After the Fire: A True Story of Love and Survival by Robin Gaby Fisher

marriage, they still had a sparkle in their eyes when they looked at each other. They were gentle people who took joy in simple things. But after Mr. Llanos’s stroke, everything had changed. Life for the family had become a series of doctor’s visits and financial worries. Insurance bills piled up. With no steady income, they became dependent on Social Security checks, hardly enough to sustain a family of five. Alvaro took on two part-time jobs — one as a stock boy in a bird store, and another as an orderly in a nursing home — to help out his parents. When he wasn’t studying, he was working, doing all he could to ease his parents’ burden.
    Daisy was a worrier by nature. After her husband’s stroke, she rarely slept. Her nerves in tatters, she had fallen into a deep depression that couldn’t be shaken even with pills. She wondered what her family had done to anger God. Still, every day, she had picked herself up and walked to Saint Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church in Paterson to give thanks for her good fortune: her husband was alive; her daughters, Shirley, then twenty-five, and Shany, sixteen, were healthy; and young Alvaro — well, he was the greatest blessing of all.
    There was something special about Alvaro. Everyone who met him felt it. He was disarmingly shy and sweet, the kind of kid who was always sticking up for the underdog, even though he was part of the popular crowd. When other boys picked on the class nerd, Alvaro came to his defense. He never stood in the hallways between classes, cruelly poking fun at the fat girls, the way his friends sometimes did. Alvaro could have had any girl he wanted at John F. Kennedy High, but he never had a girlfriend before he met Angie at the start of their senior year. He’s almost too good to be true, Angie thought when she met him. Other girls thought so, too, but their bashful classmate was more interested in baseball than in girls.
    Indeed, baseball was Alvaro’s passion, and he had shown a real talent for it. He had started out in the peewee league and then moved to the midgets and onto a citywide team. Before the fire, he had intended to try out for the Seton Hall team and dreamed of one day playing for his beloved Mets. Some of his coaches along the way had said he was good enough to realize his dream. But first he had to finish college, his parents had said. Education was more important than sports. Education was everything. Alvaro agreed.
    Alvaro was one of nine male cousins who grew up together in Paterson and the first person in his large, extended family to go to college. His cousins, even the older ones, looked up to him, and he took the responsibility of being a role model seriously. Other students skipped classes to go to the beach, but not Alvaro. His studies came before everything except the needs of his parents. Even on weekends, he shut himself in his bedroom, asking his family not to disturb him until his homework was finished. Alvaro was going to make something of himself — he had promised his parents he would. And once he did, he would buy his mother the home she had always dreamed of having.
    “How can I blame God for wanting him?” Daisy said when describing her son to one of his nurses. But the thought of losing Alvaro was so traumatic for Daisy that the burn nurses feared she was headed for a nervous breakdown. The longer Alvaro didn’t show progress, the more unpredictable she became, sulking one minute, smiling the next. She had become quick to anger, usually about things that didn’t matter. Alvaro senior held in all his fears because he wanted to spare his wife any more stress, but he, too, was in turmoil. Sometimes the pain in his head got so bad that he thought he was having another stroke, but he kept even those times to himself. Thinking they were sparing each other, the couple simply avoided speaking to each other about their son. Day after day, they drove to the hospital early in the morning, listening to the radio rather