After the Fire

by Robin Gaby Fisher

  “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.

  The two hugged before Shawn turned to leave the physical therapy room after his final session.

  “Love you, Roy,” Shawn said.

  “Love you, too, kid,” Bond said, pushing Shawn toward the door — pushing him so that Shawn wouldn’t see that he was crying.

  Shawn was melancholy as he left Bond behind and headed upstairs to the burn unit to look in on Alvaro. Here he was, celebrating another milestone in his recovery. He should be happy. But how could he be happy when Alvaro wasn’t getting better?

  Shawn steeled himself as he walked toward Alvaro’s room. Nearly three months had passed since that frigid Wednesday in January, when he and Alvaro were awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of the fire alarm and crawled out of their room into the dark, smoky third-floor hallway in Boland Hall. He missed his roommate. Missed his incessant teasing about the Yankees, and his contagious chuckle. Missed the way he tidied up his room like a girl and always wore a baseball cap.

  “Hurry and come inside!” the nurse cried when she saw Shawn coming. “Come in and talk, because he can hear you!”

  Shawn could hardly believe it. Goose bumps popped up on his arms, and his whole body tingled with anticipation. He pulled on the gown and gloves and rushed to his friend’s bedside. “Al! It’s Shawn. What’s up?” he said. His hands trembled.

  Alvaro blinked slowly, unmistakably.

  Shawn’s eyes widened. “It’s okay,” he continued breathlessly. He wasn’t sure what to say next. He hadn’t been expecting this. Alvaro could hear him. He could even respond. “I’m okay,” Shawn said, talking faster than he could think. “I’m going to get Mets tickets so we can see a game . . . Al . . . you’re going to be okay . . . you’ve been through a lot . . . but I’m going to be right here for you. I’m going to be right here.”

  Alvaro blinked harder. Shawn’s eyes filled up.

  “He hears me,” he said, wiping away the tears with the back of his gloved hand. “That’s why he’s trying to blink — to let me know he hears me.”

  Alvaro blinked again.

  Chapter 17

  Ten days had passed with no sign of Angie. She had told Daisy she was going to Puerto Rico for spring break, which Daisy thought was curious. What kind of girl leaves for vacation when the boy she loves is fighting for his life in a burn unit? she thought to herself. This is not the Angie I know, the girl Alvaro loves.

  Angie had said she needed to get away. She hadn’t slept through the night in weeks and her nerves were frayed. What good would she be to anyone if she fell apart? She had promised Daisy she would visit Alvaro the day before she left for her trip, but she hadn’t come. Then she called again on the day she got back, never mentioning the fact that she went away without saying good-bye, and said she would be at the hospital in an hour or so. So Daisy waited, watching for the unit’s double doors to swing open and her son’s diminutive girlfriend to skip through, her ponytail swaying back and forth. She watched the doors for minutes, then hours. No Angie.

  The next day, Angie finally showed up. Daisy and Alvaro senior were rubbing lotion on Alvaro’s feet when she came in. Angie arrived in Alvaro’s room with a copper tan, her thick, auburn hair, sun-bleached with streaks of pale blond, cascading over her shoulders. She still wore Alvaro’s crucifix ring on a chain around her neck, along with her own matching crucifix ring on her left hand. Daisy took that as a good sign. The forced smile on Angie’s face, however, was not.

  “Hola,” Angie said, hugging Daisy. Then she greeted Alvaro senior. “¿Cómo estas?” How are you?

  Hurrying to get through her excuses, Angie apologized for not coming earlier. She hadn’t felt well, she said — maybe too much time in the sun, maybe the bumpy airplane flight, maybe a virus or something — and she still had tons of homework to catch up on. Daisy was angry at Angie, especially after her daughters said they suspected that Angie was “checking out” on Alvaro. But maybe her daughters were wrong. Now that she was back, everything would be better. “Entiendo,” Daisy said warmly to Angie. I understand.

  Daisy continued to massage Alvaro’s feet, and Angie chattered on, barely taking a breath between words. The weather in Puerto Rico had been warm and sunny. The island was paradise, the ocean turquoise, just as it looked in the travel brochures, and the people were maravillosa. She didn’t know there could be so many friendly people in one place. She hadn’t wanted to come back, not so soon, or — what she didn’t say — maybe not ever.

  “What’s new around here?” Angie asked brightly.

  No one told her about Alvaro’s waking up. They wanted Angie to be surprised. Alvaro had not stirred the whole time she chattered away. Angie was standing at his side, but her face was turned toward Daisy and Alvaro senior, who were still at his feet. Now, he raised his left arm off the bed, slowly but deliberately. Daisy glanced at her son, then at Angie, who had started to say, “Have you seen Shawn lately?” before stopping midsentence and turning toward Alvaro. A long second passed. Alvaro raised his right arm. Angie’s eyes flew wide open. Then he raised both arms, this time higher and more dramatically, a motion that said, Angie, I’m here. I’m alive. And I hear you.

  The people in the room held their breath, each afraid to exhale for fear the moment would pass too quickly and be gone forever.

  Angie broke the stillness.

  “Al?” she asked incredulously, breathlessly. “Baby, can you hear me?”

  Alvaro moved his fully extended arms, faster this time, up and down, up and down. The heart monitor bleeped from the jump in his heart rate. Angie placed her hand gently on his. She looked down at his bandaged face. His eyes were still partially stitched shut, and she knew he couldn’t really see her, not clearly. His mouth was exposed and he was trying to speak, but he couldn’t because there was a breathing tube stuck in his throat. He formed words with his lips, but Angie couldn’t understand what he was trying to say.

  “He’s trying to tell me something,” Angie cried.

  “Talk to him,” Daisy said. This was the first time she had seen Alvaro try to speak.

  Angie talked about her brother’s birthday party. The whole family was there, kids and all, and there were balloons and a big chocolate cake with thick buttercream frosting, “your favorite.” She talked about the shameful grade she had gotten on a calculus test, an 84. “I could kill myself for getting that grade,” she said. “Can you believe it?” She talked about the computer lab at school. She was spending a lot of time there, the way they had done together, but it wasn’t nearly as much fun without him. “I love you,” Angie said. “And I miss you.”

  Alvaro’s mouth was forming indecipherable words. One after the other after the other. All silent, none of them comprehensible.

  “He’s talking. He’s talking, but I don’t understand,” Angie whispered hoarsely. “It’s been so long since I’ve been ab
le to talk to you!” she cried. “And I have so many stories to tell you.”

  Tears spilled out of Alvaro’s eyes, dampening the gauze mask that bandaged the rest of his face.

  “Look!” Alvaro senior cried. “He is crying. Don’t cry, Pápi, please don’t cry.”

  Daisy was crying, too, crying because she was seeing the first emotion from her son in months. As much as she hated to see her son weep, she loved that he was feeling something, and knowing her son as she did, she knew what it was.

  “Let him cry,” Daisy said. “His tears are the only way he can tell us what he is feeling, and he is feeling love.”

  So the boy who had been given a one-in-three chance of living, who had been on the verge of death only weeks before, cried.

  Chapter 18

  Hello. Hello. Hello.” The words spilled out of Alvaro’s mouth like a river released from the ice after a spring thaw. A moment earlier, Michael Marano, a burn surgeon, had removed the breathing tube from Alvaro’s trachea, allowing him to speak for the first time since the morning of the fire. It had been ninety days. “Okay, Alvaro, come on now, can you say something to us?” Marano had asked. Eager to test his new freedom, Alvaro didn’t hesitate. Hello. Hello. Hello.

  The first words had been a long time coming. First, Alvaro had to be weaned from the respirator that had kept him alive for the past thirteen weeks. Little by little, the settings had been lowered, decreasing the volume of oxygen the machine pushed into his fragile lungs. Every adjustment forced him to work harder to breathe with the machine. Then he was taken off the respirator completely for short spurts of time, forcing him to do all the work himself, pulling air into his lungs, pushing it out. At first, it was fifteen minutes. Then an hour. Then two hours. The process was exhausting. Sometimes he felt as if he were suffocating as his lungs struggled to do what the machine had done so effortlessly, and no amount of reassurance from the nurses or the respiratory therapists could completely calm him. At times, Alvaro slept the rest of the day after a particularly grueling session off the vent. “You have to work harder,” the therapists would tell him. “Once you’re off the vent, the healing will go faster. The quicker you’ll be able to go home.” Home, Alvaro would say to himself, then drag in another mouthful of air and blow it out again. Finally, ten days after the tube was removed for the first time, the machine was put away. The sickest patient in the burn unit was ready to breathe on his own.