After the Fire

Alvaro Llanos was crying.

His stomach hurt and his head throbbed. Lunch was meatloaf. He hated meatloaf. Nothing felt good.

Just the idea of leaving his room at the Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation in West Orange was nauseating. He hadn’t been there a full day, and already he was expected to go to the gymnasium for physical therapy.

The gym looked like a big city health club, only most of the dozens of people there were in wheelchairs. Many had spinal cord injuries. Some were recovering from car accidents. Some from hip and knee replacements. Some from strokes or lost limbs.

No one else was burned.

It was okay to be burned at Saint Barnabas Medical Center. In the burn unit, no one judged or stared. All the patients looked burned, some worse than Alvaro. He never saw a look of pity — not from the staff, not from the other patients, not from their families.

Four months had passed since the fire in the freshman dormitory at Seton Hall University that killed three students and injured 58. Alvaro and his Boland Hall roommate, Shawn Simons, were taken to Saint Barnabas in Livingston after the fire.

Shawn, who had been burned on his hands and his face, still went there for outpatient therapy, but Alvaro, burned on more than half his body, required the more intensive inpatient therapy that Kessler offered.

Alvaro, who had turned 19 the week before, left the burn unit for Kessler on May 16. The day had been a real mixed bag. He had wanted to leave Saint Barnabas, but only because it meant he was one step closer to home.

Leaving the people of the burn team was a different story. They had given Alvaro back his life and he felt beholden to them. They had become family. He was safe with them.

Burn nurse Susan Manzo was a joker. One day she brought him a water pistol so he could soak the rest of the staff. She tried to argue that the water gun was good therapy for his hands.

Nurse Ann Marie Majestic had talked so much baseball to him all those weeks he lay in a coma that he knew her voice when he finally woke up. He worshipped her.

Andy Horvath was the only person who could soothe him in the tank room, the place where they scrubbed his burns every day. Sometimes, when he cried, the male nurse would lean close to his face and promise him that everything would be all right.

The entire staff had gathered around Alvaro as he prepared to leave the burn unit on a splendid, sunny, 70-degree Tuesday. They were as saddened by his departure as he was.

Mike Brick, the gruff respiratory therapist, looked like he would burst out crying when he said goodbye. “Work hard, Al. ... You look great,” he had said before rushing away.

Nurse manager Peggy Dimler had called him “sweetheart.” He loved being called that.

He would miss Roy Bond the most.

“I feel like I’m sending my son off to war,” the husky physical therapist said that day.

“This isn’t goodbye,” Bond said as he hugged Alvaro. “It ain’t over until the fat lady sings — and she hasn’t yet. I love you, man.”

Alvaro loved Bond, too.

If he could just stay in the burn unit for the rest of his life, he would never have to worry about people staring at him. Ostracizing him. Feeling sorry for him.

Still, he remembered what burn nurse Eileen Gehringer said to him on that last day: “It hurts to see you go. But you are on to better things.”

Alvaro knew she meant things like college classes, movies with friends, playing baseball, driving his car, dates with Angie Gutierrez, his girlfriend since high school.

How he wanted to get back to being a regular kid. No more stained bandages under his clothing. No more waking up to blood on his sheets. No more hand tremors, chronic fatigue or struggling just to get out of a chair or to pick up a pencil.

No more drugs. Before he was burned, the strongest drug Alvaro had ever ingested was Tylenol. Now he was taking 12 pills a day — painkillers, anti-depressants, pills for anxiety, pills for itching, pills to sleep.

“In the beginning I used to think, ‘Why me?’ but I don’t do that much now,” Alvaro said the week before he left Saint Barnabas for Kessler.

“In the beginning I was scared that when I went back to school people would be staring. Now, I’m not scared. Now I’m getting comfortable with who I am.

“It’s like I have been reborn, like I am starting life all over again.”

Now, at Kessler, where he didn’t know anyone, and no one knew him, Alvaro’s resolve was cracking.

Alvaro didn’t touch the meatloaf. Instead, lying in his bed, he watched ESPN and felt sorry for himself.

Then a hamburger arrived — compliments of Barbara Benevento, the head of his medical team at Kessler.

Benevento, a bubbly physician who grew up on Long Island and had the accent to prove it, was accustomed to dealing with boys. Many of her patients at Kessler were around Alvaro’s age, victims of automobile or diving accidents. She had four brothers.

“Hello!” Benevento said, striding into Alvaro’s private room with a grin on her face and a clipboard under her arm. “We’ve been waiting forever for you. It’s so great to meet you. I’m so happy you’re here.”

A pep talk from the doctor and a little insider information was all it took to reignite Alvaro’s spirit.

No one in the gym would give him a second look, Benevento promised. They had their own problems, which they were working hard to overcome. He would see people in wheelchairs, people without limbs, people who were paralyzed and who couldn’t breathe on their own. They were too wrapped up in their own recovery to pay much attention to him.

Alvaro relaxed a little. He liked Benevento; he thought she was pretty in her pink sweater and ponytail, and she was friendly.

“Guess what?” he whispered conspiratorially to his parents when they arrived. “Even Superman didn’t go the gym when he first got here.”

Christopher Reeve, the actor who played Superman in the movies, was one of Kessler’s most famous patients. Reeve had spent six months there after being thrown from a horse during a riding competition in Virginia and suffering a spinal cord injury.

Reeve wouldn’t go to the gym when he first got to Kessler, Benevento had confided to Alvaro.

At 1:20 p.m. — 24 hours and 20 minutes after he had arrived at Kessler — Alvaro was ready to get back to work.

Even Superman took longer than that.

Alvaro had barely swallowed the last bit of his burger when J.R. Nisivoccia, his new physical therapist, knocked at the door.

Nisivoccia, an athletic-looking 27-year-old with a brown crew cut, was amiable and gentle.

“Do you want to walk around your room or hit the hallway?” he asked his new patient.

Alvaro didn’t hesitate. “Let’s hit the hallway.”

While Alvaro settled into a routine at Kessler, Shawn returned to Seton Hall to register for the fall semester.

The small Catholic university was two traffic lights away from the Simons home. Shawn had dreamed of going there since he was a child.  And Christine Simons wanted her son to have a college education. Others might have been satisfied with a good-paying job after high school, but Shawn wanted more.

No one was prouder than his mother when he was accepted at the university. At her urging, Shawn decided to live on campus to make the most of his college years.

It never occurred to Mrs. Simons that her son might not be safe there. When she went to Seton Hall to see where Shawn would be living, she never looked for fire sprinklers. She was more concerned about the dirty bathroom on his dormitory floor.

This was his first time on campus since the Jan. 19 fire. He stayed 10 minutes and signed up for 15 credits: three business classes, English and algebra.

Shawn still would be a freshman when he returned to school in the fall, but he was determined to catch up by taking extra courses.

No, he would not live on campus, Shawn told the dean of freshman studies, Bernadette Manno, when she asked.

“I understand,” she said. “Is this your first time back on campus?”

“Yeah,” Shawn said.

“Was it tough?”

“Uh, no, not really.”

Shawn seemed to take his first return visit in stride. He didn’t linger on campus, nor did he mention wanting to see Boland Hall.

As he left the university, though, he thought about Alvaro.

“Now it’s just a matter of time and determination and we’ll be back to school together,” Shawn said in the parking lot.

“I think if he decided to go back and stay on campus, I’d ask him to room with me, and I’d go back and live there, too. We’ve grown so close. It’s going to be hard if we decide to do that, but I think we could support each other through it.

“I just can’t handle living there (on campus) right now without him.”

Alvaro was at Kessler six days when he asked that his therapy time be doubled from three hours a day to six. His goals were to increase his upper-body strength using weight machines, and to relearn everyday agility tasks: shuffling cards, holding a glass, twisting a cap off a jar.

Hani Mansour, director of the Saint Barnabas burn unit, had said that Alvaro’s stay at the rehabilitation center would last two months, probably well into July.

Benevento and the rest of the Kessler team agreed it would be at least that long before he could go home. And then there would be up to two years of daily outpatient therapy at Saint Barnabas.

Even walking was difficult for Alvaro. His gait was slow and unsteady and he sometimes lost his balance.

Walking laps around the gym and playing basketball became daily rituals at Kessler. Standing five feet from the hoop, Alvaro, slowly and deliberately, tossed free throws underhand. Scar tissue prevented him from raising his arms above his shoulders.

Still, he hardly missed a basket. Picking up the basketball was hardest of all, and it was the exercise Alvaro hated the most: bending over from the waist. Alvaro’s back had been incinerated in the fire, and the surgeons at Saint Barnabas had to cut away layers of burned skin before they found a healthy bed for skin grafts.

Parts of his back were still open and oozing blood and other fluids. The slightest movement could cause the fragile skin to break and bleed. Sometimes the pain would be so bad that Alvaro cried.

When he was tempted to slack off or hide in his room, Alvaro thought about driving his dark blue Mazda Millenia or sleeping in his own bed.

He thought about his mom’s home-cooked rice and beans or Sunday afternoons when all of his cousins gathered at his house to play dominoes or watch the Mets on TV.

One day after his parents brought him a lunch of Chinese takeout, Alvaro cracked open his fortune cookie and read aloud: “A handful of patience is worth more than a bushel of brains.”

He tried to be patient, but he wanted to go home.

So Alvaro worked harder than anyone in the gym. When Nisivoccia asked him to do 10 repetitions on a weight machine, he did 12 or 13. When the therapist told him to walk two laps around the gym, Alvaro walked three. When everyone went to lunch at noon and the gym cleared out, Alvaro stayed, tightening the cap on an empty peanut butter jar or placing one more building block on a stack.

“By the time you get out of here we’re going to be calling you Arnold,” Nisivoccia told his determined patient in his best Schwarzenegger accent.

“It’s rare when you see someone that age come in with no bitterness,” Nisivoccia said about Alvaro.

Alvaro got comfortable at Kessler quickly. He liked the therapy and he liked the staff. Nisivoccia became a confidant. Benevento was doctor, cheerleader and mother confessor.

Benevento, 39, had been treating patients at Kessler since 1997. An adventurer, she was hoping to go on a three-week African safari in July. Still, she practically lived at Kessler and frequently joked that she didn’t have a life outside the rehabilitation center.

A physiatrist — a physician who specializes in physical medicine — Benevento primarily treated spinal cord injuries, a specialty for which Kessler was renowned. She had seen hundreds of desperately sick patients come through Kessler’s gym. Many of them were heroic in their efforts to get better. Few were as determined as Alvaro.

“If you hang around long enough, you learn there’s something in certain people, an inner strength,” Benevento said one day as she watched Alvaro walking laps.

“They will take the worst disadvantage and turn it into an advantage. From the first minute you look into his eyes you know this kid has that inner strength. You can’t buy that. This is a kid that, whatever it takes, he’s going to do it. If he was any other person he would be lying in a bed, depressed. He’s still a kid, a little boy.

“He has his moments — the fear, the memories of the fire — but he’s able to take that and put it aside somehow and do the work.”

Benevento suddenly choked up.

“Every day people ask me, ‘Why do you stay (at Kessler)? It must be so depressing.’ That’s why,” she said, pointing to Alvaro. “That’s why you do this every day.”

June was a month of firsts for Alvaro and for Shawn.

On Monday, June 5, Shawn returned to his part-time job as a clerk in the Newark law firm of LeBoeuf, Lamb, Greene & MacRae. More important, he was driving again.

“I’m 75 percent back to where I was before the fire!” he proclaimed  as he stood at a copy machine, trying to sort legal briefs while wearing the special gloves that protected his burned hands.

“By tomorrow he’ll be asking for a raise,” his boss, Mary Ellen Dolan, said.

The following week, Shawn was invited to speak to fifth-graders at Newark’s Rafael Hernandez Middle School. The class had written to Shawn while he was at Saint Barnabas. Their questions were innocently frank:

How did the fire start?

“Right now, no one is sure if it was an accident or a prank.”

Did you run out of the fire?

“No. We crawled. You should always get on the floor when you’re in a fire. Always get on the floor. There’s more oxygen there.”

Is it scary not knowing who did it?

“It is kind of scary, yes. When I go back to school I could be sitting next to the person who did it and I wouldn’t even know.”

Do your hands hurt?

“It hurts in therapy. Not right now.”

Do you have nightmares?

“No. But most people do. I think about what happened a lot.”

Is your friend still in the hospital?

“Yes. He was burned worse.”

The students asked questions for 45 minutes. Shawn answered each one directly, laughing at the bluntness of some and answering others as if he were the teacher.

Only one question seemed to catch him off guard: Could you have saved your roommate?

“If I could just go back, I would definitely make him go a different way.”

The last question was answered less candidly than the others:

Are you scared that this will happen again?

“No, I’m not worried. I doubt that anything like this will ever happen again.”

What Shawn didn’t tell the students was that on the previous Monday he had awakened his mother at 4:30 a.m. to say he smelled smoke. That was the time of the Seton Hall fire.

Christine Simons got up and inspected the whole house. Nothing. She went outside and surveyed the street. Nothing. She didn’t see any fire, and she didn’t smell any smoke, she told Shawn. “Go back to bed.”

Not five minutes had passed when Mrs. Simons saw her son standing in her bedroom doorway again. “Shawn, what’s up?” she asked.

“Mom, I have to know where it’s coming from.”

For the next 30 minutes, mother and son drove the streets of Newark searching for a fire. Only when they drove to the nearest fire station and saw that all the trucks were inside did Shawn finally agree to go home to bed.

While Shawn was talking to the fifth-graders at the Rafael Hernandez Middle School, Alvaro took his first look at himself in a full-length mirror.

He wished he were dead.

It was during a lap around the Kessler gym. Alvaro had passed the mirror many times, but this was the first time he was wearing his glasses. It was the first time he had gotten a good look, and it took him by surprise.

Alvaro didn’t say anything to his doctor or his therapist, but on the way back to his room, he told his mother what had happened.

“I am so ugly,” Alvaro said. “I should have just died.”

“No, you are not ugly,” Daisy Llanos told her boy. “We should just thank God you are still alive.”

Alvaro didn’t say a word. He turned his wheelchair into his room and switched on the TV.

He never said anything about it again.

He wanted to go home. That was all that mattered.

Benevento could recite countless stories of valor she had witnessed within Kessler’s walls, but even she was mystified by the everyday courage of her teenage burn patient.

Here was a kid who, according to the books, should be hiding out, or lying in bed, in the depths of despair, yet Alvaro was willing to put himself out there in the public eye.

It didn’t get much more public than Shea Stadium.

It was June 23, the Mets were playing the Pittsburgh Pirates, and Alvaro had a day pass from Kessler to go to Queens for the game. He was accompanied by a group that included his parents and his 17-year-old sister, Shany, as well as Shawn, Christine Simons and Shawn’s girlfriend, Tiha Holmes.

The Saturday outing was instigated by Benevento, who had learned from Alvaro that he had never been to Shea Stadium, home of his beloved Mets.

“Would you want to go?” she asked, thinking he probably would not be ready to face a crowd. “Yeah!” Alvaro answered. The next day, the doctor had the tickets in hand.

Alvaro told Angie about the tickets, and she contacted the father of a college friend, who worked in the Mets’ front office. Her friend’s father, James Plummer, decided to make Alvaro’s day at the ballpark unforgettable.

The magic started the moment Alvaro and Shawn arrived.

Dressed in his full Mets regalia, Alvaro was bewildered as he and Shawn were escorted from the gate into a tunnel that led directly onto the ballfield. “We’re going on the field?” Alvaro asked. Shawn shrugged. He didn’t know what was going on, either.

The roommates were invited to stay on the field during batting practice. Shawn was nonchalant. He had seen bigger celebrities, he said. Besides, the Yankees were his team. Alvaro was the Mets fan.

One by one, the players strolled up to Alvaro and Shawn and introduced themselves: Edgardo Alfonzo, Derek Bell, Mike Piazza.

Todd Zeile lingered, telling the boys about a high school friend who had been burned doing a science project.

Bell and Alfonzo got two bats out of the dugout, autographed them and presented them to the boys.

“Okay,” Shawn said, no longer trying to pretend he was anything but impressed. “This is fantastic.”

Bobby Valentine, the volatile Mets manager, walked up.

“How does your throwing arm feel?” he asked Alvaro. Alvaro was speechless for at least the second time that afternoon. “Do you think you can throw the ball out?”

“Yes!”

As Mets announcer Roger Luce introduced the roommates to the crowd, Valentine positioned himself 10 feet from the top of the dugout steps where the boys stood. The crowd cheered.

Shawn wound up and quickly threw the ball to Valentine. Then it was Alvaro’s turn.

Slowly, Alvaro brought his arms up in front of him as far as the scarring would allow — barely to his shoulders. He stepped back with his left foot, turned toward the Mets manager, then hurled the ball directly into Valentine’s mitt.

“Nice toss,” Valentine said, walking back toward the dugout. Then, as if Alvaro were one of his players, he smacked the boy on the backside.

If Daisy Llanos was anxious that day at Shea Stadium, she hid it from her son and the rest of her family.

Mrs. Llanos, 41, had so many worries. She wanted Alvaro home. Yet when the doctors began talking about a discharge date, she wondered whether she could care for him. He was still so weak and his burns still bled.

She worried, too, about her husband. He had never completely recovered after suffering a stroke in 1997. His blood pressure was erratic and sometimes he felt dizzy and out of focus, the way he had just before the stroke.

How much was he affected by Alvaro’s ordeal? Did her daughters Shirley, 25, and Shany feel neglected because she hardly had any time for them now? When she did see them, she was too tired to do anything or even say much.

The way she was feeling, she could have a stroke herself. Who would take care of her family then?

And the medical bills were piling up. Between Saint Barnabas and Kessler, the cost of Alvaro’s treatment was close to $2 million. Until May, they had been paid by Medicaid because Alvaro was covered under his parents health insurance.

Once he had turned 19 in May, however, he was disqualified.

Nearly every day someone from Kessler — usually Alvaro’s social worker, Maggie Infante, but sometimes Benevento — was on the telephone with the case manager from Physicians’ Health Services, the insurance company that managed the Llanoses’ Medicaid, negotiating how to pay for Alvaro’s care.

Coverage by Physicians’ Health would cease once he was discharged, although he would be racking up expenses as an outpatient.

Infante worried that he would not be able to get home services if he had no insurance coverage.

The exchanges went on for all of June and July, but eased when Mansour said Saint Barnabas could handle any gap in his insurance.

Eventually, Alvaro applied for his own Medicaid insurance but he would not be approved until September.

Benevento watched Mrs. Llanos with concern. She was spending all her time in her son’s room at Kessler. She went home for a couple of hours each afternoon to run errands, to wash Alvaro’s clothes and to buy groceries for the rest of the family.

“She’s smiling and walking around, trying to be strong, but she’s like a robot,” Benevento said one afternoon in late June.

The doctors at Kessler and at Saint Barnabas tried to reassure Mrs. Llanos. They would do whatever it took to keep Alvaro’s recovery on track, they told her.

She would not be comforted. Even anti-depressants and sleeping pills couldn’t lift her out of her despair.

Mrs. Llanos saved her tears for the rare moments she was alone, taking a bath or after her son was asleep.

Sometimes she wished she were dead.

Angie Gutierrez ended her freshman year at Seton Hall with a 3.8 grade-point average.

Over the summer she made up an English course she had dropped after the fire, and from her part-time job saved enough money to buy her first car, a gray Mitsubishi Galant.

In July, the university sent her to China for a week to attend an international conference of students.

At home, in her spare time, she baby-sat for her younger siblings while her mother worked.

Angie’s relationship with the Llanoses, once so strong, continued to deteriorate through the summer. They thought she should spend more time with their ailing son, but Angie was determined to do things her way: studying, working, shopping with girlfriends and being a good friend to her former beau.

Two days before the Mets game, Mrs. Llanos confronted Angie in the hallway at Kessler and angrily demanded that she return Alvaro’s gold crucifix ring. Since the fire Angie had worn it on a chain around her neck.

Angie gave the ring back, but she never returned to Kessler. Instead, she stayed in touch with Alvaro in daily telephone calls.

Alvaro felt caught in the middle. He needed his parents — he loved them. But he wanted to be with Angie, too.

He understood Angie’s predicament. It was hard to take classes, study, work and still find time to visit him every day.

He defended his parents, too. “They’re just watching out for me.”

Angie was confused about everything. “We kind of broke up in a way,” she said. “In a way we didn’t.

“His parents want a woman to be his wife. That’s something I can’t do. They have high expectations because in the beginning I was always there. But I’m still young. I’m still growing up. There’s still a lot I have to do. “

Angie said she still loved Alvaro. “But honestly I’m taking this one day at a time.”

What was difficult for her to understand was her own anger toward Alvaro.

Angie felt abandoned by her boyfriend while he was in a coma all those months after the fire. She also was disappointed that after he woke up he would not defend her to his parents.

As for Alvaro’s appearance, she came to believe that while he looked different, he was still Al. “When you speak to him you know it’s him. It takes time to get used to, and I’m still not used to it.

“There are two different kinds of affection,” Angie reflected. “I love him as a person. I know that’s not how he’s going to look later on.

“So it’s more the friend thing with us right now. It’s easier for both of us.”

Angie paused. Her voice turned sad.

“If me and him don’t end up together, he’ll find someone else. Because he’s a great guy.”

While Angie was trying to come to terms with the end of the romance, Alvaro was still holding onto thoughts of a future together.

“I just hope everything works out,” he said.

“I really hope that when I am done with everything we can get married. We both have to live our lives first and we can’t put pressure on each other. We have to have fun and see the world and learn more stuff because we’re both so young.

“But even if we don’t get married, I want to stay best friends,  which I am. I am Angie’s best friend.”

By July 20, Benevento felt that Alvaro was ready to go home. Mansour, the director of the Saint Barnabas burn unit, agreed.

While he would be spending a lot of time at Saint Barnabas, Alvaro would be living at home.

He had been at Kessler for two months and five days. He was walking better. He could get up from a chair, feed himself and brush his teeth. His balance and endurance had improved. His hands still trembled, but less so. It had been six months since the fire.

“This is just the beginning,” Nisivoccia told Alvaro before hugging him goodbye.

At 5:40 p.m. Alvaro and his parents began the 40-minute trip home to Paterson.

First they made a stop to pray at St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church. At the Llanoses’ home, scores of relatives and pans of baked lasagna were waiting. And so was Shawn.

“This is a very good day,” Shawn said as Alvaro walked through the back door after making his way up three wooden steps and into the kitchen.

Shawn was not wearing his Jobst gloves. He now felt comfortable exposing his burned hands.

“Now it’s like the fire never happened,” he told Alvaro’s sister, Shirley.

“I can’t wait until it feels like that for my brother,” she said, unable to hide her dejection.

Sometimes, anticipation is so much better than reality.

From the moment, in March, when Alvaro woke up from his long coma, all he could think of was going home. It was what lifted him out of blue moods and motivated him when he was too tired to work.

Once he went home, everything would be better. He could concentrate on his relationship with Angie, get back to his schoolwork, go out with his friends.

Alvaro was given the largest bedroom in the three-bedroom apartment. To make room, his sister Shirley got her own apartment. Shany moved into Alvaro’s old room and his parents remained in the middle-sized bedroom off the kitchen.

Alvaro slept in fits and starts. He woke up in the middle of the night, frightened. When he was asleep, it wasn’t restful. He moaned and mumbled, the words incoherent and troubled.

The 45-minute trip to Saint Barnabas for therapy every morning grew old fast. Alvaro had to be there at 9 a.m. First his wounds were scrubbed in the burn unit tank room, his dressings changed, and then he had three hours of physical and occupational therapy. By then, half the day was gone, Alvaro was exhausted and his parents were weary.

Mr. and Mrs. Llanos hovered over him during the therapy sessions. When he cried out in pain, they winced. Mr. Llanos often had to walk away. Sometimes they interfered: Do you need a drink of water? Are they hurting you? Do you want to stop now?

By now the Llanoses knew there might be some pain in the therapy. They didn’t expect to see blood. Therapist Roy Bond did.

Bond had seen his first cord split early in his career. A cord is the thin, braided rope of scar tissue that forms around a burn patient’s joints. Cords restrict movement even more than regular scarring: They don’t give. Often, they are surgically split to help increase a patient’s range of motion. But sometimes they tear when a therapist stretches the patient’s skin.

It is painful, bloody and frightening.

When it happened to Alvaro, on his second day back at Saint Barnabas, he nearly climbed off the table. Despite Bond’s consoling words, Alvaro skipped therapy on the third day.

For the Llanoses, it was proof that they had to be even more protective of their son’s well-being.

Bond and Catherine Ruiz, Alvaro’s occupational therapist, finally had to ask the couple to stay in the waiting room.

Alone with Bond, Alvaro confided that his parents were suffocating him. He knew they loved him, but he couldn’t go to the movies with friends without them coming along. What if something happened to him? his mother would ask. His friends wouldn’t know what to do.

The Llanoses did things for him that he should have been doing himself. Sometimes he had to tell his father that he could feed himself.

“They just won’t let go,” he said.

“But I love them so much, I don’t want to hurt them by saying anything.”

On the last Friday in July, the pent-up frustrations exploded.

Mrs. Llanos was helping Alvaro take his first shower at home. She was nervous, afraid that she might hurt him. He was still so weak and wobbly. Alvaro soaped up while his mother attempted to cut the bandages he still wore on his head. The gauze was stuck. The more Mrs. Llanos pulled, the more pain Alvaro felt.

“I can do this myself!” he scolded his mother. “Let me do it on my own!”

Trying to help him, Mrs. Llanos let go of the shower chair Alvaro was using for balance. He nearly fell.

“You don’t know how to do anything! You don’t do it like the nurses,” he yelled, pushing his mother away.

“Okay, then,” Mrs. Llanos said. Tears spilled from her eyes. “I’m not going to do anything for you anymore. I’m going to get a nurse to take care of you.”

“I’m the one who got burned!” Alvaro wailed.

“I didn’t want this to happen to you,” Mrs. Llanos cried, then stormed out of the tiny bathroom into her bedroom, slamming the door.

“It’s not my fault that you got burned.”