After the Fire: A True Story of Love and Survival (14 page)

Shawn thought about Alvaro. “Now it’s just a matter of time and determination and we’ll be back to school together,” he said to his mother when he got home that day.

“I think if he decided to go back and stay on campus, I’d ask him to room with me, and I’d go back and live there, too. We’ve grown so close. It’s going to be hard if we decide to do that, but I think we could support each other through it. I just can’t handle living here right now without him, knowing he’s still struggling to get better.”

“I know, baby boy,” Christine said. “In time. In time.”

Alvaro’s first time in the gym at Kessler had been as uneventful as Benevento had promised. No one had stopped what they were doing when he walked in. One or two patients may have glanced sideways at him, but he may have imagined that, too. No one else was scarred, but some were totally paralyzed and some couldn’t even speak. The second time was easier, and the third time some of the other patients included him in their conversation. He had been at Kessler six days when he asked that his therapy time be doubled from three hours a day to six. His goals were to increase his upper-body strength using weight machines and to relearn everyday agility tasks: shuffling cards, holding a glass, twisting a cap off a jar.

Mansour had predicted that Alvaro’s stay at the rehabilitation center would last two months. Benevento and the rest of the Kessler team agreed it would be at least that long before he could go home. Everyone hoped that would be sometime in late summer or early fall. After that, he still would be faced with at least two years of daily outpatient therapy at Saint Barnabas.

Laps around the gym and playing basketball in the courtyard outside became daily rituals for Alvaro at Kessler. Standing five feet from the hoop, he slowly and deliberately tossed free throws underhand because his scar tissue prevented him from raising his arms above his shoulders. Even walking was still difficult for him. His gait was slow and unsteady and he sometimes lost his balance. Picking up the basketball was hardest of all, and it was the exercise Alvaro hated the most: bending over from the waist. Still, he hardly ever missed a basket. He would lift the ball, step to the free throw line, take a breath, and shoot. It was J. R.’s job to retrieve the balls and to catch Alvaro when he fell.

Bending over was difficult because Alvaro’s back had been incinerated in the fire, and the burn surgeons at Saint Barnabas had been forced to cut away layers of burned skin before they found a healthy bed for skin grafts. As a result, even now, parts of his back were still open and oozing blood and fluids. The slightest wrong movement could cause the fragile skin to break and bleed. Sometimes the pain was still so bad that Alvaro screamed after reaching for something, or turning over, or bending from the waist. But whenever he was tempted to slack off or hide in his room again, J. R. would remind Alvaro about his dark blue Mazda Millenia waiting at home, or about the prospect of sleeping in his own bed. Alvaro thought about his mom’s home-cooked rice and beans and Sunday afternoons the way they used to be, when all of his cousins gathered at his house to play dominoes or watch the Mets on TV. One day after his parents brought him a lunch of Chinese takeout, Alvaro cracked open his fortune cookie and read aloud: “A handful of patience is worth more than a bushel of brains.” He tossed it aside, telling his parents he had more brains than patience. He wanted to go home.

So Alvaro worked harder than anyone in the gym. When J. R. wanted him to do ten repetitions on a weight machine, he did twelve or thirteen. When J. R. told him to walk two laps around the gym, he walked three. When everyone else went to lunch at noon and the gym cleared out, Alvaro stayed, sitting at a table, tightening the cap on an empty peanut butter jar over and over or placing one more building block on a stack. The exercises seemed silly sometimes, but the more he did them, the more limber his scarred hands became and the less they trembled.

“By the time you get out of here, we’re going to be calling you Arnold,” J. R. said, using his best Schwarzenegger accent.

“Or Superman,” Alvaro said, smiling.

It was rare for someone Alvaro’s age, with a devastating injury, not to be bitter. Benevento had seen hundreds of desperately sick patients come through Kessler’s gym. Many of them were heroic in their efforts to get better, but few were as determined as Alvaro.

“If you hang around long enough, you learn there’s something in certain people, an inner strength,” Benevento said to an intern one day as they watched Alvaro slowly walking laps, trying to catch his breath, and holding a cane to steady himself if he started to fall. Six months earlier, he had been practicing his swing in anticipation of tryouts for Seton Hall’s baseball team.

“They will take the worst disadvantage and turn it into an advantage. He’s one of those people. From the first minute you look into his eyes, you know this kid has that inner strength. You can’t buy that. This is a kid that, whatever it takes, he’s going to do it. He’s still a kid, a little boy. If he was any other person, he would be lying in a bed, depressed.

“Every day people ask me, ‘Why do you do this? Why do you stay? It must be so depressing.’ ” She pointed to Alvaro. “That’s why.”

Chapter 23

A
collective gasp rose from the fifth-grade class at Newark’s Rafael Hernandez Elementary School when Shawn walked into the classroom.

“It’s him,” the wide-eyed students cried when they saw Shawn.

“It’s Shawn!”

“Hi, Shawn!”

“Wow!”

“Shawn!”

The elementary school was one of dozens around the country that had corresponded with the Seton Hall students burned in the fire. Shawn had received hundreds of letters, most of them from strangers, many from schoolchildren. He had promised to visit the inner-city school in his hometown when he was well enough. So here he was, at the end of June, all dressed up in a pressed shirt and crisp jeans, with a Yankees baseball cap concealing his burned scalp, and his burned hands buried in tan-colored pressure gloves.

“Good morning,” Shawn said, standing at the front of the classroom, like a teacher ready to begin his morning lesson. “I’m really happy to be here, and I understand you have a lot of questions. Who wants to go first?”

Every hand in the room shot up.

“Let’s take it one by one. How about you?” Shawn said to a little girl with braided hair, seated in the front row.

“How did the fire start?” the little girl asked.

“Right now, no one is sure if it was an accident or a prank,” Shawn answered with the dispassion of a person reciting a shopping list. “Next?” Shawn said.

“Did you run out of the fire?” a boy in a plaid shirt asked excitedly.

“No. You should always get on the floor when you’re in a fire.
Always
get on the floor. There’s more oxygen there.”

“Is it scary not knowing who did it?”

Shawn groped for words. “It’s, um . . . it’s kind of scary, yes. When I’m in class at Seton Hall, I could be sitting next to the person who did it and I wouldn’t even know.”

“Do your hands hurt?”

“It hurts when I’m doing therapy. Not right now, here with you.”

“Do you have nightmares?”

“No. But most people do. I think about what happened a lot.”

“Is your friend still in the hospital?”

“Yes. He’s in a different hospital now. He’s in a rehabilitation hospital. He was burned worse.”

Shawn fielded questions for nearly an hour, laughing at the bluntness of some and answering others as if he were talking not about himself but about an acquaintance.

The fire had been a national news story and it had made Shawn a local celebrity. His picture had been in the newspaper numerous times, and everywhere he went, someone would ask if he was one of the Seton Hall students who were burned in Boland Hall. He had been approached in malls, in gas stations, in restaurants, and on the street. Everyone had a question, and he answered every one.
How are you feeling?
Fine.
Are you going back to school?
Yes.
Back to Seton Hall?
Yes.
Will you live in the dorm?
Not yet. In some ways, Shawn enjoyed his new fame. He had always been outgoing, and easily slipped into the role of being the center of attention. He didn’t mind talking to strangers or answering their questions.

Today, though, one question caught him off guard.

“Could you have saved your roommate?” a curly-haired boy with large brown eyes asked.

The room went silent except for the sound of the teacher catching her breath.

Shawn’s eyes turned dark. A moment passed. “If I could just go back, I would definitely make him go a different way,” he said quietly, more to himself than to the children in the room.

“One more question,” the teacher said. “Shawn’s tired. He’s spent a lot of time with us.” A dozen hands in the air.

“You,” Shawn said, pointing to a shy-looking girl seated at a desk next to him.

“Are you scared that this will happen again?” she asked so quietly he could hardly hear her.

“No, I’m not worried,” Shawn said softly. “I doubt that anything like this will ever happen again.”

What Shawn didn’t say was that the previous Monday he had awakened in his bedroom, certain that he smelled smoke. It was dark outside. He looked at the clock. Four thirty — the same time he had been awakened by the fire alarms in Boland Hall five months earlier. At first, Shawn froze in his bed. Then he made himself get up and crawl on the floor, his heart pounding, his breath short, out of his room and into his mother’s room, where Christine was fast asleep.

“Mom,” he cried in a hoarse whisper. “Mom! Wake up! Mom! I smell smoke.”

Christine awoke with a start.

“What is it? What is it, Shawn?” she asked, trying to make sense of what was happening.

“I smell fire,” Shawn said. “There’s a fire.”

Christine jumped out of bed and, with Shawn on her heels, went room to room, inspecting the whole apartment. Everything looked normal. She turned to Shawn.

“I don’t smell anything,” she said gently.

Still, to calm him, she went on to check every electrical outlet and every appliance in the house. She turned the dials on the gas stove to make sure all of them were securely off. She ran downstairs to the basement to check the furnace, and it was cold to the touch. Then, finding nothing inside the house, Christine walked outside and looked up and down Halstead Street, with Shawn watching from the door. There was nothing. Just a sleeping city block a couple of hours before dawn.

“I don’t see or smell anything,” Christine told Shawn. “There’s no fire, Son. Go back to bed now and try to get some sleep.”

Not five minutes passed, and Christine felt her boy’s presence, then saw his shadow in her bedroom doorway.

“What’s up, Shawn?” Christine asked, the ever-patient mother.

“Mom, I have to know where it’s coming from,” Shawn said, his voice quivering with anxiety.

Christine rose from her bed, pulled on her clothes, and grabbed the car keys from the top of her bureau.

“C’mon, baby boy,” she said. “Let’s go see what we can find.”

For the next half hour, Christine and Shawn drove through the streets of Newark, searching for a fire. It was only after Christine had pulled up to the nearest fire station and Shawn had seen all of the trucks parked inside that he finally agreed to go home to bed.

The plain white envelope arrived with Alvaro’s breakfast tray.

“What’s this?” he asked Benevento, who had personally delivered his eggs to his room that morning in late June.

“What’s what?”

“This.”

“Oh. That. Humph. Guess we’ll have to open it and see,” the doctor said, acting like the cat that swallowed the canary.

Benevento picked up the envelope and plucked a piece of paper from inside. She unfolded it and paused.

“Looks like a day pass,” she said, holding up the paper. “It says here you get to leave this wonderful place on Saturday afternoon to go to a Mets game.”

Alvaro’s eyes widened. “For real?”

“Seems like it’s for real.”

A day earlier, Alvaro and the doctor had been talking baseball, the Mets, of course — the only team worth talking about, if you asked Alvaro. He had told her he had never been to Shea Stadium, even though he hadn’t missed a Mets game on TV, not a single one, since he was a little kid.

“Would you want to go?” she had asked, thinking he probably wasn’t anywhere near ready to face a crowd.

“Yeah!” Alvaro had answered without hesitating. The next day the doctor had the tickets in her hand.

Benevento could recite countless stories of bravery she had witnessed at Kessler over the years, but she was awed by her young burn patient’s courage. According to the books she’d read on burns, Alvaro was still at the point where he should be hiding under the covers, in the depths of despair, afraid to face the world as a burned person. Yet here he was, willing to go — even excited at the thought of going — to a ball game where there would be thousands of strangers and who knew how many gawkers.

A friend of a friend of a friend with connections to the team had heard about the outing and arranged for Alvaro to get a private tour of the stadium while he was there.

“How about that?” the doctor asked.

“Can I bring Shawn?” Alvaro asked.

“Of course!” Benevento said.

The Mets played the Pittsburgh Pirates on that brilliant, sunny Saturday in Queens. The magic started the moment Alvaro and Shawn arrived at the ballpark. Alvaro, dressed in full Mets regalia over his bandaged torso, seemed bewildered when he and Shawn arrived at the ticket gate and were met by a man who introduced himself as a representative from the team. The man escorted them to the front of the line and through the gates into the stadium.

“This way,” he said, pointing to the long tunnel leading to the ball field.

“We’re going on the
field?
” Alvaro asked, his voice breathless with incredulity.

The man nodded.

“We’re going to the field,” Alvaro murmured.

Shawn, a Yankees fan, shrugged.

Alvaro hobbled through the tunnel. He was still frail. He stopped for a moment, with his mouth open, drinking in the scene before him.
I’m at Shea Stadium,
he thought.
There’s the field. There’s the dugout. Is this a dream?
A few feet away, the players were warming up. Bats swinging. Balls soaring. Cleats digging into the dirt. Dust flying. Alvaro took a few steps onto the grass. The only thing separating him from the players was the netting of the batting cage.

“The players would like you to be their guest on the field during batting practice,” the man who worked for the team said.

“For real?” Alvaro said, barely able to catch his breath.

He looked at Shawn. Shawn’s eyes were as wide as saucers.

“Okay,” Shawn said. “I admit it. This is cool.”

Alvaro grinned, then laughed a loud, hearty laugh.

A player approached.
Is he walking toward me?
Alvaro wondered.
No way. It can’t be . . .

“Hi. I’m Mike Piazza.”

“I . . . I know,” Alvaro said.

“Glad to meet you,” the player said. “Can I shake your hand?”

Alvaro extended his gloved hand, and Piazza took it gently. “Hope you enjoy the game,” the ballplayer said. “Get better.”

“Okay,” Alvaro said.

One by one, the players walked over and introduced themselves.

“Hi, I’m Derek Bell.”

“I’m Edgardo Alfonzo.”

“I’m Todd Zeile.” Zeile lingered awhile, telling Alvaro and Shawn about his friend from high school who was burned doing a science project. “I know how much pain he suffered,” the player said, and the boys nodded.

Bell and Alfonzo fetched two bats out of the dugout and scrawled their names with a black Sharpie on the blond wood. They handed one bat to Shawn, one to Alvaro.

“This is fantastic,” Shawn said. “It doesn’t get better than this.”

Batting practice over, Bobby Valentine, the volatile team manager, appeared.

“How does your throwing arm feel?” he asked Alvaro.

Alvaro was unable to speak.
Is he talking to me?

“Do you think you can throw the ball out?” Valentine asked.

“Do I
what?
”

Alvaro heard a familiar name over the public-address system. It was his name. Roger Luce, the Mets announcer, was introducing him and Shawn, describing them as “students from the Seton Hall fire.”

The crowd roared.

Valentine positioned himself on the grass in foul territory, about ten feet from the top of the dugout steps, where the boys stood.

“Ready?” he asked.

First Shawn wound up and threw the ball to Valentine. “Nice throw,” Valentine said, and the fans cheered.

Then it was Alvaro’s turn.

Slowly he brought his arms up in front of him as far as his taut scars would allow, which was barely to his shoulders. Valentine stood by patiently. The stadium was quiet except for a jet passing overhead from nearby La Guardia Airport. Alvaro stepped back with his left foot, turned toward the Mets manager, hesitated, then hurled the ball directly into Valentine’s mitt. The crowd went wild.

Alvaro looked around the stadium. It looked as big as the earth, as tall as the sky. He wanted to freeze the moment, like a frame in a movie, never rolling forward, never winding back. If time stood still and he could stand here forever, he would.

The cheering of the fans brought Alvaro back.

“Nice toss,” Valentine said, walking toward the dugout. Then, as if Alvaro were one of his players, Valentine smacked him on the backside.