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

been treated in the emergency room and released to their parents.
    Poignant stories had begun trickling out. One boy had jumped from the ledge outside his third-story window, breaking an arm and a leg. Another heaved a mattress out of his window and was about to jump when a fireman burst into his room and carried him to safety. A girl dialed 911 and was told by a fire dispatcher to stuff a comforter under her door and seal it tight with packing tape. The advice had saved her life. Students told stories of seeing fellow students on fire. One boy had started to flee from the building but found another student — he didn’t know his name — lying in a heap just outside his dorm room door. He pulled the gasping student inside, wrapped him in a sweatshirt, and stayed with him until help arrived. A female student, a distance runner on the college track team, nearly tripped over a burned boy as she ran from the fire. She picked him up and carried him outside.
    But many of the stories were not as inspiring. Parents spoke of being unable to find their children. One father said he had called his son’s cell phone, and his son’s roommate had answered. “I can’t talk,” the boy had exclaimed. “The firemen are trying to get us out.” “Where is my son?” the father had asked. “He may have gotten out the back,” the roommate said, and cut off the connection. The father still hadn’t found his son.
    Mansour looked around at the distraught parents, at their eyes, puffy from crying, and their mouths, pinched in grimaces, and his thoughts drifted to his own son. How many nights had he been preoccupied with that most terrible fear of losing your own child? How many prayers had he said, asking that Nicolas never be burned? That was why he had been so insistent that they practice the fire escape route at home, and why he had checked Nicolas’s dorm room in Washington for smoke detectors and sprinklers. He would definitely send Nicolas that ladder he and Claudette were talking about.
    Shawn Simons and Alvaro Llanos were Nicolas’s age. They had the same dreams, the same expectations, the same carefree “nothing can happen to me” attitude that boys their age deserved to have. Mansour shook his head. Now they were in drug-induced comas in the burn center’s intensive care section. Respirators were breathing for them. Swaddled in layers of gauze to protect their oozing, burned skin, they looked like mummies. A web of IV lines pumped massive amounts of narcotics and fluids into their bloodstreams to numb them to the unrelenting pain they would otherwise suffer and to prevent deadly burn shock.
    What would he tell their parents? That they would sleep that way for weeks? Perhaps months? That is, if they lived.
    Christine Simons was the first to introduce herself.
    Mansour had noticed her, sitting there, comforting the parents of the Llanos boy. He had heard through the hospital grapevine that she had spent most of the morning in the emergency room, making a fuss because the doctors down there had insisted she stay until her blood pressure normalized. She just wanted to be with her son. Mansour didn’t blame her; he admired her mettle.
    “What can you tell us, Doctor?” Christine asked when she saw Mansour standing there.
    “The next few months will be a roller-coaster ride,” Mansour replied. If their boys did survive, they would lose months and maybe even years of their lives to the healing process, and even then their scars — both physical and emotional — might be permanent.
    Alvaro’s sister Shirley translated the doctor’s words into Spanish for her parents. In any language they were unwelcome, and Daisy Llanos wiped away tears.
    Her son. Tall. Handsome. Her golden boy. He had willingly taken on the role of head of the family after her husband’s stroke two years earlier. He truly was the perfect child, and now she might lose him.
    “I want to know why I thought my son was sleeping in the dormitory, safe. Why