it, you’ll be home.”

  “Yeah,” Shawn said, trying to sound happy.

  The nurses applauded as mother and son passed.

  Shawn whimpered like a baby on the morning he was rolled into the OR for surgery on his hands. Pins had to be put in his fingers to immobilize his damaged joints. Otherwise he would lose his fingers. The procedure was relatively easy and would require only local anesthesia, Mansour said. “Aren’t you going to knock me out?” Shawn asked, incredulous. “That’s not how it’s normally done,” Mansour answered. “I’m not doing it unless you knock me out,” Shawn insisted. Hani relented.

  The surgery went as planned, and Shawn was back in his room in two hours. When he woke up from the anesthesia, his mother and Tiha were waiting with pizza. But the next day, Shawn’s mood was dark and raw. He complained about his bandaged hands. Eating was awkward, he said. He was having trouble picking up the telephone. His mood wasn’t helped by his lack of sleep at night. “What’s the trouble?” the nurses asked. It depended on the day, sometimes the hour.

  “My forehead stings.”

  “My fingers ache.”

  “The skin grafts on my hands are ugly. My mother always said the first thing a woman notices about a man is his hands. Where does that leave me?”

  The doctors had said there was no reason Shawn would not, at some point, be able to lead a fairly normal life. His only real physical challenge was getting back the use of his hands, and that would take commitment by him to the painful daily therapy sessions. The therapy, which required the stretching of his taut new skin, would help keep Shawn’s hands from constricting and shriveling up. He knew that. But the pain of bending and straightening his fingers was excruciating, and Shawn was finding there were limits to his tolerance and his perseverance. For the first time in his life, he felt powerless. There was nothing he could do to change what had happened. Nothing he could do to erase the scars. No matter how hard he might try or how much he wanted to make something right, his hands would always remind him that there were some things he couldn’t control. They would never look better. And he couldn’t return to the dorm room and turn left instead of right.

  “I need to go to the bathroom,” he said one day as the physical therapist pulled and pushed on his bandaged fingers. “I need you to open the door for me.”

  “No,” the therapist said. “You have to at least try to turn the knob yourself.”

  “Mom?” Shawn asked, looking at Christine, who was seated in a chair near his bed.

  “No,” the therapist said, looking from Christine to Shawn. “You try, Shawn. You’re not doing as much as you should be. You need to start trying harder. You need to start doing things for yourself. If you don’t start exercising your hands more, they’ll tighten up and you’ll lose the use of them. I thought you were a tough guy. Everyone said you were the star patient in ICU. What happened?”

  Shawn glared at the therapist.

  “Ever have anyone kick you?” Shawn asked through clenched teeth. “Because I’m about to kick you right out of this room.”

  Christine gasped. This was not the Shawn she knew.

  “Shawn!” she snapped. “I’ve never known you to speak to someone like that. I’ve never known you to be violent.”

  “I’ve never hurt like this before,” Shawn responded.

  Mansour heard about the incident. He had watched with great hope and admiration as Shawn struggled back to life in the ICU. He had even told his wife, “This boy has the mettle to come all the way back.” But now Hani was becoming impatient.

  “He is sitting in there like a little king,” Mansour griped at a weekly meeting of the burn team. “Everyone is doing everything for him. That’s not helping. There’s always someone feeding him. Reading to him. I don’t know what happened to him. When he was in intensive care, he did everything we asked and more, and he was always so calm and polite. Now he’s getting better and he’s being impossible.”

  For her part, Christine was worried about Shawn’s state of mind. He had never seemed so angry, so belligerent. Shawn usually handled everything by forgiving and carrying on. But now her easygoing son was a stranger. The more he healed, the more miserable he seemed to become.

  In the past, Christine had always known how to make her son feel better. And as recently as a couple of weeks ago, he’d been cheered by the scores of greeting cards he’d received. Schoolchildren from all over the state were sending notes to the Seton Hall students burned in the fire. Christine picked a card from the pile.

  “Listen to this one, Shawn,” she said, chuckling. The message was written in crayon. “Dear friend,” it read. “My name is Evan. I am a Michigan fan. I suppose you like Seton Hall. If you need a good laugh, I strongly suggest the movie Dumb and Dumber. Now that is a great movie.”

  Normally, Shawn would have giggled along with her, but he was stone-faced.

  “Humph,” he said, turning his attention to the TV.

  “Do you want to tell me what’s going on?” Christine asked, rubbing her son’s head. “Shawn? . . . Shawn?”

  Tears rolled down Shawn’s cheeks. He wiped them away with his bandaged hand, but they continued to fall, drenching his face and his sheets.

  “I guess I’m just getting tired of all this,” he said finally.

  “But Shawn, you’re getting better. You’re doing so well. You’re alive. We have so much to be thankful for.”

  “I’m not sleeping, Mom,” Shawn said, trying to choke back sobs. “I can’t sleep.”

  “Why, Shawn? What is it? Are you afraid?”

  �
�Mom, I saw Alvaro. I saw him a long time ago. No one would tell me anything about him, so I looked in his room. And I kept looking in after that. I know. I know how sick he is. That’s why I don’t sleep. I can’t sleep because I think he’s going to die. And I blame myself. What happened to Al is my fault because I turned the wrong way out of our room.”

  Shawn’s secret was out.

  It was a normal Friday night at the Hall. Hundreds of students crowded into the college bar, just down the street from the Seton Hall campus, mingling and drinking three-dollar beers.

  Jennifer Lopez’s “Waiting for Tonight” was blaring when cops burst through the front door at 1:23 a.m. and swarmed the bar.

  “Nobody leaves until we see some ID,” one officer shouted. The crowd went quiet.

  It had been weeks since the fire, and investigators were frustrated. They were focusing on a small group of students, but no one was talking. The longer the investigation dragged on, the harder it would be to crack the case. Frucci didn’t sleep most nights, wondering what to do next. He tossed and turned in his bed, trying to think of ways to move the investigation forward. With the case hopelessly stalled, investigators had finally decided to resort to an old trick, hoping the guise of a raid on underage drinking would shake loose a fresh lead.

  One of their chief suspects was Sean Ryan, the kid who had admitted to tearing down the banner, then rushed out of police headquarters, never to return. He had since gotten an attorney and had nothing more to say to investigators. But he had told four different stories to fraternity brothers about where he was when the fire started.

  The forensic part of the probe had given up little, except that the fire had started on a couch and had quickly engulfed the entire lounge. It had told investigators that the fire was most likely set, but nothing about who started it. Arson is the hardest crime to prove. According to the International Association of Arson Investigators, arrests are made in only 16 percent of arson cases, and less than 2 percent end in a conviction. Frucci and his team needed people to help them bring this case to justice. But the students who knew things — including Ryan’s fraternity brothers — had clammed up after those first interviews. Some had hired lawyers. Others hid behind protective parents when investigators called on them for follow-up interviews. Everyone, it seemed, had circled the wagons.

  “We have nothing to move ahead on and won’t unless something gives,” one law enforcement source told the Newark Star-Ledger newspaper.

  Frucci and the other investigators had come to see the case in terms of good versus evil, because what kind of kids hid the truth about a crime in which fellow students had died? What kind of people could ruin so many lives, yet continue to live their own as if nothing had happened? Investigators hoped the raid might push something — or someone — into the light.

  The Hall was a popular hangout for the Pikes, Ryan’s fraternity. The officers had brought with them a dozen grand jury subpoenas naming students who they believed knew more than they were saying.

  They corralled a group of students in a back room, many of them Ryan’s fraternity brothers, slapped subpoenas in their hands, and walked out.

  At least now prosecutors could bring the reluctant students before a grand jury, where they would be asked questions without their parents or their lawyers present — if the prosecutor’s office could ever make a case strong enough to convene a grand jury.

  Chapter 14

  Almost two months earlier than the doctors had predicted, Shawn was ready to go home. The snow from the week before had melted and the February day was springlike, sunny and fifty degrees, as Shawn prepared to leave. The doctors and nurses in the unit were excited. Going home meant a job well done. It was what they looked forward to with every patient. Shawn would have to return to the hospital for therapy every day, but he had progressed to the point where around-the-clock care was no longer necessary. Hani had decided that family support was what Shawn needed most now. The staff had produced a medical miracle; the rest of Shawn’s physical and mental recovery would depend on him.

  All of the cards Shawn had received, most of them from strangers, had been taken down from the walls and packed up with the rest of his belongings by Christine the night before. His room in step-down, which had been crammed with stuffed animals and flowers and other gifts from well-wishers, was now empty except for his packed bags. Waiting for his parents to come, Shawn sat on his bed, staring at the bare wall, and got lost in his thoughts. He had been in the hospital for a long time and he had made some lifelong friends there. The people in the burn unit had saved his life. As much as he wanted to leave the hospital and go home, some of the staff had come to feel like family and he was sad to leave them.

  “We’re right here, and you can come back to see us anytime,” Chris Ruhren, the director of the burn nurses, told Shawn when she came to say good-bye. Shawn knew that many patients returned to the burn unit, and many kept coming back even years after their treatment had ended; he had met a few of them while he was there. But he wasn’t so sure he wanted to be one of them. As much as he had become attached to people on the staff, he wanted to be able to put the fire behind him someday. He knew that would take time — at least until after Alvaro was out of the woods — but he didn’t want to live his life as “one of the victims of the Seton Hall fire.”

  Christine arrived with Kenny on the second floor with a camera and directed everyone to pose for pictures. Shawn and the nurses, hugging. Shawn and Dr. Mansour, grinning from ear to ear. “We’re going to put together a whole album,” Christine said.

  “You’ve done very well,” Mansour said, hugging Shawn.

  “I’m sorry I was so difficult sometimes,” Shawn said. “I’m grateful for everything you did for me. Thank you.”

  “Save a copy of that picture for me,” Mansour said. “I’m going to put it on my desk.”

  “You have a great son,” nurse Eileen Gehringer told Christine, and the women hugged.

  “We love you all,” Christine said.

  Gehringer handed Shawn his discharge order: Percocet for pain. Benadryl for itch. Xanax for anxiety. Eye salve. Sleeping pills. “And every day downstairs for therapy,” she said. “That’s the most important thing.”

  “I know. I know,” Shawn said.

  “Are you ready to go, Shawn?” Christine asked.

  “Let’s go, son,” Kenny said.

  But Shawn hesitated. “There’s something I have to do first,” he said.

  Christine and Kenny followed as Shawn led the way. He walked slowly out of step-down and down the hall toward the double doors leading to the burn ICU. Christine wasn’t surprised. The double doors swung open and Shawn made his way across the unit toward room 4, Alvaro’s room.

  At that moment, Alvaro was being rolled out of his room on a gurney to be taken for his daily tanking. Shawn stopped when he saw his roommate. He braced himself against the wall as the gurney approached, feeling as if the floor were moving beneath him. He looked down at Alvaro, lying there motionless, and the room seemed to swirl around him. Alvaro looked no different, no better, than he had on Shawn’s last day in the ICU, the last time Shawn had been able to peek into his room.

  Shawn blinked and took a big gulp of air to regain his equilibrium. All these weeks later, and Alvaro was still unconscious. Blood and brownish fluids oozed through his gauze body armor.

  It was just as Shawn had feared. Day after day in step-down he had fantasized about Alvaro bursting into his room, smiling his big, white smile, saying, Look, Shawn, I’m getting better! I’m really getting better. Let’s see who makes it to the finish line first. But dreams were dreams, and Alvaro wasn’t improving at all. Will he ever get better? Shawn wondered. “Al,” he said, reaching for his roommate, then quickly retreating as the gurney carrying the sickest patient in the burn unit pushed past.

  Christine and Kenny enveloped Shawn and started to lead him away, but Shawn pulled back.

  “No,” he said, standing his ground. “No. I need t
o see him before I leave.”

  Shawn took a seat in the nurses’ break room, across from the tank room, so he could see when Alvaro was wheeled back out. His parents sat with him. No one spoke. Thirty minutes passed. Christine and Kenny made small talk. What a perfect day outside. Did you happen to see in the paper that . . . ? Shawn said nothing. Another thirty minutes went by. Finally the doors to the tank room swung outward and the rolling gurney carrying Alvaro emerged. His gauze was white again, but it wouldn’t be long before the blood seeped through. The exhausted nurses pushed on. Shawn waited as they counted to three and then lifted Alvaro’s limp body from the gurney onto his bed in room 4. Alvaro had been big to begin with, but he looked like a giant lying there.

  With Alvaro settled in, Shawn pulled on a yellow smock, rubber gloves, a head cap, and a face mask from the cart outside the room. The protective gear was required to help shield Alvaro from outside germs and deadly infections. The nurses exchanged furtive glances as Shawn approached. How would he handle this? Could he handle it? Christine watched through the glass as Shawn walked into the room and stood over his comatose roommate. She couldn’t help feeling pride. Her son was a good boy. A caring boy. She really believed he would trade places with Alvaro if he could. She was thankful that he couldn’t.

  Shawn studied Alvaro’s face. All he could see were his mouth and his eyes, and his eyes were closed.

  “He can hear you if you talk to him,” a nurse said.