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

decided it was time to jolt Alvaro’s parents into reality. The Llanoses had to be prepared for their son to die.
    “Look,” Petrone said, clearly agitated, “don’t worry about his eye or the thing on his leg. He’s very, very sick. He’s in critical condition. The other things don’t matter right now. At this point we’re trying to keep him alive . We’ll deal with the other things later. Do you understand?”
    Daisy collapsed in tears. “Why aren’t you making him better?” she cried. “Why aren’t you helping him? Why?” As the doctors stood there, with no words left to say, Daisy turned and ran from the burn unit with Alvaro senior close behind her.
    Mansour had seen parents break down before. The burn unit was the last place in the world a parent wanted a child to be. But Alvaro needed his family to be strong. Family support often meant the difference between life and death in the burn unit. Mansour knew that Daisy and Alvaro senior would be beyond consoling if they lost their son. Of course they would. But he worried more about whether they could cope if their boy lived. How would they cope with having a burned son?
    Turning to look in on his sickest patient, Mansour found himself feeling suddenly miserable. “Poor boy,” he said, talking to himself. “He is fighting so hard. He wants so much to live, and his parents are doing everything they can to be supportive. But they are losing their grip.”

Chapter 16
    T he nurses in the burn unit marveled at Alvaro’s girlfriend, Angie. They listened when she whispered in his ear: “I’m here, baby. It’s Angie. I love you. I miss you. I’ll be right here when you wake up.” They watched as she closed her eyes, pretending to be someplace else, gently rubbing lotion on his swollen brown feet, the only part of him she could touch. “Where are you today?” the nurses would ask. “We’re on a Caribbean island,” Angie would say. Or “We’re floating on a big white cloud.” They read her letters, notes written in a big, curly scrawl and taped to the wall at the foot of Alvaro’s bed so that he would see them, Angie explained, if he suddenly woke up and she wasn’t there. Sometimes the nurses felt like voyeurs because the letters were so achingly personal, the words of an idealistic young girl desperately in love: “I love you, baby. I love you so much. We will never be apart. Never. God is taking care of you, and I know that when you come out of this, God will give me the strength to take care of you.”
    Angie was petite and pretty, with wavy auburn hair and mahogany eyes. The nurses often told her, “Angie, you’re more devoted than most of the husbands and wives of our patients.” Privately, they were taking bets about how long she would last. The nurses had seen families break down from the strain of dealing with burns and the time it took for patients to recover. They had seen wives leave husbands because they couldn’t deal with disfigurement, and husbands walk out on wives rather than stick out the long and difficult process of burn recovery.
    The first signs of strain began to surface when Alvaro had been in a coma for nearly two months. Angie came to visit on a Sunday afternoon, after missing a day, which everyone, especially Daisy, had noticed because Angie never missed a day. Her eyes were red and puffy from crying, and her hair hung limply over her shoulders. She usually wore her hair pulled up in a spirited ponytail. She seemed agitated and distracted, not the happy girl who was always trying to cheer up everyone else.
    Daisy greeted Angie with a hug, the way she always did. Angie sat next to Alvaro’s bed and stared at his face . Why doesn’t he do something, anything, to let me know he’s here? she wondered. Why can’t he give a sign that he hears me? As always, Alvaro just lay there, dead to the world, his only movement the rise and fall of his chest as the respirator pushed air into and out of his lungs.
    Angie paced