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

than talking. Then they passed the hours in Alvaro’s room, watching sports on TV or reading the Bible.
    As the days passed and Alvaro continued to hover between life and death, the two shut out the world, even the warnings from the medical staff about the precariousness of their son’s situation. “He’s fighting, but he’s very sick,” the nurses would say, and Daisy and Alvaro senior would stare at them blankly or nod their heads. They asked the same irrelevant questions day after day.
    When will Alvaro wake up?
    Were his eyes damaged in the fire?
    Will he ever be the same? Will he ever look the way he did?
    Daisy was a young forty years old, so much so that before Alvaro was burned, people often mistook her for the sister of her eldest daughter, Shirley. But she now seemed to age dramatically with each passing day. Her mouth turned down in a perpetual frown, and deep, dark circles scooped out the soft flesh under her eyes.
    When her husband was sick, she had sought the help of a psychologist to cope. Susan Fischer, the burn unit social worker, had tried to counsel Daisy. Nothing had helped this time. If only she could hear Alvaro’s voice, she told the nurses, she would feel better. If only she could be assured that he heard her when she spoke to him. Bebito, I love you. Mommy is here. If only she could sleep next to him so he wouldn’t be afraid. The nurses listened patiently. There is always someone with Alvaro, they would say, trying to soothe Daisy’s frayed nerves. Save your strength for when he wakes up. That’s when he’ll need you.
    But such reassurances only went so far with Daisy. Alvaro was always so proud of himself and the way he looked. He liked to wear shorts and short-sleeved shirts to show off his attractive brown body. Will he ever look good in his shorts and his short-sleeved shirts again? she would ask. The nurses would shake their heads and wonder how Daisy could be discussing her son’s looks when it was still so uncertain whether he would even survive. But Daisy refused to think about life without Alvaro, or if she did, she was keeping those thoughts buried in a deep and inaccessible place.
    There were occasional moments of lucidity. Once, she stood at the pay phone in the hallway outside the burn unit, commiserating with relatives and friends. “No quiero que mi hijo muera,” she cried bitterly. I don’t want my son to die. Alvaro senior always hovered nearby. “Oh, please, God! No!” he pleaded. “Please! I want him to wake up now.” But mostly the two parents cultivated a fog of denial and sunk deep into the hole of optimism.
    Fischer told a meeting of the burn team that she was worried about the couple. “The family is in hell,” Fischer reported to the staff. “This is their golden child and he’s not getting better. They are looking for answers to comfort them — answers we can’t give them. She’s not sleeping at all. He’s not sleeping at all. They don’t sleep because they are constantly expecting the phone to ring in the middle of the night. Even sleeping medications aren’t working. It’s just an impossible situation, really.”
    “I don’t know what to tell them anymore,” Hani said, but what he was thinking was, whatever I tell them, they don’t seem to grasp it. I’m not sure if it’s a language barrier or denial, but I suspect it’s a little of the first and a lot of the second.
    In mid-March, with Alvaro still teetering between life and death, the situation reached the breaking point. Mansour and his colleagues, burn surgeons Sylvia Petrone and Michael Marano, were standing at the nurses’ station outside Alvaro’s room. The doctors were discussing Alvaro’s deteriorating condition and what more they could do to try to reverse it, when the couple approached them and began their daily inquisition. “What is the tear in Alvaro’s eyelid?” Daisy asked accusingly. “And what is the small sore on his leg?” Petrone, who tended to be direct,