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

of Alvaro’s body except his feet, his eyes, his nostrils, and his lips. Horvath pumped additional morphine into an IV line in Alvaro’s arm as they stripped away the bandages. Soon Alvaro was naked. The room went quiet. From his scalp to his waist, Alvaro was one gaping, oozing wound. His hands, grafted earlier, were a brownish purple, bloated to twice their normal size. His hair had been burned off and his head was red and shiny, and chunks of his ears were missing. The sides of his torso were concave, the burns so deep that the surgeons had been forced to cut away layers of flesh to reach healthy tissue to support the temporary, life-sustaining skin grafts he had received when he was first brought into the hospital. But his back was the worst: a skinless bed of raw red and yellow tissue. Even his legs, which were not burned, had not been spared. So much healthy skin had been taken from his legs to graft onto his torso and his back that they now looked like a patchwork quilt.
    Horvath choked up.
    “Let’s get to work,” Mellini said.
    They soaked Alvaro with warm tap water from the overhead hoses. Then they smeared him with antibacterial soap and began scrubbing his burns with four-by-four-inch gauze pads, the ones patients said felt like steel wool.
    While the team scrubbed, Mellini watched Alvaro’s face to gauge how much pain they were causing him. Though out cold, Alvaro grimaced. Then, despite being in a morphine-induced state of unconsciousness, he lifted his right arm as if to ward off the next punch. Nelly Delgado, a grandmother who had worked in the tank room longer than anyone else, was overcome by tears. Alvaro was hooked to a respirator and unable to make sounds, but she knew he was screaming inside. “Okay, honey,” Delgado said, tears rolling out of her eyes. “I’m so sorry I’m hurting you. Poor baby. God help our poor, poor baby.”
    Horvath, a gentle man, beloved by the patients and the rest of the staff, stroked Alvaro’s bare hands. He had already become attached to the boy. He had seen the pictures the Llanoses taped to the wall near their son’s bed: Alvaro holding his girlfriend, Angie Gutierrez; posing with his parents and sisters in their kitchen; mugging for the camera with his buddies from Paterson. The photographs showed a beautiful boy with soft, romantic eyes and a cocky smile. Horvath had instantly become fiercely protective of him.
    “I’ll take care of his face,” he told the others.
    “Okay, Al,” Horvath said quietly as he began his work. “It’s okay. You’re doing fine, buddy. I’m going to clean your mouth now. Good boy. Oh, you have the most beautiful white teeth.”
    With the cleaning finished, Alvaro was moved to the other side of the curtain that divided the tank room. There, he was placed under a heat shield to keep him warm. Toni Schmidt, a burn technician, picked up a silver nitrate stick. It looked as harmless as a Q-tip. She touched the end of the stick to one of the open wounds on Alvaro’s right side to oxidize unwanted scar tissue. To Alvaro, it would feel as if he were being burned all over again. How intense was the pain that, even unconscious, the boy seemed to feel it? Beyond imagining. Tears streamed from Alvaro’s eyes. Nearby, a table had been prepared with his new dressings — large pieces of gauze slathered with brownish yellow silver sulfadiazine, a topical antimicrobial cream. The team wrapped the gauze around Alvaro from his head to his ankles, rolled him onto a stretcher, covered him with a blanket, and, at 9:55 a.m., pushed him back to his room.
    The procedure had taken one hour and fifty-five minutes. Tomorrow morning it would begin all over again.

Chapter 9
    T he ambulance, sirens blaring, rolled up to the gilded gates outside Seton Hall, and Shawn could hardly believe what he saw.
    There must have been a thousand people waiting, and they were chanting his name. Shawn . . . Shawn . . . Shawn.
    The ambulance stopped and he quickly slid