After the Fire: A True Story of Love and Survival Read Online Free PDF

son’s old bed at home on both nights. When someone from the hospital called to say there had been a fire and Alvaro had been burned, Daisy was overcome with a sense of doom. “How can this be?” she cried. “Alvaro is safe in school. I just saw him two days ago.”
    Daisy had jumped in the car and driven seventeen miles from Paterson to Saint Barnabas, expecting the worst. A native of Colombia, Daisy spoke very little English, and her husband spoke even less. Her son had always been her voice, her link to the English-speaking world. Now she struggled to be heard. “Permiso, señorita,” she said, gently pushing her way to the front of the crowd. Excuse me, miss.
    “My son is Alvaro Llanos,” she said, tears streaming down her cheeks. “Mi hijo es mi vida. ¿Puedes decirme, por favor? ¿Está él vivo?” My son is my life. Can you tell me, please? Is he alive?
    “Please try to be patient,” another nurse said. “The doctor will be out to speak to you as soon as he can.”

Chapter 4
    W ith the worst of the burned students finally tucked into their rooms, Mansour was ready to talk to their families. He glanced at his watch. It wasn’t yet noon. He had already done a day’s work — and then some. He was physically and emotionally drained. In all his years treating burn patients, Mansour had never figured out how to handle his emotions when it came to children. It deeply pained him to see them suffer and always sent him into a profound funk.
    Walking out of the burn ICU and down the hall toward the waiting area, he wondered about the two most badly burned boys. The next few hours were critical for their survival. He wasn’t sure either would make it through the day. The Simons boy had a fighting chance, but his hands would probably have to be amputated. The Llanos kid would need a miracle to pull through. And if he did survive, Mansour wondered, would he be one of those victims who, after all was said and done, was angry that his life had been saved?
    The waiting area was jammed with people, crying, praying, glued to a suspended TV set. Mansour glanced up to see what they were watching. CNN was showing footage of the burning dormitory, but the sound was turned off. Mansour didn’t blame them. The news coming out of the university was heart wrenching. Three freshman boys were dead: John Giunta, a talented musician, had been trapped in his room and suffocated in the smoke. Two boys — Aaron Karol, a soccer player and scholar from Green Brook, a small township in central New Jersey, and Frank Caltabilota, whose high school football career had made him a hometown hero in Long Branch, a beach city on the Jersey shore — had burned to death in the third-floor lounge. One fire official said he thought Karol and Caltabilota had left their dorm rooms, become disoriented in the smoke, and run into the fire, which was believed to have started in the third-floor lounge.
    Caltabilota.
    The name sounded familiar to Mansour. Oh yes, he realized, the man who has been calling the burn unit all morning looking for his son. Each time he had called, someone had checked and double-checked the blackboard by the nurses’ station for the names of new patients, and each time they’d had to tell the poor man his son’s name was not on it. The man had been increasingly frantic with every call.
    Just a boy . . . And now he was gone forever. Mansour shook his head, hoping Mr. Caltabilota hadn’t learned of his son’s death on the television news.
    Dozens of students had suffered burns and smoke inhalation in the fast-moving fire, according to the news reports. Officials didn’t know what had caused it yet. One critically burned girl, a resident assistant named Dana Christmas, had been taken to University Hospital in Newark after heroically reentering the burning building several times to alert sleeping students. Most of the seriously injured, the news continued, had landed in the burn unit at Saint Barnabas. The less serious had