After the Fire

Frail as an old man, his face scarred and his forehead bandaged, Alvaro Llanos Jr. held his head high as he walked on the campus of Seton Hall University on the first day of the fall semester earlier this month.

No one who knew what he had gone through since he was severely burned last winter in a devastating fire in the freshman dormitory expected to see him when classes resumed in September.

Yet there he was.

Eight months earlier, in the frigid predawn hours of Jan. 19, a fire had ripped through the third floor of Boland Hall, where Alvaro lived with his roommate, Shawn Simons. They were both 18 years old.

The fire, deliberately set in the third floor lounge, trapped some students in the dormitory and stalked others until three were dead and 58 injured. Four, including Alvaro and Shawn, were in critical condition.

Alvaro and Shawn had spent the months since the fire in and out of hospitals.

Shawn, who was less seriously burned and healed faster, had been at Alvaro’s side throughout his difficult convalescence. He was there the day Alvaro finally awoke from his long coma.

It was Shawn who held Alvaro’s hand when he looked at himself in the mirror for the first time, and it was Shawn who reassured him those times when it seemed as if he might break down.

When Alvaro was moved from Saint Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston to the Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation in West Orange in mid-May, Shawn was his first visitor and his last —he was there when Alvaro went home in late July.

Now, although Alvaro was not well enough to take classes on campus, he wanted to be with Shawn when he returned to resume college life.

It didn’t take long for the news to spread. E-mails flew across the South Orange campus from student who knew them and students who only knew of them:

They’re back! Both of them!

When Shawn left his home in Newark that morning, Christine Simons felt like her son was going off to kindergarden for the first time. How would Shawn feel once he was back on campus? Would he be able to adjust? Would he feel afraid? Awkward? Isolated?

By now, Shawn didn’t look much differently than he had before the fire. A navy blue Yankees cap hid the scars on his forehead and his cherished black curls had grown back. His burned hands stayed in the pockets of his baggy Polo jeans most of the day.

Shawn took five classes. None of the professors fussed over him and there were no double takes from students as he went from class to class. It felt like he had never left.

Seton Hall appeared to have recovered, too. Over the summer, Boland Hall had been rebuilt and a new class of freshmen had already moved in.

Alvaro, however, still had a long way to go. As he walked around campus with his parents, students who were friendly with him before the fire now passed without recognizing him.

"I’ve counted four so far," Alvaro said as he headed to the university bookstore to buy a Seton Hall decal for his car — though he wasn’t well enough to drive. "They were friends, people I knew pretty well. They didn’t know who I was."

Alvaro called out to two or three of them.

"Hey, it’s me. How ya doin?"

"Al? Is that you? I wasn’t sure," said one girl who ran to hug him was not strong enough to go to class full time and he wasn’t sure he was still Angie’s boyfriend.

Angie, who was living on campus, seemed to be avoiding Alvaro lately. She hadn’t returned his telephone calls in days.

Alvaro had thought about Angie the night before. About how much he loved her. About why she

wouldn’t call him back. He didn’t want to be a pest, but he needed answers. He would try to catch her later at her dormitory after he visited Carlos Rodriguez, his professor.

Rodriguez taught Spanish for Hispanics, one of two courses Alvaro would take at home in Paterson. Rodriguez wanted him to meet his classmates.

By the time Alvaro got to Room 237 in Fahy Hall, 29 students had assembled. Trailed by his parents, Alvaro self-consciously took the first seat by the door.

The day’s lesson was on the board: Getting to know each other.

Rodriguez already knew Alvaro. He had come to Saint Barnabas Medical Center after the fire to see what he could do for the families of the injured students, and immediately he struck up a friendship with Daisy and Alvaro Llanos Sr.

They spoke the same language, and Rodriguez told them how, three years earlier, his mother had been scalded by boiling water while he was visiting her in Puerto Rico. At the time, Rodriguez thought her burns weren’t that serious, but when she died a few days later from a stroke, he blamed himself. Helping the burned students and their families was a kind of requital.

When Shawn and Alvaro were in the burn center, Rodriguez visited regularly. He was a companion to their parents, and sometimes translated for the Llanoses. Before long he was accepted as part of the family.

When Alvaro showed up in class Rodriguez felt as if he were introducing a surrogate son. He had come to love the boy. Now, as Rodriguez introduced Alvaro to the class, he began to cry and stepped out of the classroom to compose himself.

His eyes red and swollen, Rodriguez returned a minute later and wrote on the board: Amor. Compasion. Valor. Sacrificio. Lealtad.

Love. Compassion. Bravery. Sacrifice. Loyalty.

"To me, they represent all of these qualities," Rodriguez said, turning to Alvaro and his parents. "It’s very easy to love them. For me, it was love at first sight."

The anxiety in the classroom had been palpable before Rodriguez spoke. Alvaro had been too timid to face the other students, and they had been afraid to look at him.

Now the tension broke.

One of the students stood. "I have a great amount of respect for you for overcoming what you have," he told Alvaro.

"No words can express the respect I feel for you," another added.

Alvaro lifted his head, faced the students and grinned widely.

"It feels very good to be here with you," he said.

When Rodriguez dismissed the class, the students filed past Alvaro as if he were an honored guest. Most offered smiles and words of encouragement. Some still avoided his gaze. When they did, Alvaro extended his hand.

"He’s awesome," one boy said as he walked away.

One student, Marina Cruz, stayed behind. She had been on the verge of tears all during class. Now she knelt beside Mrs. Llanos and sobbed.

Cruz, now a senior, was one of the nursing students who had gone to Boland Hall the morning of the fire. She had helped Alvaro as he lay moaning on the couch in the dormitory lobby. While Mrs. Llanos stroked her hair, Cruz, still sobbing, recalled how Alvaro’s skin had peeled off in sheets. His face was burned so badly she hadn’t realized that she knew him.

Hani Mansour, director of the Saint Barnabas Burn Center, was astonished that Alvaro had returned to Seton Hall with Shawn. The boy had such courage and such dignity.

Mansour, 53, was upbeat about Alvaro’s future. He would need physical and occupational therapy for months to come; there would be more surgeries, and he would never look the way he did before the fire. Even the slightest breeze would irritate his skin. He would be hypersensitive to heat and cold as the new nerve endings matured.

But Alvaro would be okay. He and Shawn could be a real inspiration for other burn patients.

Both boys attended the burn support group at Saint Barnabas, where they encouraged others rather than complain about their own injuries.

One of them was Kadeem McCullers, a 6-year-old boy from Long Branch who was burned while playing with matches near a drum of paint thinner. It blew up in his face.

At a support group meeting at the end of August, Kadeem’s mother Rozina worried aloud about whether people would stare at her child or ridicule him.

Shawn answered first. People did stare, he said. At the mall. In restaurants. Even in his own neighborhood. It was something Shawn had had to deal with, and her son would, too. Sometimes when Shawn caught people staring at him he’d ask whether they wanted to know what had happened. Most were just curious. It was natural. They weren’t judging him, he realized. When he did explain what had happened to him, everyone responded with words of encouragement.

Alvaro told the group that people gaped at him. He wasn’t able to hide his burns with gloves or a baseball cap the way Shawn could. Sure, it bothered him. Maybe they thought he was ugly.

"But I know I’m still me," Alvaro said. "I am still the same person I was before I got burned. And I am going to get better in time."

The tragedy had taught Alvaro an important lesson. "I think I’ve learned more because of it. I’ve seen so much that other people haven’t seen. I learned life is so precious and no matter how bad things seem — say you don’t have money or you don’t look the way you did once — you still have your life. That’s what’s important."

Eight-year-old Jabrill Walker, who had spent two months in the burn unit while Alvaro was there, often turned to Alvaro and Shawn for comfort. Jabrill had been burned as badly as Alvaro in a house fire.

Jabrill especially idolized Alvaro because they had spent so much time together in the burn unit. One evening in late summer he telephoned Alvaro at home. He was happy to be home with his mother and his brother, Jabrill said. But some of the kids in the neighborhood made fun of him because of the way he looked.

"Do people stare at you, Al?" Jabrill asked in his tiny voice.

"If they do, I don’t pay much attention."

"Well, sometimes when I go out with my mom, people stare at me," Jabrill said.

"I think they’re probably staring because you’re so cute," Alvaro told Jabrill. The little boy giggled.

People did stare at Alvaro. They stared in restaurants. In stores. At Shea Stadium, when he went to see the Mets play.

"The other day I was standing in line at the movies, and this girl about my sister Shirley’s age just stood there staring at me," he said a couple of days after he comforted Jabrill on the telephone.

"I decided she was staring at me because I’m so cute," Alvaro said with a chuckle.

Mansour knew there would be times when Alvaro hated his body, hated himself. But then Alvaro would realize he had survived something most people did not, and he would be grateful for being saved. Mansour wouldn’t be surprised if Alvaro changed his plan for a career in computers and instead became a burn therapist.

For Shawn, the fire would someday be a distant memory. Mansour was sure of it.

Shawn’s hands would always be scarred, although his face had healed better than Mansour and the other burn surgeons had imagined.

The fire hadn’t changed Shawn’s view of life. It hadn’t humbled Shawn the way it did so many other burn patients. Maybe that was good. The kid was feisty and tough. A real survivor. He would make something of himself someday.

As for himself, Mansour would not be the director of the Saint Barnabas Burn Center forever. He loved the place, there was no denying that. But he longed to return to Lebanon. His wife Claudette, who was from Connecticut, had agreed to live there someday. The couple had visited several times, and she liked the culture as well as the landscape. A burn center was needed in Beirut. Who better to start it?

Until then, Mansour would continue to promote what he considered to be one of the best burn centers anywhere.

It troubled him when other hospitals didn’t send their burn patients to him.

As New Jersey’s only certified burn center, Saint Barnabas was where all seriously burned patients belonged. They suffered so much anyway, but in places where there was no specialized burn team, they suffered unnecessarily.

Mansour still prayed for Dana Christmas, the only badly burned student who had not been brought to the burn center that first day. She spent months recovering at University Hospital in Newark and was now home in Paterson. Christmas, who was a resident adviser in Boland, had gotten several awards for her heroism the night of the fire.

Burn nurse Susan Manzo knew she was instrumental in helping the Llanoses and the Simonses through their long ordeal.

She also was fond of Tom Pugliese, the other badly burned Seton Hall student, whom she had cared for on that very first day.

Recently Manzo had received a card from Pugliese thanking her for taking such good care of him. She was happy he had recovered so well and was back at Seton Hall.

Nevertheless, Manzo had decided to leave the burn unit for a position in the cardiothoracic intensive care unit. It wasn’t an easy decision.

Manzo, 34, was the quintessential burn nurse. She was smart, unselfish and a little bit on the wild side. Mansour liked her compassion and her spunk. He wanted her to stay.

Manzo would never form the kind of bond with her cardiac patients that she had with her burn patients, Mansour told her.

When her own 9-year-old son, Anthony, went off to college in a few years, he would leave with a smoke detector packed in his bag. She could thank her Seton Hall patients for that. Manzo cared for them as much as if they were her sons or nephews.

But that was what made the job so difficult.

"I have no problems with having very sick patients," Manzo said. "But after a while it’s like, ‘Can I let this one go?’

"I’m tired of seeing babies die. It gets to you after a while."

Manzo needed a new challenge. She knew burn nursing inside and out, and she knew she was really good at it.

"Is this the smartest move?" she asked herself. "I don’t know. But I’ll be right down the hall. I’ll always be there for them in some capacity. That’s the best part of being a burn nurse. You’re always a burn nurse. If a big fire happens, they will call. My phone will still ring. And I will still go."

As she reflected on what she had learned in the burn unit, Manzo thought about the one lesson she would always carry with her.

"It taught me you don’t take any day for granted, because God knows what can happen."

While Manzo began to withdraw from the burn unit, Daisy and Alvaro Llanos Sr. were learning to let go of Alvaro.

He still needed their help, but every day their son was becoming stronger and more independent. Mr. Llanos rejoiced as he watched Alvaro and his cousins again play cards and dominoes.

For Mrs. Llanos, the baths and daily dressing changes that had been torture were now routine.

She was finally sleeping, and she was relaxed enough to eat a full meal. So many people seemed to care about her boy. Strangers sent their prayers; some even sent gifts and checks.

In early September Mrs. Llanos called her best friend, Millie Deleon, and the two of them went to a beauty salon for a haircut and a manicure. It was the first time Mrs. Llanos had allowed herself that luxury in the eight months since the fire.

Mrs. Llanos found herself smiling again. When Alvaro went to his cousin Marco’s house to watch the Roy Jones Jr. prizefight and didn’t get home until two-thirty in the morning, Mrs. Llanos was giddy with happiness.

Ken Simons, never a part of his son’s daily life before the fire, now saw Shawn more frequently.

For Christine Simons, life had pretty much returned to normal. She was back at work at her overnight job with Federal Express. Shawn could do most things on his own, though he still went to Saint Barnabas for therapy two days a week.

Not a day passed when Mrs. Simons didn’t think about the parents of the three students who lost their lives. She prayed for them every day.

She thought about how when Shawn was 13 or 14 she had lost touch with him for a while. He had been going through typical teenage stuff. She and Shawn had always been so close and suddenly he wanted only to be with his friends. She often felt lonely after that.

But the day before the fire Shawn had surprised her with a phone call from his room in Boland Hall. "What are you doing, Mom?" he had asked.

The two went shopping and then spent all day together. It was just like it used to be.

It was her hope that the parents of the students who died had a similar memory of their sons.

Through the months, Mrs. Simons had stayed close to the Llanoses, and it was she who encouraged them to loosen the reins on Alvaro.

"If our children sense our fear, it won’t help them," she said to Mr. Llanos one day.

"But I thought he was safe and secure (at Seton Hall)," Mr. Llanos replied.

"We all felt that way," Mrs. Simons said. "But this could have happened anywhere. None of us wants to let our children go, but you can’t protect him from everything."

Shawn had also done some letting go. He let go of his memories of the fire, and he let go of his anger at Seton Hall. Life was good again. He was back in college. His romance with Tiha Holmes was going strong: She was even getting jealous again. When Shawn went to a party without her one Saturday in early September, Tiha wanted to hear every detail.

"Did anybody try to kick it to you?" Tiha asked, using the neighborhood phrase for "pick you up."

"Why would they do that?" he replied.

"Because you look so good."

Alvaro wanted his relationship with Angie to survive the fire, too. Only after he went home from the hospital did he realize it probably would not.

Letting go of Angie would be one of the hardest things he’d ever have to do.

In late August, Alvaro told Angie he didn’t love her anymore. That wasn’t true, of course. He said it to spare her — and to spare himself — because he suspected she had already moved on.

Alvaro tried to see Angie over Labor Day weekend, but she was busy. She had to work. She had a wedding. She had to visit her father, her aunt, a friend.

He finally caught up with her that first day back at Seton Hall.

Angie was agitated when she saw Alvaro in the lobby of her dormitory. She had not known he was on campus until an hour earlier when he telephoned to say he was there.

"Hi, sweetie," Angie said stiffly, giving Alvaro an air kiss on the cheek. "I tried to call you yesterday. Really, I did."

The former lovebirds were ill at ease. They seemed to be dancing: Alvaro took one step forward. Angie took one step back.

Twenty feet away, Mrs. Llanos, standing next to her husband, felt as though her heart might break. She pretended to look anywhere except at her son and his girl.

Fifteen minutes later they were apart. Alvaro had to go home. Angie had to get away.

Taking refuge in the campus cafe, Angie slumped into an overstuffed couch. She wished it would swallow her. Everything was so different now, Angie tried to explain.

"Sometimes it’s not even him. It doesn’t even look like him anymore. It’s just hard to see him like that. I’m not embarrassed, but every time I see him I feel so bad. I’m afraid to talk to him about the relationship. Sometimes I feel like my life just stopped. I can’t meet people. I guess I just want to move on. But I feel so guilty."

Other students had been scrutinizing Angie. "Even when I go out with friends, people say, ‘How’s Al?’ They throw it in my face.

"In the beginning I was trying

to be there for him. When he woke up from his coma, he wasn’t communicating with me. Then he realized I was trying my best, but that wasn’t good enough. Then for him to say, ‘I don’t love you anymore’ — that hurt.

"I’m only 19," Angie continued, wringing her hands and staring into her lap. "I should be able to date other people. I don’t want people putting this on me that I can’t live because of Al. There’s no right or wrong in this. I know a lot of people will disagree with that. They’ll say I’m bad. I’m the type of person who, like, I hate it when people don’t like me. But you can’t judge someone unless you are in their position."

Angie wanted to leave Seton Hall and go to college in another state. "I feel trapped. The fire is going to haunt me forever. I have to deal with all of his friends watching me. If I was to go out with someone at Seton Hall no one would accept it. I want to be there for him, but I just can’t be there for him as a girlfriend. I want to be able to have the option to move on and I don’t feel like I have that option, and sometimes I resent that."

Nearby, another student strained to hear Angie.

"I used to bug him all the time, ‘When are we going to get engaged? C’mon, when, Al?’ I really thought I would marry him. If this accident didn’t happen we would have gotten married and had kids and that would have been my life. But right now, he’s not the one."

Angie started to cry.

"I sang to him when he was asleep for all those months, but he will never know about it. No one will know exactly what I went through. I guess my love left awhile back when people were trying to keep me there. I’ve been trying to live on memories. I tried to stay so focused, to love him, to be there, but it’s just not the same anymore.

"This is like a love story that doesn’t have a happy ending."

Two days later Angie drove to Alvaro’s house to tell him how she felt.

"We talked the way we used to talk and I know she still loves me," Alvaro said afterward, relieved that at least the conversation had finally taken place.

"We decided to be real close friends for now. I have to become a man and she has to become a woman. Then we’ll see what happens.

"I explained to her how I felt — that I love her and I will always be there for her. I’m not ready to be a boyfriend. I will do anything for her, but I can’t hold her or take her away somewhere."

It would still be a long time before Alvaro could put the fire behind him. His back and his head were still raw in spots and frequently bled. His scars sometimes split open as he was stretched in therapy. Pain had become a part of his everyday existence and he still required large daily doses of painkillers.

Mansour scheduled surgery for October to sever the cords of scarring under Alvaro’s arms and chin, which restricted his movement. He would be back in the burn unit for at least a week after that, and probably two. Cosmetic and laser surgeries were on the horizon, but that would be months, maybe years, away.

Alvaro felt good about the way the talk with Angie turned out. "Before she left, I told her that if she was dating someone else when I got better that I would be there to take her back."

The passionate girl with the thick copper hair would be a hard act to follow. Angie was Alvaro’s first love. She was smart and gregarious, always challenging him. Angie wrote her own poetry. She sang and danced and she was a whiz on the computer.

"And she’s beautiful," Alvaro said, looking away.

"To me, she’s beautiful."

At least he still had Shawn.

What began as an association based on a room assignment had grown into a deep friendship.

Two teenage boys, both from underprivileged neighborhoods, felt rich in each other’s presence.

In August, when Shawn threw a 19th birthday picnic for himself, he invited two people to help him blow out the candles on his cake: his mother and Alvaro.

When Angie broke up with Alvaro, Shawn was there at the Llanos home, waiting in the wings to catch him if he fell.

Sometimes still they talked about the fire. Shawn and Alvaro heard the rumors and read the newspaper stories saying investigators believed the dormitory fire had been set. They wondered why no arrests had been made. Yet they felt little bitterness.

"I don’t know who set the fire so there’s nobody to be angry at," Shawn said one day.

"I don’t know how I’ll react if there is a name. You can’t go around hating someone you don’t know. But whoever did this, I don’t think they were trying to hurt anybody. It’s like getting hit with a stray bullet. They weren’t aiming for me."

Alvaro used to think a lot about the fire and wonder how it happened, but he didn’t much anymore.

"I used to get mad because these kids did something so stupid," he said.

"I think they probably lit a fire and it got out of control. Something little got real big.

"I still get mad when I think about the three boys who died. It makes me feel sad to think of how much their families are hurting. But the kids who died are in heaven now, so at least they’re safe."

The former roommates talked often about moving back on campus one day. They decided they probably would, but only when they could live together.

From that first day at Seton Hall, when Alvaro picked Shawn out of all the other freshmen milling around campus and told his parents, "That’s my roommate, I just have this feeling," he knew theirs would not be an ordinary relationship.

"There’s something different about me and Shawn," he would say. "I don’t know what it is. We don’t even have to talk. I sense his strength and it makes me strong, too.

"The day he came dancing into my hospital room, wearing regular clothes, and I was in my bed, it made me a little jealous. But it made me stronger. Right then, I decided that I wanted to get better, too."

After the Boland Hall fire, Shawn and Alvaro found something precious and unexpected — a diamond in the ashes. They discovered a kind of friendship that was hard to explain. But they understood.

"I have a bond with Alvaro that I can’t have with anyone else, ever," Shawn said. "We survived a terrible ordeal together, and even though we still talk to each other the way we did before — you know, we still joke and make fun of each other — there’s something more.

"I love Alvaro. Definitely. I love him. Al’s going to be all right. I have no doubt in my mind.

"And I’ll be right there with him."

---

Part Two: Samaritans

They were wrapped like mummies to protect their burns, and respirators were breathing for them. Massive amounts of fluids were being pumped into their bodies to prevent deadly burn shock, and liquid nourishment was being fed into their stomachs through tubes. Early on, the boys had been slammed into morphine-induced comas to numb the deep, unrelenting pain of third-degree burns. Without the drugs, the pain would be unbearable.

It was almost 10 p.m., and Mansour wanted a shower and some sleep. He had to be back in the Saint Barnabas Medical Center burn unit seven hours later. Students Shawn Simons and Alvaro Llanos, both 18, had burns that were vast and deep, and their lungs were badly damaged by smoke. If they lived, they would be in the burn unit for a long, long time.

Burn recovery is erratic, fraught with fleeting highs and daunting lows. Mansour, director of the Saint Barnabas burn unit, told the Simons and Llanos families that the next few months would be "a roller coaster ride."If the boys did survive, they would lose months, maybe years to the healing process and even then many of their scars - physical and emotional - would be permanent.

For now, Mansour had done all he could for them.

They were wrapped like mummies to protect their burns, and respirators were breathing for them. Massive amounts of fluids were being pumped into their bodies to prevent deadly burn shock, and liquid nourishment was being fed into their stomachs through tubes.

Early on, the boys had been slammed into morphine-induced comas to numb the deep, unrelenting pain of third-degree burns. Without the drugs, the pain would be unbearable.

While it is often said that third-degree burns are the least painful because the nerve endings are gone, it is not true. Nerve endings on the surface may be gone, but deeper ones are not. And they transmit a hot, brutal pain that is difficult to fathom for someone who hasn't been burned.

The comas would last weeks, even months. Mansour told the families that the boys would not remember much about that time. But undoubtedly they would recall the misery of the burn treatment room where their raw, open wounds were scraped and scrubbed each day.

At least they were alive.

Burns were cunning, though. On the surface, everything could seem under control, while potentially fatal infections festered inside.

Opportunistic bacteria weren't Mansour's only worry, though. Burn patients get sick from the outside in. Wounds leak vital bodily fluids, triggering burn shock, which shuts down major organs.

Lung injuries pose the gravest danger to burn patients. Both Shawn and Alvaro were gasping for breath when they were brought to Saint Barnabas. It would be days before doctors could tell how badly their lungs were damaged. More patients die from complications resulting from smoke inhalation than from burns.

As soon as they were considered stable, both boys would undergo skin grafts. Shawn's hands were so badly burned that Mansour worried the teenager would lose his fingers. His face, particularly his forehead, probably would need surgery, too. Alvaro needed grafts for most of his upper body - his chest, back, arms, hands and neck.

Mansour could not say what the prognosis was for Shawn or for Alvaro. Either could die at any moment; Alvaro's condition was particularly precarious.

For their families, there was little to do but wait and watch the clock. Priests from Seton Hall were in and out of the burn unit waiting room. The Seton Hall president, Monsignor Robert Sheeran, prayed with the families. The Simonses and Llanoses were settling in for a long, uncertain ride.

Mansour liked Christine and Ken Simons right away. Both seemed bright and levelheaded. Mrs. Simons quickly won over the whole burn team. The doctors and nurses marveled at her composure. Her devotion to her son was powerful. She took an unpaid leave from her night job at Federal Express to sit at Shawn's bedside for hours at a time, having one-sided conversations as he lay there, oblivious to her presence. She wanted the best for her son and she was going to see that he got it. But she trusted the staff with the details.

Family support is critical to burn treatment. It often makes the difference in a successful recovery.

The Simonses presented a united front on behalf of their son. No one guessed they were divorced.

For three nights after the fire they set up house in the Saint Barnabas waiting room. They slept there - one on the couch, the other in a chair- they ate there and they prayed there.

On the third night, they fought there. It was 3 a.m. and Mr. Simons was getting restless. There wasn't much to do except watch the clock and wait. The chair in the waiting room was hard. The television was on, the sound off. It was hospital quiet.

Mr. Simons kept imagining his son's face the way it would look burned. He tried to blink the image away. It kept recurring. Shawn had been such a handsome kid. His friends called him "pretty boy." He was always checking himself out in the mirror. Mr. Simons used to say the boy primped more than a girl.

How would his son handle being disfigured? Could Shawn deal with people staring at him? Could he? The noise in his head kept getting louder. Then Mrs. Simons woke up.

Christine and Ken Simons divorced when Shawn was 4. For their son's sake they had always made an effort to have a conciliatory relationship. Still, when they spent any time together, old tensions bubbled up.

This was one of those times.

"I'm worried about how Shawn is going to handle how he looks," Mr. Simons told his former wife. "When I was young I was handsome like him. I was God's gift to women. If he's anything like me he's going to be devastated by this."

Mrs. Simons was a stoic woman. But this was too much. Suddenly she was besieged by old resentments: the times her ex-husband had forgotten Shawn's birthday; the time he neglected to get his son a single Christmas gift; the time he told Shawn that his new family took priority over him. He's not like you, she wanted to say, but she didn't.

"We're waiting to see if God is going to spare our child, and you're thinking about Shawn's looks?" Mrs. Simons said, tears welling in her eyes.

It was the last night they would spend together in the hospital.

The Llanoses were loving parents, too. Mansour could see that. But they were harder to reach than the Simonses. Colombian immigrants who met and married in Paterson when they were in their early 20s, neither Daisy nor Alvaro Llanos spoke fluent English. Mansour wasn't sure whether their dazed expressions meant they didn't understand him or that they were bewildered by what was happening.

Alvaro was their only son. Their golden child. He would be the one to realize the American dream. He would be the first person in his family to graduate from college, to have a real career, to buy a house in the suburbs.

The family had just been through one catastrophic illness. Mr. Llanos, 46, had had a debilitating stroke two years earlier and was still recovering. He had left his job at the Marcal paper factory in Elmwood Park and he still

couldn't work, he couldn't drive and he couldn't walk without a cane. Mrs. Llanos was forced to quit her job at the Paterson post office to care for him.

Mansour wanted to comfort the parents more, but he couldn't say how long it would be before they would have their children back. He couldn't even tell them with certainty that they would ever be able to hold their boys again.

Wansour, 53, knew all about the torment of burns.

He was exposed to it for the first time while growing up in Lebanon. Mansour, not yet a teenager, was visiting his father in Beirut's military hospital when he heard a patient screaming in the next room.

The sound was like nothing he had ever heard. It seemed to start deep in the man's gut, then build slowly and deliberately until it finally spilled out into one long, tortured wail: the scream of a burn patient.

Why couldn't they help him? young Mansour had asked the nurses. There wasn't much they could do but wait for him to die, he was told.

"The pain, the way he was screaming, screaming in pain, that affected me - a lot," Mansour would recall, shaking his head as if he were trying to dislodge the memory from his brain.

Twenty years later, Mansour was a young doctor just beginning his career when he heard that scream again.

A resident in general surgery at St. George Greek Orthodox Hospital in Beirut, Mansour was assigned to care for a group of Syrian soldiers burned by napalm during the 1973 Middle East war. The burn field was so undeveloped and had so few practitioners that Mansour turned to books for guidance on how to treat his patients. During his research, he learned that the prognosis for the Syrian soldiers wasn't much better than it had been for the man he had encountered 20 years earlier.

Before 1970, major burns - covering one-third or more of the body's surface - were almost always fatal. The rare patient who managed to survive the initial burn shock usually died from massive infection.

Few doctors knew how to treat burns and fewer still wanted to.

Mansour did.

Where others saw hopelessness, he saw a challenge. He saw burns as his future.

Mansour was born Esber Hani Mansour in Beirut on July 19, 1947, one of five sons of Greek Orthodox parents. His mother Marie still lives in the house in Beirut where Mansour grew up. An older brother resides nearby. Mansour's father Nicolas, who died in 1986, was an engineer who owned a construction company.

The family wasn't wealthy, but they were educated, members of Beirut's intellectual class. Nicolas Mansour encouraged his boys to follow in his footsteps. Only Hani, the middle son, dared to study something different, and that was because his mother, whose father was a doctor, pushed him toward medicine.

Mansour was accepted to the American University and St. Joseph's University, both in Beirut. He chose to attend St. Joseph's for his undergraduate work and medical school.

Mansour almost left medical school after the first day. His microbiology professor lectured about "echinococcus that multiply by schizogony" as if the students knew what that meant. Mansour didn't have a clue.

He went home dejected and cried to his mother that he wasn't going back. She insisted he try again.

Mansour did, and quickly he decided that he wanted to become a surgeon. He wasn't sure what type of medicine he wanted to specialize in, but his residency at St. George Greek Orthodox Hospital, where he treated the burned Syrian soldiers, took care of that.

In 1974, Mansour immigrated to the United States to take a residency in general surgery at the Union Memorial Medical Center in Baltimore. There he met his wife Claudette, who was working part time as a nurse. Inspired by a trip to France, Claudette, who grew up in Connecticut, was studying French. When she heard Mansour speaking French at the hospital, she struck up a conversation with him. He asked her out for pizza. They married in 1978.

A year later, Mansour was studying burn care under the pre-eminent burn surgeon Basil Pruitt at the U.S. Army Institute for Surgical Research in Fort Sam Houston, Texas. In short order, Pruitt promoted Mansour to chief of burn study.

While Mansour polished his skills in Texas, specialized burn centers were springing up around the United States. By 1980, there were 114 - nearly triple the number a decade earlier - and survival rates for burn patients had doubled since Mansour's boyhood.

In 1981, Saint Barnabas in Livingston called Pruitt looking for someone to head up its nascent burn program.

Saint Barnabas, now a 620-bed medical complex with 1,500 physicians in 68 medical and surgical specialties and 4,000 employees, had opened a burn center four years earlier. It was directed by a surgeon whose specialty wasn't burns. Saint Barnabas wanted an expert.

Pruitt suggested Mansour.

When Mansour arrived at Saint Barnabas he found a 10-bed burn center tucked away in a corner of the hospital basement.

Mansour was 34 at the time. His dream was to start a burn unit in Lebanon, but he agreed to come to New Jersey for a year before returning home.

In Texas, he and Claudette lived 15 miles and one traffic light from the hospital where he worked. As far as Mansour was concerned, that was too far. When the couple came to New Jersey they bought a map and drew a five-mile circle around Saint Barnabas. Any house they bought would have to be inside that ring, they told the real estate agent. Indeed, Mansour set his sights on a house right across the street from the hospital. He would be able to see Saint Barnabas from the living room window. But Claudette put her foot down, and they bought a house two miles away.

There was much to do. He had to teach the nurses, the technicians - even the plastic surgeons - how to treat burns.

In 1983, he needed help, so he hired someone who knew almost as much as he did. Sylvia Petrone was a New Jersey native who at the time was a fellow in burns at Cornell University Medical Center in New York City.

Like Mansour, Petrone made Saint Barnabas her life. A Morristown native and the daughter of a builder, she was single and lived within minutes of Saint Barnabas.

Petrone was the emotional antithesis of Mansour. He tended to wear his feelings on his sleeve. He was accessible and down to earth - as polite to the cleaning staff as he was to the hospital

president.

Petrone, now 47, was formal where Mansour was casual, reserved where he was familiar with the staff. Petrone hid her feelings well, but when someone on the burn staff was in need, she was often the first one to help. When Chris Ruhren, the nursing director, required minor surgery, Petrone showed up in the operating room and held her hand until the anesthesia took hold.

And Petrone was an artist when it came to skin grafting.

With Petrone assisting, Mansour expanded the burn team and upgraded its profile, moving the unit from the windowless basement to a sunny location on the second floor. In 1993, they recruited a third burn surgeon. Michael Marano was studying burns on the same fellowship as Petrone had at Cornell University Medical Center. Marano, who is married and the father of two children, grew up in Newark and graduated from Seton Hall and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.

He, too, had his distinctive personality. Most would define him as a gentleman.

Over the years, Mansour became known as impish and a little eccentric. Before he knew it, one year had turned to 19.

Staffers went out of their way to accommodate him. When the 5-foot-4 doctor decided to go on the Atkins diet the nurses hid birthday cakes from him. Mansour pouted and complained that he seemed to be gaining weight, not losing it. (He eventually dropped 44 pounds.)

Everyone on the burn staff knew when a child had been admitted because Mansour would become glum. Yet whenever the stress in the unit grew nearly unbearable, it was Mansour who broke it by telling a corny joke, laughing the hardest of all. His body would jiggle and his face would turn scarlet.

One day, Mansour came to work wearing a black shoe and a brown shoe. As he stood in the burn unit talking to the family of a new patient, Ruhren, the nursing director, followed the eyes of the relatives down to the doctor's feet. Ruhren could hardly keep from laughing.

"I don't want you to worry just because he can't tell the difference between a brown and a black shoe," she told the family when Mansour walked away. "He really does know what he's doing." They all laughed.

By the winter of 2000, Saint Barnabas and Hani Mansour were ready to handle a disaster of the scope of the Seton Hall fire.

With 30 beds and a staff of 90 burn specialists that included social workers and respiratory, physical and occupational therapists, as well as the doctors and nurses, Saint Barnabas was one of the leading burn centers in the nation.

Since Mansour's arrival, the number of patients had quadrupled to 425 a year. They came from all over the state. Many, like Alvaro, would have their care paid by Medicaid; others, like Shawn, were covered by private insurance. Because the cost of treatment often mounted to millions of dollars, the hospital set up a burn foundation to help.

Within the hospital, the burn unit was called "the golden child" and the "premier service." The staff was considered elite. To be a member of the burn team was something to boast about - though some still wondered who would choose such a grueling specialty.

Mansour liked to say the members of his team could have worked anywhere in the hospital. They were the cream of the crop. The best of the best. Always at the top of their game.

The game had gotten more complex, however. Burn care had advanced light-years since Mansour treated those Syrian soldiers in Beirut.

Mansour would say that burn treatment was part science, part art. In its earliest days, it was neither.

In 1500 B.C. the Egyptians were treating burns with mud and cow dung. Seventh-century practitioners advised using a salve consisting in part of the fat of old, wild hogs and bears, and a chunk of genuine mummy.

In succeeding centuries the remedies became slightly less exotic: purging and bleeding in the 16th century; turpentine and maggots in the 17th century.

As Mansour learned during the 1973 Mideast conflict, modern warfare forced learning in the science of treating those burned in battle.

During World War I, burns were treated with sterilized wax. World War II brought huge advances in anesthesia, skin-grafting techniques and the use of antibiotics.

By the 1960s, doctors were infusing burn patients with liquid formulas to replace the huge amounts of plasma leaking through their pores. Advances in topical antibiotics to fight septicemia, a massive infection from burns that poisons the blood, further reduced the death rate - though the prognosis for burn victims still was poor.

Eventually, burn specialists learned to feed burn victims early and to feed them often. Burns, more than any other injury, cause the metabolism to race. It is as if the comatose victim were jogging 24 hours a day, seven days a week, constantly expending calories. Without enough nutrients to nourish itself, the body would begin to eat away at its own muscle mass.

To make up for the lost calories, protein-enriched formulas are pushed through tubes into patients' stomachs within hours of their injury. Once they are able to eat on their own, they are encouraged to consume high-calorie foods - milkshakes, cheeseburgers, pizza. A 5,000-calorie diet is not uncommon for a burn patient.

In the 1980s, burn surgeons realized that early removal of burned skin and immediate skin grafting provided the best wound cover and protection against infection. But where to acquire the skin?

Cutting a patient's own healthy skin is the most efficient way to graft. Using a stainless-steel instrument that looks like a cheese cutter, surgeons slice strips of healthy skin from unburned sections of the victim's body. The strip is passed through a machine where tiny metal teeth puncture it, creating a mesh that can cover a larger area. The fine mesh strips are then stapled to the burned areas. The metal staples are removed later.

In the past few years, doctors have learned the use of cultured skin, where a tiny patch of the patient's healthy skin is sent to a laboratory and grown in petri dishes. After 18 days enough skin has been produced to cover an entire torso. But the skin has the consistency of wet tissue paper. It is difficult to work with, and the cost is exorbitant: $80,000 to $100,000 to cover a chest.

Cadaver skin is frequently used as a temporary cover until a patient's own skin can be grown. The process is called a homograft. Cadaver skin is the best substitute for a patient's own skin, but it, too, is costly: several hundred dollars for a small strip from a skin bank. Saint Barnabas keeps it in a deep freeze in the operating room.

The most recent advance has been the development of artificial skin. When a patient is so severely burned that there is not enough of his own healthy skin to use for grafting, surgeons turn to artificial skin, though only as a last resort. It doesn't take well and it tends to become infected.

Petrone is unimpressed by any of it. "None of this stuff is the panacea they make it out to be," she said. "There is no panacea when it comes to healing burned skin."

Within a week of the fire, Shawn's hands were grafted using skin from his shins. The burn surgeons stripped Alvaro's thighs for his five skin grafts, all of which took place during the first three weeks of his hospitalization.

The doctors would have to wait to see whether either boy required further surgery. In the meantime, they'd start with a basic treatment plan, then customize it to each patient.

What worked for Shawn would not necessarily benefit Alvaro - but both would start out every day the same way: in the burn treatment room.

The staff calls it the tank room. Patients call it the torture chamber.

"It's something you don't wish on your worst enemy," said Ann Marie Majestic, who has worked as a nurse in the Saint Barnabas burn unit since the beginning. "You can't describe it. You take your most God-awful open wound and rub sandpaper or Brillo over it. That is the pain these patients go through every day."

The tank room is the heart of burn treatment. It is foul-smelling and muggy. The temperature is set at 90 degrees Fahrenheit to protect patients from chill, and hanging heavily in the air are the sickening odors of burned flesh and open wounds. Between the heat and the smell, medical students often faint.

Antiseptic, windowless and bright under fluorescent lights, the tank room looks like most other hospital treatment rooms.

It is not.

It is what burn patients tend to remember most about their hospital stay - even years later.

Lexine Skinner-Simon was burned in a propane tank explosion on June 10, 1989. When she returned to the Saint Barnabas burn unit to visit the nurses a month after the Seton Hall fire she teared up at the sight of the tank. "Do you know what it was like being in that tank room? The awful pain. The tears. Everyone scrubbing and you couldn't say anything because you had tubes down your throat? That was the dreaded thing - when they said you were going to the tank room and you knew everyone was going to hurt you in there and you didn't understand why. The tank room, well, hell couldn't be any worse than what went on in there."

Most patients, already heavily sedated, are injected with booster shots of morphine before they are brought in. They still feel the pain.

A tanking usually takes an hour or less. Alvaro's burns were so vast it took two - two dreadful hours for the patient and the staff.

At 5-foot-8 and 200 pounds, plus the 70 extra pounds of fluids he retained after the fire, Alvaro was the largest patient in the burn unit and the most seriously burned. Unconscious, he was dead weight and difficult to handle, even for the team of five that it usually took to wash him.

Paul Mellini, the chief tank room technician, tried to schedule Alvaro early. His tank time was draining for the staff both physically and emotionally.

On one typical morning, Mellini and veteran burn nurse Andy Horvath led a team of technicians into Room 4 where Alvaro slept. Two doors down a 2-month-old baby, scalded in a bathtub and admitted the night before, was screaming. An elderly woman burned in a cooking accident moaned in the room next door.

The mood inside Alvaro's room was tense. On a count of three, Mellini, Horvath and three others lifted Alvaro off his bed and onto a plastic-covered, stainless-steel shower trolley. They covered him with a blanket, then rolled the trolley 25 feet into the tank room under a trio of hoses suspended from the ceiling. The trolley was tipped slightly and a 2-inch-wide black hose was attached from the bottom of the gurney to a drain in the floor. The hose would accommodate the runoff of water, blood and dead flesh.

Mellini tried to keep the atmosphere light. He asked one of the burn technicians to save him some cake from a lunchroom celebration, then launched into a spirited conversation about the late cartoonist Charles Schulz. "Livin' La Vida Loca" played on a boom box in the room.

The team began to cut away the gauze covering every inch of Alvaro's body except his feet, his nostrils and his lips. Horvath gave Alvaro some more morphine as they stripped away his bandages. Soon Alvaro was naked.

From his scalp to his waist, Alvaro was one gaping, oozing wound. His hands, grafted three weeks earlier, were a brownish purple, bloated to twice their normal size. His hair and a chunk of his right ear were missing. The sides of his torso were concave. The burns there were so deep that the surgeons had to cut away layers of flesh to reach healthy tissue to support the grafts. His back was the worst: a skinless bed of raw, red and yellow exposed 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, they looked like a patchwork quilt.

Alvaro's injury was so catastrophic that even some of the professionals had a hard time looking without choking up, but the team got right to work.

They soaked him with warm tap water from the overhead hoses. Then they smeared him with antibacterial soap and began scrubbing his burns with 4-by-4-inch gauze pads, which felt to him like steel wool.

The scouring was a fundamental step in burn treatment. Proteins leak from the wounds and form a film that looks like the cooked white of an egg. The film, which provides a haven for deadly infections, dries into a hard, waxy scab. When it is scrubbed away early in the treatment process, permanent scarring is minimized and the risk of infections is limited.

Though Alvaro was in a deep morphine sleep, he felt the pain. While the team scrubbed Alvaro, Mellini kept an eye on his face to gauge how much pain they were causing him.

Technician Nelly Delgado, a grandmother who had worked in the tank room longer than anyone, was overcome by tears when he grimaced, then lifted his right arm as if to ward her off. If he was screaming, no one could hear him because he was hooked to a respirator and unable to make sounds. "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. The 56-year-old nurse had already become attached to him. 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 romantic eyes and a cocky smile.

Horvath was fiercely protective of him. "I'll take care of his face," he told the others. "Okay Al. It's okay. You're doing fine, buddy. I'm going to clean your mouth now. Good boy."

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.

Burn technician Toni Schmidt picked up a silver nitrate stick. It looked as harmless as a Q-tip. She touched the tip of the stick to one of the open wounds on Alvaro's right side to burn off unwanted scar tissue. To Alvaro, still unconscious, it felt like he was being burned all over again. Tears streamed from his eyes.

Nearby, a table had been prepared with his new dressings - large pieces of gauze slathered with silver sulfadiazine, a topical antimicrobial cream.

The team wrapped the gauze around him 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 55 minutes.

Tomorrow morning it would begin all over again.

---

Part Three: Awakening

It was a rude awakening. He felt as if he were being tossed from person to person. Someone was spraying water on his face. Where was he anyway? Shawn wished he has his glasses so he could see. The room seemed really big, and there were strangers in masks pushing and pulling at him. One of them was shouting: "Breathe! Breathe!"

Shawn was in the tank room, the place where patients' burned skin was scraped, scoured and dressed each day. He wasn't sure why he was there. Something about a fire. Was he burned? Shawn looked at his hands. They didn't look like his hands.

When the ambulance pulled up and Shawn stepped out, a marching band began playing and cheerleaders turned cartwheels as they spelled out his name. The best part was the brand-new red Mustang convertible parked in front of his freshman dormitory, Boland Hall. It was the most beautiful car Shawn had ever seen - and it was for him. Only it was all a dream.

His arms tied to the bed, his eyes swollen shut, his body wrapped in gauze from head to foot, Shawn, critically burned in a fierce fire that raged through Boland Hall 14 days earlier, was in a deep and morphine-induced sleep.

In his relatively short life, Shawn already had survived one fire.

He was a month old when the Newark house in which his family was living burned to the ground. A fire had begun in the apartment below theirs. Christine Simons, who had taken her daughter, Nicole, to school, arrived home just in time to see her husband, Ken, fleeing the flames with their baby boy, Shawn, cradled in his arms.

Christine Simons thought about that as she watched her 18-year-old son lying in his hospital bed, a respirator pumping air into his lungs and a web of tubes pushing food, liquids and narcotics into his bloodstream.

The restraints were especially upsetting, but they were crucial: Although unconscious, Shawn might try to pull out his breathing tube.

It would have been unbearable to lose her son 18 years ago. She didn't think she could survive losing him now.

In the two weeks since the Seton Hall University dormitory fire, Mrs. Simons had spent every waking hour in the Saint Barnabas burn unit. As she stood by Shawn's bedside she thought she saw him blink - or were her eyes playing tricks? Sometimes she would stare at her son until her back ached, hoping for a sign. Would he ever wake up? And what about his roommate, Alvaro Llanos?

The smallest thing - a twitch or a flutter, a cough or a fever - could make Mrs. Simons rejoice or despair. She knew the Llanoses felt the same way. She even saw it sometimes in the nurses and doctors who were treating the boys. Hani Mansour, the director of the burn unit at Saint Barnabas, had said that burn recovery was a roller coaster. But this felt different. You never knew when the next turn was coming or what lay beyond. Burn recovery wasn't a roller coaster, Mrs. Simons thought, it was a runaway train.

Mrs. Simons and Shawn were unusually close. She used to say they didn't really need to talk to each other because they could read each other's thoughts. If only she knew what he was thinking now. Was he afraid? Did he know what was happening to him? Was he hurting?

The truth was, she was suffering more than her son. While Mrs. Simons worried herself sick, Shawn was immersed in morphine dreams.

Mansour had told Mrs. Simons that Shawn was being weaned from the massive amounts of morphine that had ensured his long sleep. He had passed the initial crisis and he would get better sooner if he were participating in his own recovery. He could open his eyes any day. For her, that day couldn't come fast enough.

At 10:15 a.m. on Feb. 2 - more than two weeks after he had been drugged into sleep - Shawn woke up.

It was a rude awakening. He felt as if he were being tossed from person to person. Someone was spraying water in his face. Where was he anyway? Shawn wished he had his glasses so he could see. The room seemed really big, and there were strangers in masks pushing and pulling at him. One of them was shouting: "Breathe! Breathe!"

Shawn was in the tank room, the place where patients' burned skin was scraped, scoured and dressed each day. He wasn't sure why he was there. Something about a fire. Was he burned? Shawn looked at his hands. They didn't look like his hands.

He wished his mother were there. The woman standing closest to him had a kind face. But when he raised himself up to try to hug her, she recoiled - as if she thought he intended to strike her. When she did embrace him, everyone else started to clap and cry. What a strange place this was.

The moment the Simonses arrived in the burn unit, nurse Andy Horvath gave them the good news. Shawn had awakened that morning in the tank. He was now in his room, bewildered but alert. He was still attached to the respirator, so he couldn't speak. But he could communicate by pointing to letters of the alphabet on a sheet of paper a nurse had left by his bedside.

Ken Simons cried at the sight of his son. He had lost two of his children - from a previous marriage - to illness. He had been praying to God to save this one.

Christine Simons cried, too. As relieved as she was, she felt helpless. Mothers were supposed to make their children feel better. She had always been able to do that. Now she saw such pain and fear in Shawn's eyes, and there was nothing she could do except trust in God and the doctors.

Tears trickled down Shawn's red, raw cheeks. He tried to speak - he had so many questions - but he couldn't make any sound.

"The respirator," his father told him. "You won't be able to talk until you're taken off the respirator."

Shawn wiggled his bandaged fingers.

"As long as you can move them, that's good," his father said.

Shawn raised his hand to his bare head. His curls - where were they?

"It's okay. They'll come back," his mother reassured him.

Mrs. Simons held up the sheet of paper with the alphabet printed on it, and slowly Shawn spelled out what was on his mind.

"Where have you been?"

"Right here, every day," Mrs. Simons replied.

"How is Al?"

"Al is fine."

What she didn't say was that the doctors had given Alvaro only a 40 percent chance of surviving.

Three doors down, Daisy Llanos sat by her boy's bed, reading the Bible. Rosary beads hung from his bed, from the bulletin board, from a shelf.

Mrs. Llanos was a devout Catholic. When she wasn't watching over Alvaro, she was praying at St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Church or St. John the Baptist Cathedral in Paterson. "Please Jesus, if you love me and you love my son and you love my family, please help us through this," she prayed in Spanish. "Please leave my son with me, no matter how burned he is."

Her prayers had been answered two years earlier when she had begged for her husband's survival after a life-threatening stroke.

If God would let her son live now, she would take care of him for the rest of her life. Mi niño bello, nadie jamás te hará daño. No one would ever hurt her beautiful boy again.

While Mrs. Llanos prayed, others confessed their fears and frustrations in letters they tacked to Alvaro's hospital room wall.

"Waiting for your response of our presence, but not a single movement has occurred," 16-year-old Shany Llanos wrote to her brother. "Out of everyone in the family, you are the last person we expect to give up ... I know that when we are in the room with you, you can hear us & I know you're trying to respond."

Alvaro's girlfriend, Angie Gutierrez, wasn't so sure. "When I lie down I try to hug myself so I can feel your body close to mine," she wrote. "But somehow no matter what I do I can't find you. No matter how hard I try I can't see you."

It was Angie who delivered the news to the Llanoses that Shawn Simons was awake. They tried to be happy for his family. But somehow it made their situation seem worse.

The Simonses and the Llanoses had bonded in the weeks since the fire. Except for vigils at their sons' bedsides, the two families had spent every day together in the burn unit waiting room. They watched "Jerry Springer," "Divorce Court" and "Oprah Winfrey." They ate meals brought in by a local church. And they talked about their sons, somehow managing to surmount the language barrier to share their stories.

Shawn's older sister, Nicole, and Alvaro's two sisters, Shany and Shirley, passed the time in the waiting room talking about boyfriends, music and especially their injured brothers.

Angie, 18, just wanted to be near Alvaro. She had been through this once already, when she was in the eighth grade. In 1995, Angie's father had been trapped in a burning car. He spent three months in the Saint Barnabas burn unit under the care of Mansour - in the same room Alvaro was in now. No one would let 13-year-old Angie see her father. With Alvaro, though, nothing was going to keep her away. She dropped her English class to sit at her comatose boyfriend's bedside.

When she wasn't talking to Alvaro - encouraging him to keep fighting or chattering about what she had done in school that day -Angie tried to comfort his parents and everyone else.

Mrs. Simons would say they had all become like one big family. But it was a family that the burn nurses were about to split apart.

Only hours before Shawn awakened, the nurses, eating dinner in the burn unit's kitchenette, debated whether it would be better if Alvaro died. They knew that Alvaro had been a handsome boy, and that he had dreamed of becoming a professional baseball player. That spring he was going to try out for the Seton Hall baseball team.

If Alvaro did live, he would never be the beautiful boy he once was, and he would almost certainly be limited physically.

Laura Thompson, a nurse who has worked in the burn unit since 1986, wondered whether he'd be able to adjust, whether his family would be there to help him.

The Llanoses were fragile - maybe too fragile to cope with what was ahead.

Horvath, the nurse who felt so protective of Alvaro, couldn't look at them anymore. He was afraid he might give them hope when he shouldn't.

Shawn's injuries were considerably less severe than Alvaro's. Shawn was on a fast track to recovery. Two days after he woke up, his feeding tube was removed. The doctors had planned to wean him off the respirator and breathing tube that day, but Shawn yanked it out himself. By the next day he was chattering to his mother about his girlfriend, Tiha Holmes, and asking for grilled cheese sandwiches and macaroni and cheese. A week later he was taken off the critical list.

Shawn's hands and face were scarred. He still could lose some of his fingers and, even with months of painful therapy, would never regain the full use of his hands. But the doctors were optimistic about his recovery.

Alvaro's survival was still hour-to-hour.

It could be that way for weeks, even months. Extreme measures would have to be taken to protect him from the side effects of being on a respirator indefinitely. The doctors performed a tracheotomy, a surgical procedure in which they cut a hole in the front of Alvaro's neck to accommodate his breathing tube, and his eyelids were sewn shut to protect his corneas from drying out - a procedure called a tarsorhaphy that struck even some of the nurses as barbaric.

For Shawn, his injuries meant a two- or three-year setback. If Alvaro lived, he would be defined by his burns for the rest of his life.

It was time to start separating the families, said Chris Ruhren, director of the burn unit nurses. "This can no longer be treated like one case."

The Saint Barnabas burn nurses had become attached to both families. They celebrated each of Shawn's victories with the Simonses and they agonized over Alvaro's setbacks with the Llanoses.

"Angels," Christine Simons called them. People tended to describe them in ethereal ways. One patient had lapel buttons made up for the staff that read, "There is a special place in heaven saved for those who treat burns."

The nurses were an eclectic bunch. They were 55 acutely different personalities with one thing in common: Burns were in their blood. It's what made them a family. Burn nurses knew everything about each other. They knew about Kathy Hetcko's new boyfriend and they knew that Sharon Iossa ate only mashed potatoes for lunch every day.

They laughed at each other's raunchy jokes and cried on each other's shoulders. They gossiped about one another, bickered sometimes, and pulled crazy pranks when it all got to be too much.

Each of them had a fear of fire: Nurse Susan Manzo had her landlord light her gas grill when she wanted to barbecue. Kathe Conlon installed smoke detectors in her garage. None of them put cloths on their tables - that way their children couldn't pull on them, overturning hot food or lit candles. And no children were allowed in the kitchen when they were cooking.

For what they witnessed on an average day, they should have been paid a king's ransom. Burn nurses earned between $40,000 and $65,000. No one was in it for the money.

Burn nursing is unlike any other medical specialty. In a profession where the goal is to make patients feel better, their job inflicts pain. In a job where the payoff is to watch sick patients return to normal, theirs often don't. No one leaves the burn unit the way he or she was before. Nurse manager Patty Primmer would say, "Sometimes you look at a patient you have saved and you say, 'What have we done?' "

Mansour said the members of his team could work anywhere in the hospital. They were the smartest and most dedicated people in their professions. Like him, they chose burns. Then they chose to stay.

Part of that reason was Mansour, 53. It wasn't just that he treated his staff as equals, he thought of them that way. That was why nurses in other units in the hospital envied the burn staff.

There were three things nurses wanted from their jobs: good pay, flexible hours and the respect of the doctors they worked with. Most struggled to get the first two. Few got the third. In cardiac care, for instance, the doctors were the kings of their fiefdom. Rarely did a cardiologist commiserate about a treatment plan with the nursing staff or spend time in the nurses' lunchroom, joking, trading diet tips or making plans for the next staff picnic.

The doctors in the burn unit did that all the time.

Within Saint Barnabas there was a mystery about the burn nurses. They tended to stick together. They rarely ventured out of the unit; they ate most of their meals there in order to be close to their patients.

The average critically ill patient in an intensive care unit received 14 hours of bedside care per day. Critical burn patients required a nurse at the bedside for 21 out of every 24 hours.

The job was as physically demanding as it was emotionally difficult. On some days the nurses couldn't find time even for a bathroom break during their 13-hour shifts.

Not everyone fit in. "You don't get here if you're not good," said Manzo, an eight-year veteran of the burn unit. "If you don't pull your weight, we'll weed you out because you don't belong here."

"If you can't become part of the team, you don't last," Kathe Conlon added.

In the course of a day, burn nurses might deal with child abuse, elder abuse or a whole family wiped out by fire. They saw babies that looked like scorched skeletons and young mothers who were burned beyond recognition trying to save their children.

"There are times when this place is so very, very awful you never want to come back," Manzo said.

One morning as nurses were preparing Alvaro for the tank room, a call came into the burn unit that a child, burned on more than half his body, was being brought up from the emergency room.

As the burn team mobilized, the unit pulsated with anticipation and dread. Burned kids were the worst punishment. Most of the staff had families. For many of them, this case would hit too close to home.

Eight-year-old Jabrill Walker was wheeled into the tank room at 8:15 a.m. Mansour and a team of eight nurses and technicians were waiting. The boy had been playing with matches in his bedroom before school and his shirt caught fire. Like most freshly burned patients, he was awake and alert, and afraid.

Mansour could see that the burns were grave. Indeed, they were almost a duplicate of the Llanos boy in Room 4, the surgeon thought to himself. Like Alvaro, this child would require escharatomies - slits down his arms and across his chest to keep the swelling from cutting off his circulation.

Manzo was assigned to the case. She was the single mother of a 9-year-old boy, Anthony, and she talked about him all the time. When Manzo looked down at Jabrill, her hands shook and her face turned red. She saw her own boy's face on the child's burned body. Jabrill would have to be washed so the doctors could better assess his burns.

"I'm going to tell my mommy what you're doing to me," the child wailed. Manzo blinked back tears. Veteran burn nurse Eileen Gehringer could not. Burn technician Libby Davis fled the room rather than let the child see her sob. Manzo persevered.

"Okay, Jabrill, honey," she said in her most motherly voice. "We're going to give you a bath now. A big bubble bath."

As the hoses dropped from the ceiling over the boy on the gurney, Manzo, her face glistening with perspiration, turned to one of her colleagues. "You coming with that morphine?" she snapped.

Then, turning back to the boy, she broke into her son's favorite bathtub song. "Oh, Alice where are you going? Upstairs to take a bath," Manzo sang as she and the rest of the team scrubbed the boy's body.

Mansour was reflective as he left the tank room: "It's very sad. This boy is going to be here for a very long time. ... Another crisis. What can you do?"

After Jabrill had been taken to his room, Manzo stood in the unit kitchenette, holding a cold soda to her forehead. "I'm on my last thread," she told Davis, who attempted to comfort her.

"You okay?" Davis asked, rubbing Manzo's back, then taking the soda and popping it open for her.

"I'll be okay when it's 3:30 and I can call to make sure Anthony got off the bus and is safe at home."

Most nurses take pride in being stoic. Not in the burn unit. There, no one is afraid to show emotion, and when they do, the others always rally to support them.

Jabrill's case was hardly unusual. In the burn unit there were hundreds of war stories: the badly burned little girl they nursed back to health, only to read in the newspaper a year later that she had been beaten to death by her parents; the 5-week-old baby who lost his hand because his father held it under boiling water to stop him from crying; the businesswoman who spent three months recovering from severe burns, then died two years later in a house fire.

Burn nurses are asked time and time again, "How can you do it? Why do you do it?"

The truth is, most of them wouldn't be happy anywhere else.

"I left once and it's not fun," said Thompson, who began her nursing career in the unit 16 years ago, when she was 21. "When you leave here, the 'us' is gone from your life. It's like moving away from everything you love and hate. The bottom line is, this is where a lot of us belong."

They stayed for each other. They stayed because no one else would. They stayed because for every tragedy there were two success stories.

Shawn was one.

He was smart and stubborn and cocky.

Before the nurses even had the chance to get to know him, Shawn was telling them he would be out of there by the end of February. "Give me two weeks and a couple of days and I'll be home," he told Horvath a week after waking up.

Forget what the doctors had told his parents - that he would be in the hospital for at least three months. He was going home on Feb. 25. "I always set ambitious goals for myself," he said, "and I usually meet them."

Shawn would meet his goal this time, too. Indeed, he would better it by three days. He had not, however, counted on the turmoil in between.

The first blow came early on, when a nurse was helping Shawn take his first steps out of his room. Shaky and weak, he had to pour all of his concentration into just putting one foot in front of the other.

Shawn remembered hearing that his college roommate was three doors down. As he and the nurse made their way past Room 4, he glimpsed through the glass wall at his friend, and suddenly it hit him how seriously hurt Alvaro must be.

Everyone had told him that Alvaro was "fine." "Okay." "Getting better every day." But the vagueness of the responses troubled him. Only two nights earlier, he had asked his respiratory therapist, Mike Brick, to take him to see Alvaro. "You don't need to worry about him now," Brick told him. "You need to concentrate on yourself."

Now Shawn knew why everyone had been so evasive.

Shawn didn't let on to anyone that he'd seen Alvaro. He stopped asking about his friend, but for the next few days he glanced into Room 4 every time he walked by. Nothing changed.

Shawn never stopped thinking about Alvaro, though. "That's why I don't sleep," he finally confided to his mother. "I think I am blaming myself."

As it turned out, Boland Hall had an exit door 25 feet to the left of Shawn and Alvaro's room. Shawn had crawled out of their room and to the right. Alvaro followed. It was the route the boys always took to the elevator. But on the night of the fire the hallway was pitch black and smoky. Shawn had no way of knowing he was turning toward the fire.

Had he and Alvaro turned the other way, they might never have been burned at all. "I wish I went left," Shawn said, guilt and remorse in his voice.

"But then," he added, "I think this is all God's plan. There is a reason for what is happening to Al and to me. ... We just don't know what it is yet."

Soon, Shawn became absorbed in his own recovery. When he was moved from the burn intensive care unit to burn stepdown, on the other side of the hallway, he no longer walked past Alvaro's room. Not until the day he left Saint Barnabas to go home.

In stepdown, Shawn fought to keep his resolve, repeatedly proclaiming that everything was fine, that he was happy just to be alive. But sometimes he wondered how much more he could take.

Shawn whimpered like a baby on the morning he was taken into the operating room to have pins pushed into four of his fingers. The pins would immobilize his severely damaged joints and maybe save his fingers. Mansour usually used a local anesthetic when he performed the procedure, but Shawn made him promise he'd knock him out. Two hours later, Shawn was back in stepdown and his mother was feeding him pizza.

The next day Shawn fell into a funk. His hands were bandaged. Eating was awkward. He couldn't pick up the phone. The pins would stay in for six weeks. Overall, he was recuperating faster than anyone expected. But everything hurt.

A hand-made card from an elementary school student Shawn didn't know produced a brief respite from his misery. It came with a bunch of other messages, some drawn in crayon, others written in pencil on lined paper.

"Dear Friend," the greeting began, "My name is Evan and I go to Saint Denis in Manasquan, New Jersey. I am a big Michigan fan. I suppose you like Seton Hall. If you need a good laugh, I strongly suggest 'Dumb and Dumber.' Now that is a great movie."

Dozens of cards arrived for Shawn and Alvaro each day. Many were from complete strangers. Some were from out of state - as far away as California and Alaska. Shawn read every one. Mr. and Mrs. Llanos passed the time reading Alvaro's mail. Both boys' hospital rooms were papered with greeting cards.

Visitors helped lift Shawn's spirits, too. There was always someone in his room - a friend from the neighborhood or school or church. Priests from Seton Hall paid occasional visits. A local beauty queen stopped by and left an autographed picture.

Everyone was being so kind, but nothing could blunt the pain of Shawn's burns. His forehead stung. So did his hands, especially his pinned fingers. His skin-grafted hands looked so ugly, he thought. Would they ever look normal again?

The third week of February started off badly for Shawn, but it would end even worse.

Shawn's hands were stretched several times a day as part of his physical therapy. It kept them from constricting and shriveling, but the pain of bending and straightening his fingers was excruciating.

That Monday morning his skin was especially tight. At one point, therapist Melissa Kapner bent his fingers so far back Shawn thought he would go through the roof. "Ever have anyone kick you before?" Shawn asked through clenched teeth. "Because I'm about to kick you out of this room." His mother had never seen Shawn so mad. "Shawn!" she snapped. "I've never known you to be violent."

"I've never hurt like this before," he snapped back.

Shawn requested a bathroom break. When he asked for help with the door, Kapner told him he must at least try opening it himself. Mrs. Simons squirmed as Shawn struggled. When he finally did turn the doorknob, he shot Kapner a disgusted look before leaving the room.

"He'll like me eventually," Kapner said, unfazed. "Maybe in a year or so."

On Tuesday, in the weekly burn team meeting, where all aspects of burn treatment were discussed, Kapner delivered her report on Shawn. Kapner adored Shawn. Everyone did. He was a lovable kid. But he was a resistant patient, she told the assembled group of surgeons, nurses and therapists. "His hands are doing okay, but he's not doing as much as he should be. I went in there on the weekend and his girlfriend was feeding him."

Around the room, staffers gasped.

Successful burn therapy required earnestness on the part of the patient. The therapist worried that if Shawn didn't start exercising his hands more when he was alone in his room, the scar tissue would tighten up and he could lose the use of his hands. "We've told him this, but he's not taking it in," Kapner said.

Mansour revealed another problem in his report. "He's doing very well except his forehead is open," the surgeon said. "I am very tempted to propose skin grafting. I have to talk to his mother because he is very fragile."

The meeting took place three hours later in Shawn's room. Mansour stood at Shawn's bedside and spoke directly to him while Christine and Ken Simons looked on.

"Your forehead is still healing, but very, very slowly," Mansour said. "One option is skin grafting. As for scarring, you will have it no matter what we do. The surgery is an option. It is not an emergency. By Sunday, if there is no progress, we will do the surgery on Monday."

Shawn didn't say a word. He just glared at the surgeon.

"I hope this doesn't depress you more than you already are," Mansour said as he left the room.

Shawn bristled.

He knew that another surgery would push back his discharge date. Feb. 25 was little more than a week away.

"You want to think about it?" his mother asked him.

Shawn nodded yes.

Less than a minute passed. "I've thought about it," he said. "I don't want more surgery."

Burn nurse Debbie Vlack Stawski, one of Shawn's favorites, entered the room to take his blood pressure. "Don't bother," he grunted. "It's up."

By Wednesday it was Mansour's turn to gripe.

Mansour was angry over Shawn's decision. He thought it was hasty and foolhardy.

"His reaction is that of an adolescent," Mansour said before catching himself and chuckling with exasperation. "Of course, he is. But he's sitting in there like a little king. Everyone is in there doing everything for him. There's always someone feeding him. Reading to him. If the forehead doesn't heal, he'll have to have the graft anyway. But I'm not going to tell him that yet."

The friction between the surgeon and Shawn was about to escalate even further.

Snow was falling on Saint Barnabas on Friday. It was even chillier inside.

Shawn's forehead felt on fire. Having his head dressings changed in the tank room that morning was agony. When they first swabbed the Betadine on his open wounds, it was like holding a blowtorch to his forehead. Mansour had been in surgery and had not gotten the chance to examine Shawn's forehead before it was dressed again. He wanted to see it after lunch.

Shawn would have to go through the dressing change all over again. Twice in one day. The thought of it brought tears to his eyes.

At 2 p.m., Shawn was back in the tank. His head was undressed and he sat on an examining table, waiting for Mansour.

He was seething.

A moment later, Mansour breezed in. He examined Shawn's forehead for about a minute. He was pleased with the progress. "Looking better," he said, and walked out.

Shawn shook his head and said disgustedly, "He could have done that this morning."

The burn technicians redressed Shawn's head, and he clenched his teeth. "That stuff really burns," he told Nelly Delgado as she applied the Betadine.

"I know it's bad, honey," Delgado said. "I'm sorry."

His head rebandaged, Shawn returned to his room. He sat down on the bed and stared at the wall. "I guess I'm just getting tired of all this," he said, near tears.

Just then Stawski reappeared. Tall, slim and gentle, the nurse was there to comfort Shawn. She usually could. She leaned over Shawn, placed her hands on his knees and looked sympathetically into his eyes. Her offer of Benadryl to ease his discomfort was quickly accepted. "Whatever I can do to make it better, I will," she said.

Shawn seemed not to hear. He rose from his bed and walked to the window. The snow was dwindling to a stop and, for a moment, he stood there watching. Then, suddenly, he turned on his heel and walked out of the room.

Shawn couldn't escape, though.

In the hallway, Kapner headed him off and led him back toward his room for therapy. "Where were you going?" the lively young woman asked Shawn.

"I'm getting a plane out of here," Shawn told her.

"Me, too!" Kapner said.

"Oh yeah? What time does your plane leave?"

"Same time as yours - I'm going to be sitting right next to you."

"That's what you think," Shawn sneered, and Kapner began to bend his sorely burned fingers.

Down the hall, Mrs. Simons took refuge in the burn unit family room.

She was anxious. "I think I feel bad because he is so down."

But good news was at hand.

Mansour told Shawn that he would have to come back to the hospital every day for therapy but that he could go home the following Tuesday, Feb. 22.

Despite his headstrong nature, Shawn had progressed well. Mansour was confident he would improve even faster at home. How could he miss with the family support he had? His mother had been extraordinary.

Tuesday, Feb. 22, was a perfect, springlike day: 50 degrees and sunny. The snow from the week before had melted away. The freeze between Shawn and Mansour had thawed, too.

There was an air of excitement in the burn unit. This was what the team waited for with every patient. "Going home" meant that they had done well. Shawn was grateful to them.

Room 2125 in stepdown was bare now except for Shawn's packed bags. All of the cards and balloons had been taken down the night before by his mother and sister.

Shawn seemed unusually pensive, but he said he felt no sadness, just happiness, about leaving Saint Barnabas. His mother took pictures of Shawn with Mansour and each of the nurses. (The surgeon still has the snapshot on his office credenza.) "He's my guy," Stawski said. "You've got a great son," nurse Gehringer told Mrs. Simons.

By 11:30 a.m., Shawn was ready to leave, but there was something he felt he had to do first.

Flanked by his mother and father, he walked into the burn intensive care unit. As they walked through the double doors, a patient was being rolled into the tank room. For a split second, Shawn didn't realize it was his college roommate on the stretcher.

Alvaro was unconscious. Brownish fluids oozed through his bandages, from under his arms, his chest and his stomach. It was the first time Shawn had seen his friend since those early days when he was in intensive care, too, and would sneak glances at Alvaro as he walked past his room.

Shawn was stunned.

He stood at attention as the gurney with Alvaro passed, then he wandered distractedly, looking for a familiar face or anything else to take his mind off of what he had just seen.

The nurses, aware of what had just taken place, crowded around Shawn protectively to say their goodbyes. "You look so great." "You've done so well." "We'll miss you so much."

Shawn's back was to the tank room doors as Alvaro was rolled inside. Just before the doors shut, Alvaro's nurse Mike Conmy turned to his colleagues who were surrounding Shawn and rolled his eyes. Bad timing, his expression said. Very bad timing. Mr. Simons choked back tears.

After thanking the nurses for taking care of him, Shawn and his parents walked back to stepdown. Gehringer was ready with the discharge order: Percoset for pain, Benadryl for itch, Xanax for anxiety, eye salve and sleeping pills. Shawn would have to return indefinitely for daily outpatient therapy.

At noon, Shawn was officially cleared to go home, but he chose to linger until Alvaro came out of the tank room.

An hour later, Shawn and his mother returned to intensive care. Alvaro was settled back in his room. The nurses' furtive glances conveyed their shared concern. How would Shawn handle this? Could he handle it?

Shawn put on the required yellow smock, rubber gloves, head cap and face mask. He walked into Alvaro's room and stood beside him. Conmy was on the other side of the bed, taking Alvaro's blood pressure. While Mrs. Simons watched through the glass, Shawn studied his roommate's face.

"He can hear you if you talk to him," Conmy said. But Shawn had no words. He bowed his head in silent prayer, then, in utter grief, tore off his gown, mask, cap and gloves and rushed out of the room into his mother's arms. At long last his tears came.

It was the first time Shawn had cried about the fire. He felt like he was abandoning Alvaro.

"Let's go home, baby boy," said Mrs. Simons, leading her son away.

"If his eyes were open, he would have read my mind," Shawn said later. "He would have known that I was thinking, 'Al, you're going to pull through this. It will take a little longer, but you will pull through.'

"He would have known that I was thinking that even though I was going home, I wasn't really leaving him and that I would be there to see him through this. No matter how long it took."

---

Part Four: Crisis

Shawn Simons was home from the hospital only three days when death began to close in on his college roommate. The crisis that Hani Mansour and his Saint Barnabas burn team had feared all along was upon them.

Alvaro Llanos, 18, who had been burned along with Shawn in the Jan. 19 Seton Hall University fire, had been showing signs, however slight, of improvement.

Then, suddenly, on Feb. 25 his temperature shot up to 105. Every measurement indicated he was dying. His blood pressure and heart rate were dropping, his respiratory system was failing.

Mansour suspected a catastrophic infection was building in Alvaro’s lungs, and X-rays suggested adult respiratory distress syndrome. ARDS usually occurs within the first few weeks of burn treatment. It is an insidious killer, stiffening the lungs of burn patients and literally stealing their breath until even a respirator can’t work hard enough to keep them alive.

Mansour had wished — indeed, prayed — that the roommates’ story would end well. Shawn, also 18, had progressed better than anyone had predicted.

And Alvaro had managed to hold on for more than a month. Mansour, the director of the burn unit, had begun to think that maybe his prayers would be answered. But now, 38 days after the fire, it seemed likely that Alvaro would die.

The burn unit was as gloomy as the raw, rainy late winter. The team took it personally when one of the patients took a turn for the worse.

"We don’t lose 18-year-olds here," nurse Susan Manzo vowed. "Uh-uh. Not here."

Of course, that was wishful thinking.

That same day, Feb. 25, 14-month-old twins, burned in a house fire in Roxbury, were brought to Saint Barnabas. One was beyond saving. He was kept alive long enough to harvest his organs.

Even Alvaro’s parents realized their son was on the brink of death. They knew it, but they had difficulty coping with it. Sometimes, driving home from the hospital, Daisy Llanos, 40, would scream with grief until her husband shook her to make her stop. Shawn was getting better, getting on with his life, but not Alvaro. "When will our son react?" Mrs. Llanos sobbed.

Only when Shawn went home from the hospital did Mrs. Llanos finally realize just how sick Alvaro was. She was still trying to deal with that harsh reality when Alvaro’s lungs began to fail.

The Llanoses’ life since Dec. 1, 1997 — when Mr. Llanos awakened in the night with a vicious headache and watched in the mirror as his face contorted against his will — had been one long string of ill fortune.

He was hospitalized at St. Joseph’s in Paterson and the Kessler Institute in East Orange for three months after the stroke. Alvaro Llanos Sr., now 46, recovered, but his speech was permanently affected and he still walked with a cane. He reluctantly gave up his factory job at Marcal Paper Mills in Elmwood Park. To take care of him, Mrs. Llanos quit her job as a clerk at the Paterson post office.

The Llanoses never had a lot of money, but with both of them working, they had been able to make ends meet. The family lived in a spotless five-room apartment in Paterson within blocks of their large extended family.

Family gatherings were a mainstay of life. Dozens of aunts, uncles and cousins gathered for Saturday afternoon cookouts or Sunday dinners. While the women fixed lasagna, barbecued chicken and rice and beans, the children played dominoes or basketball, and the men drank Corona and talked about baseball and futbol. Once in a while, Mr. and Mrs. Llanos would go dancing at a Latin club in the city.

They were gentle people who took joy in simple things. They drove a 13-year-old Acura, paid their bills on time, and even managed to save some money toward their son’s college education.

After Mr. Llanos’ stroke, that changed. Suddenly, the family was dependent on Social Security checks. Young Alvaro took on two part-time jobs — one as a stock boy in a bird store, another as an orderly in a nursing home.

Life for the family had become a series of doctor’s visits and financial worries. Insurance bills piled up. Everything fell on Mrs. Llanos, a worrier by nature anyway. She rarely slept. Her nerves were in tatters. Still, every day she went to St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church in Paterson to thank God for her good fortune: Her husband was alive; her daughters, Shirley, then 25, and Shany, 16, were thriving; and young Alvaro was the greatest blessing of all.

There was something about Alvaro. Everyone who met him felt it. His dark good looks made him seem the very definition of a lothario: macho, seductive, egotistical.

What was so disarming about him was that he was a shy, sweet, vulnerable boy.

Alvaro was oblivious to the dozens of girls who wanted to date him. Indeed, he never had a girlfriend before he met Angie Gutierrez at the start of their senior year at Paterson’s John F. Kennedy High School.

Baseball was Alvaro’s passion, and he had shown a real talent for it, beginning with a PeeWee league, then Midgets and onto a citywide team. He intended to try out for the Seton Hall team, and fantasized about one day playing for the Mets.

Of nine male cousins who grew up together in Paterson, Alvaro was the only one to go to college. The others looked up to him, and he wanted to be a good role model for them. While other teenagers skipped classes, he took his studies seriously, shutting himself in his bedroom on most weekends with instructions to his family not to disturb him until his homework was finished. His goal was to make something of himself, then buy his mother the house she had always dreamed of owning.

Alvaro had an acute sense of fairness. When other boys picked on someone weaker, Alvaro defended the harassed youngster. He included those who were overlooked, especially old people and little kids.

He was almost too good to be true, Angie thought, when she met him.

To Daisy Llanos, the thought of losing her son was so traumatic that the burn nurses feared she was headed for a complete emotional collapse.

For his part, Alvaro Llanos Sr. held in all his fears — he wanted to spare his wife — but he, too, was in turmoil.

One day while at Saint Barnabas, Mr. Llanos’ left eye began to droop and his head ached. He went to see the doctor who had treated him when he’d had the stroke 21/2 years before. Stay home and rest, take a few days away from Saint Barnabas, the doctor told him. Mr. Llanos stayed away for one day.

Thinking they were sparing each other, the couple avoided talking to each other about their son. Yet every day in the burn unit they asked the same questions.

When will Alvaro wake up?

Were his eyes damaged in the fire?

Was his brain affected?

Mrs. Llanos was aging more every day. Dark circles formed under her eyes. Some days she was angry; others, heartbroken. When her husband was stricken, she’d been able to get some help by visiting a psychologist. She went back, but this time therapy provided little relief.

If only she could be next to Alvaro — she wanted to sleep with him so that when he had nightmares, she’d be right there and he wouldn’t be afraid.

What if he couldn’t deal with being burned? "He was always so proud of himself and the way he looked. He was great in sports and liked to wear shorts and short-sleeved shirts. Now the doctors say his body won’t be the same."

When Alvaro’s condition worsened, Mrs. Llanos stood at the pay phone in the hallway outside the burn unit, commiserating with relatives and friends. "No quiero que mi hijo muera," she cried bitterly. "I don’t want my son to die."

Mr. Llanos hovered nearby, clutching his heart. "Oh, please God! No! Please! I want him to wake up now."

Susan Fischer, the burn unit social worker, told a meeting of the burn team on March 7 that she was worried about the couple.

"The family is in hell," she said. "This is their golden child and he’s not getting better. They are looking for answers to comfort them — answers we can’t give them.

"She’s not sleeping at all. He’s not sleeping at all. They don’t sleep because they are constantly expecting the phone to ring. Even sleeping medications aren’t working. It’s just an impossible situation, really."

The Llanoses began to focus on insignificant things: a tear in Alvaro’s eyelid, a quarter-sized sore on his leg.

One day in mid-March, they reached the breaking point.

The three burn surgeons — Mansour, Sylvia Petrone and Michael Marano — were standing at the nurses’ station when the couple approached them and began their daily inquisition.

What was the tear in their son’s eyelid?

What was the sore on his leg?

Petrone, who tended to be direct, decided it was time to jolt them back to reality. "Look," she said, "don’t worry about his eye or the thing on his leg. He’s very, very sick. He’s in critical condition."

Mrs. Llanos broke down in tears, and Mansour prescribed Valium to calm her down.

"That’s when we realized that she understood all along, and that her questions were a foil," Marano would say later. "She was hanging onto these little things so that she didn’t have to focus on the big picture. They were holding so much in. We realized that they were at their emotional end. They were losing their grip."

To make matters worse, Angie, who had been at Alvaro’s bedside every day since the fire, now was coming to the hospital less often.

The Llanoses adored their son’s girlfriend. Mrs. Llanos refused to believe her daughters when they began hinting that maybe Angie was pulling away from Alvaro.

"If she leaves him, it is God’s will," she said. "Right now she loves him a lot and I don’t think she will do anything like that. ... I hope that never happens because it will tear him apart."

In the weeks since the fire, Angie Gutierrez had become a favorite of the burn nurses.

They watched as she whispered in her boyfriend’s 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 rubbed lotion on his swollen brown feet, the only part of him she could touch.

They read her letters, which hung on the wall: "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, God will give me the strength to take care of you."

Angie was more devoted than many spouses, the nurses told her. Privately, they were taking bets about how long she would last.

The first signs of strain began to surface early in March.

"You know what?" Angie said one Sunday afternoon as she left Alvaro’s room. "I hate coming here. I hate it. When you come here every day you don’t see any change. I know he’s not going to wake up for at least another month and my body is exhausted."

A few days later, Angie arrived at the hospital, agitated, her eyes red and swollen. She had skipped two visits that week. She would not be coming quite as much now, she explained to the nurses almost apologetically.

Getting a ride to the hospital from Seton Hall was hard, Angie said. She had schoolwork to do. She hadn’t been to the gym in weeks. She was just so tired.

She loved Alvaro, but she was starting to despise the hospital.

The sounds. The smells. The hiss of Alvaro’s respirator. If only he could talk to her. Comfort her. If he would just wake up.

The day had begun badly for Angie.

All of her friends were out doing their thing and she was in her room, listening to music and thinking about everything that had happened. It was like she was living two different lives now. In school she was with her friends and they sat around talking and laughing. But Alvaro was in the hospital, fighting. She wanted to live her life, but she just felt so bad.

As if the day weren’t dark enough, Angie saw some of Alvaro’s wounds for the first time. The doctors had removed the bandages from his legs that morning so that his donor sites, where patches of healthy skin had been sliced off his thighs and calves for grafting, could heal better. Alvaro’s legs looked like a checkerboard of red, raw flesh.

Angie was stunned.

"Will it get better than this?" she asked with fear in her voice.

"It’ll get better," burn nurse Sharon Iossa said matter-of-factly, "but the scars will never disappear completely."

Angie felt like her head would explode. She hadn’t wanted to admit it, even to herself, but she had been worrying about Alvaro’s appearance.

Nominated as one of the best-looking boys in their Kennedy High School senior class and voted best-dressed, Alvaro had always been concerned about people’s impressions of him. He wore only brand-name clothes: Polo, Chaps, Tommy. And he loved to make an entrance.

"Baby, do you think I’m cute?" he would ask Angie. "Baby, you’re gorgeous," she would reply.

Angie enjoyed being seen with Alvaro. He was a real catch. In high school, countless girls were jealous after he chose her. Would it be the same now?

"It scares me a little — what he’s going to look like," she said. "He was always so self-conscious. I know how he is. His self-esteem is going to go down a lot. He won’t be the same person."

People were expecting too much from her, Angie said. "They think this is easier for me because my father went through it, but I think it makes it harder."

Her father, Angie recalled,

hadn’t coped well. His face and hands were badly burned in a car crash in 1995. He had hidden in his house for a year after he was released from the Saint Barnabas burn unit. He took down all the mirrors in his house. When he finally did go out, people stared. "Little kids would point," said Angie. "I saw it."

Angie hadn’t told her closest friends that her father had been burned. "I hate people who feel pity for me."

She worried now that she might not be able to stick it out with Alvaro. "I’m not proud of that, so I try not to think about it, but say he has a big operation and he wants me there for him and I have a big calculus test the next day?

"I’m 18," said Angie, starting to cry. "I’m supposed to be with my friends, chilling and going shopping, and I’m going to be here in the hospital with my sick boyfriend? My life hasn’t been easy. But when I got to college I was so happy. Everything was perfect. Then this happened and it all just fell apart.

"Am I going to be able to help him through this? I just don’t know."

Chris Ruhren, 41, understood Angie as well as any of the burn nurses.

Ruhren began her nursing career in the burn unit in 1983. Since that time, she had risen steadily through the ranks to become the director of burn and critical care services at Saint Barnabas — 125 critical care nurses come under her supervision today, including the burn staff.

Over the years, she had seen dozens of Angies. They all tugged at her heart.

"People forget about these poor young girlfriends and boyfriends and what they have to deal with," Ruhren said one day as she watched Angie at Alvaro’s bedside from a distance.

"I feel so sorry for kids in this predicament — and we’ve seen plenty of them come through here."

The mother of three boys, 8, 11 and 16, Ruhren, a wisecracker and a prankster, was one of the best burn nurses in the business. Though her job had grown beyond the burn unit, she still spent most of her time there.

When peals of laughter escaped from the burn unit break room, where the staff ate their meals together, usually it was because Ruhren was there.

She was as brazen as she was benevolent, as fresh as she was gentle.

When Seton Hall freshman Tom Pugliese, 18, who was burned in the fire, had to be told that his roommate and best friend, Frank Caltabilota, 18, hadn’t made it out of the dormitory, it was Ruhren who broke the news.

The other burn nurses said they had never seen her so tender.

Ruhren was their boss, their best friend, their adviser — and their partner in crime.

Her gags were legendary: When burn nurse Eileen Gehringer was chosen to travel to Malaysia to train her counterparts there, Ruhren told her she was required to wear a headdress on the trip and should practice at work. For a week Gehringer came to work with her head covered. Only when she announced that she was embarking on a shopping trip to buy a wardrobe of scarves did Ruhren finally let her in on the joke. Gehringer, always a good sport, laughed harder than anyone else.

As irreverent as she could be, though, Ruhren was solicitous of the needs of everyone involved in the treatment of burns — including a patient’s girlfriend.

"My heart breaks for Angie," Ruhren said.

"Chances are she and Alvaro wouldn’t have stayed together anyway. They’re only 18. But now she’ll feel too guilty to leave him.

"Kids shouldn’t have to be in this predicament."

After three weeks and massive amounts of antibiotics to combat Alvaro’s lung infection, the doctors started to feel not only that their patient was back in the game, he might actually be winning it. First the fever broke. Then Alvaro’s breathing improved, so they began cutting back the morphine that was keeping him sedated.

One day, during the third week of March, Mrs. Llanos was sure he was trying to communicate with her. "Babito," she whispered, "I know you can hear me. If you can, give me a sign."

Mrs. Llanos swore he blinked.

Privately, the staff chalked it up to the desperate fantasy of a mother. But veteran burn nurse Ann Marie Majestic, 44, began talking to the boy on the off chance that he really had responded.

Majestic was the model burn nurse. She was fiercely protective, even possessive, of Alvaro. One time she yanked the curtain closed around the boy’s bed when a stranger stopped to stare. "This isn’t a circus act," she said with plenty of attitude.

When she was a child growing up in Denville, Majestic had been burned, too. A boiler exploded and scalded her right leg. The scars were still visible. That childhood experience was the main reason she chose burns as a specialty.

Two days after Mrs. Llanos said she saw her son blink, Majestic thought she saw a sign, too.

She was talking to Alvaro as she washed his burns in the tank room. Majestic always talked to her patients.

"You’re in the hospital because there was a fire on campus," the nurse told the boy. "We’re taking care of you. It’s all right, honey. You’re on a machine that is helping you to breathe, and your eyes are stitched to protect them."

Alvaro’s breathing quickened.

"Angie got out of the dorm without injury," Majestic chattered on. "Shawn’s okay and you’re doing better.

"Do you understand what I’m saying, honey?"

Ever so slightly, the boy nodded.

Majestic was taken by surprise. Wow! There’s really someone in there, she thought to herself.

She had watched Alvaro struggle to live for weeks. His damaged lungs were the worst threat to his life, although a host of potentially menacing burn-related infections festered in his system, and his burns bled so badly he needed repeated blood transfusions, sometimes two a day.

When she went home each day, Majestic wondered whether Alvaro Llanos would be there when she came back.

Could he beat the odds and survive his terrible burns?

About the only thing he had going for him was his age. A 30-year-old with the same burns almost certainly would have died. Majestic was never sure that Alvaro would pull through, either.

Now he seemed about to wake up. How about that? She couldn’t wait for the day he could look at her, talk to her.

"You’re getting better, Al," Majestic said, misting up. "You’re getting better, honey."

Downstairs, Alvaro’s Seton Hall roommate was finishing his last session with physical therapist Roy Bond.

Shawn had been coming to Saint Barnabas as an outpatient for nearly a month. Now he could climb four flights of stairs or pedal a stationary exercise bicycle for 20 minutes straight without becoming fatigued.

He would have to return to Saint Barnabas every day for occupational therapy to relearn how to use his hands. The pins put in four of Shawn’s fingers to keep them from disintegrating had been removed. But his skin-grafted hands were stiff and fragile, and he had a long way to go before he could perform routine tasks. And even worse, now he had to wear gloves — they put pressure on the skin to keep scar tissue from rising.

When Shawn was first brought into Saint Barnabas after the fire, his mouth and nose were packed with soot — clues that he had inhaled toxic levels of smoke from the fire. Time would tell whether his lungs would ever return to a healthy pink.

Shawn still tired easily, and now it would be up to him to regain his strength. He could no longer rely on Bond, the physical therapist who had always pushed him to "try a little harder" or "do just one more."

Shawn had sometimes been contrary and complaining, but he had never said no to his physical therapist.

Bond was a bear of a man: barrel-chested, and with hands that looked as if they could uproot an oak tree. He started his career at Saint Barnabas 27 years ago in the hospital’s linen department, then studied at night to get his degree in physical therapy and quickly became one of the most respected physical therapists in the profession.

Bond could get patients to do anything with his smooth, persuasive voice and colossal grin. He had a reputation for cracking the toughest burn cases. Even the most depressed patients worked for Bond. He became attached to his patients, and they to him.

Shawn was no exception.

The two hugged before Shawn turned to leave the physical therapy gym on his last day there.

"Turn out the lights, the party’s over," the therapist said with a hint of sadness. "What’s that song they used to sing? ‘It’s so hard to say goodbye’?"

Shawn was melancholy as he left Bond behind and headed upstairs to the burn unit to look in on Alvaro. He felt so conflicted. Here he was celebrating another milestone in his recovery. It was Friday and he had weekend plans with his girlfriend, Tiha Holmes. He should be happy. But all he could think about was Alvaro. When would his roommate start getting better?

Burn therapist Melissa Kapner greeted Shawn when he got to Alvaro’s room. She was grinning excitedly.

"Hurry and come inside! Come in and talk because he can hear you!"

Shawn couldn’t pull on the required gown and gloves fast enough.

"Al! Wussup? It’s Shawn," he said as he hurried toward his friend’s bed. Alvaro blinked slowly and unmistakably.

"It’s okay," Shawn continued breathlessly, not sure what to say next. "I’m okay. ... I’m going to get Mets tickets so we can see a game. ... Al ... you’re going to be okay. ... You’ve been through a lot. ... But I’m going to be right here for you. I’m going to be right here." Alvaro blinked harder. Shawn cried.

"He hears me," he said, wiping away the tears with the back of his gloved hand. "That’s why he’s trying to blink — to let me know he hears me."

Alvaro felt so confused. He couldn’t really see Shawn, and blinking took all the concentration and strength he could muster. He knew he was burned in his dormitory, and he knew he was in the hospital. He was relieved to hear his roommate’s voice.

Two months had passed since that frigid Wednesday in January, when he and Shawn were awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of the fire alarm, and crawled out of their room into the dark, smoky third-floor hallway in Boland Hall. Alvaro thought it was the next day.

Over that weekend, Alvaro continued to show small signs that he was coming back. They were signs that might have seemed inconsequential to anyone outside the burn unit, but inside the unit the blink of an eye, the wiggle of a finger or toe were momentous.

"He’s waking up!" Mansour said excitedly when he looked in on Alvaro on Monday morning. "I can’t wait to meet him."

It was the first day of spring, and Bond was excited, too. He could hardly wait to get started with Alvaro. The way this boy already had beaten such extraordinary odds told Bond that he was a real fighter.

But there was something else — something inscrutable — that told him this was an extraordinary young man.

"Al! How you doing?" Bond said as he walked into Room 4 to the sight of Alvaro, flat on his back, eyes sewn shut, gauze wrapping all but his feet and a patch of his face.

Without a second’s hesitation, Alvaro lifted both arms high off the bed. It was as if he knew this was the man who was going to lead him back to his life and he wanted Bond to know he was ready to get started.

Bond flashed that colossal smile. He was astonished, and not a little awed.

"Welcome back, buddy."

---

Part Five: Survival

Alvaro Llanos' first words came fast and frantically. "Hello, hello, hello." Maybe he thought he'd never get the chance to talk again. Maybe it was his desperate need to let someone know he could hear them — and that he understood.

"Okay Alvaro, come on now, can you say something to us?" Saint Barnabas burn surgeon Michael Marano had asked seconds earlier.

Marano had removed the breathing tube from Alvaro's trachea for a few seconds, allowing him to speak for the first time since he had arrived at Saint Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston.

It was Wednesday morning, the 5th of April. Seventy-seven days after the Seton Hall University dormitory fire that left three students dead and 58 injured. Among the critically injured were Alvaro and his roommate, Shawn Simons, both 18.

The doctors had been slowly reducing the heavy dosages of narcotics that had kept Alvaro unconscious since the fire, and for the past 10 days there were small signs he was beginning to awaken. On command, he could blink, wiggle a finger, even raise an arm slightly.

When he first heard his girlfriend, Angie Gutierrez, in the room, he lifted both arms and both legs off the bed. Tears flowed from the corners of his sutured eyes.

"It's been so long since I've been able to talk to you, and I have so many stories to tell you," Angie told him.

At the same time they were reducing Alvaro's medication, Hani Mansour, the director of the burn unit, along with Marano, and their colleague Sylvia Petrone, decided to wean him from the respirator. He was almost ready to breathe on his own.

"Hello, hello, hello." His first words, though fleeting, meant so much. The doctors knew the boy had fight. He had survived merciless odds, but his eagerness to communicate also told them he yearned to return to life.

"This is a milestone, but now we are hitting the emotional part. It's like he's in a cage and the cage is his own body. He's scared and intimidated," Mansour said.

"It's a very, very dangerous period of time for him over the next week," Petrone said. "We've had patients die after coming all this way, more than I'd like to think about."

From what the burn staff had learned about Alvaro from his family during the 11 weeks he was asleep, few on the burn staff questioned his will to live.

"This is not a child who gives up," said Susan Fischer, the burn unit social worker, just before Alvaro began to awaken at the end of March. "He's still here, so he has great inner strength. And he has not a clue of what is ahead of him — and that is in his favor.

"When he wakes up he will be weak, compliant, anxious to do what people tell him to do," Fischer predicted.

Indeed, once Alvaro started speaking over the next few days, the burn team couldn't get him to stop. The day after he muttered his first hello, the doctors gave him a smaller breathing tube, allowing air to flow through his vocal cords and letting him speak at will. Within a week it was removed altogether.

Alvaro's voice was fragile and his speech was stilted, almost robotic. His throat was swollen and irritated from having a tube in it for almost three months.

Still, Alvaro spoke to everyone who walked into his room.

"It feels good to talk," he said to Roy Bond, his physical therapist, on the first Thursday in April.

And talk he did.

"Please wipe my eyes," he asked one of the nurses.

"The TV, please," he implored another.

"Cream for my lips," he beseeched nurse Andy Horvath.

Shawn arrived at Alvaro's room for his regular noon visit after his therapy, not knowing his roommate was talking. "Al, how you doin'?" he asked, as he did every day.

"Chillin'," Alvaro replied. Shawn was stunned.

The burn staff was eager for Alvaro's parents to arrive. Daisy and Alvaro Llanos knew their son was waking up — they had seen him raise his arms and blink in response to their entreaties. But they thought it would be days before he could actually speak to them.

Visiting hours began at 12:30 p.m. At 12:35 the Llanoses walked through the double doors to the burn unit.

Shawn and burn therapist Melissa Kapner could hardly wait for Alvaro's parents to get to their son's room.

Alvaro, still wrapped like a mummy with only his face and toes exposed, was out of his bed for the first time, seated in a chair. He could see only shadows through the slits in his stitched eyelids.

Kapner leaned over and whispered something to the frail boy. He nodded slightly. Unsuspecting, Mr. and Mrs. Llanos entered the room.

"Hi, Mommy. Hi, Poppy."

Mr. Llanos dropped the cane he had used since his 1997 stroke and fell to his knees. "My son!" he cried. "Oh! My son."

Mrs. Llanos looked dazed. Then she smiled for the first time in weeks. "He is better," she said softly. "He is really better." Later she said that at that moment she felt the deepest happiness she had ever known.

Shawn, his arms crossed, leaning casually against the doorway, watched the scene unfold, then breathed a huge sigh of relief. "This is a big breakthrough for Al," he said.

"He's on the way back."

The burn surgeons always said that once their patients woke up, they made progress swiftly.

By Friday, Alvaro was begging for water. All burn patients do when they first awaken. It was April 7, and not a drop of water had passed Alvaro's parched, burned lips since mid-January. "Water!" he cried, like a man wandering in the desert. "I want water."

He wasn't allowed to have it. A cardinal rule in the burn intensive care unit was that patients were allowed only sustenance packed with calories. Up to 5,000 calories a day was crucial for recovery. Water filled them up so that they didn't want the milkshake or ice cream that would hasten their healing.

And because water was forbidden, burn patients wanted it even more.

"I've seen patients pull their IV down to get water," nurse Laura Thompson said. "I've seen them under the sink trying to lick it off the pipes. I've seen them trying to drink water from the hoses in the tank room."

Instead, Thompson fed Alvaro melting strawberry ice cream — though he let her know he wasn't a big fan of ice cream.

He also asked questions about his medical condition, and told what he remembered about the fire.

"Is my face burned?" Alvaro asked his mother that day.

Mrs. Llanos hedged, afraid to tell Alvaro the truth so soon. "Only your eyelids were burned," she said, "and they will get better."

"What other parts of my body got burned?" the boy asked.

Mrs. Llanos took a deep breath. She rubbed her son's bandaged arm.

"Your arms, your back, your chest and your neck," she said.

"Okay," Alvaro said, then fell silent.

"Don't worry," Mrs. Llanos continued, fearful that her son would want to give up. "Just thank God you are here and alive. We can worry about the burns later on with plastic surgery."

"Do you know how long you have been asleep?" Mrs. Llanos asked Alvaro, changing the subject.

"Yes. Three months. One of the nurses told me."

"What do you remember about the fire?"

"Everything," Alvaro said. "I remember everything."

He remembered walking Angie to her room at 2 a.m. and then e-mailing her good night when he returned to his room. He remembered Shawn waking him at 4:30 a.m. because a fire alarm was ringing. And he remembered following Shawn out into the smoke-filled hallway.

He remembered losing his roommate instantly in the smoke. He was disoriented, and so frightened. I have to get out, he remembered saying to himself. I'm not going to die here.

Alvaro's eyes burned and the heat was so searing he hesitated for a second, not sure whether to turn back. He decided to go ahead and crawl toward the stairs near the lounge. Just as he did, a flash of fire seemed to drop from the ceiling and engulf him.

His back was being incinerated. The clothes were burning off his body. A boy and a girl who were running down the stairs from the floor above beat Alvaro with their sweaters and jackets. The boy screamed at him to "Run! Run!"

Alvaro tumbled frantically down the two flights of stairs to the main floor. Students were everywhere and they were all staring at him in horror. He made it to the main lobby and dropped onto the couch. Everything hurt. He was so cold. He studied his hands, then his arms. Students surrounded him. "Don't worry," they were saying. "Everything will be fine."

Within moments, people Alvaro recognized as Seton Hall nursing students were helping him. One put an oxygen mask over his mouth. Another took off his gold chain. It felt like it had melted into his neck.

Time passed slowly as Alvaro lay there, thanking God that he wasn't hurt badly. At least it didn't seem too bad.

The last thing he remembered was being put on a stretcher and carried toward an ambulance outside. Everyone moved away as he passed by.

Within a week of regaining consciousness, Alvaro was breathing on his own, his feeding tube was removed, and he was learning to take his first steps. His burns were bleeding less, so he no longer required twice-daily blood transfusions. In all, he had 82 units of blood. That's more than 10 gallons. An average man's body holds 11/3 gallons of blood, so all the blood in Alvaro's body was replaced six times.

He remembered only one thing from his long, deep sleep: being taken to the tank room each day to have his burns scraped and scrubbed.

"I hated it when I heard them coming because I knew it meant I was going somewhere where they were going to hurt me.

"I used to think they were rubbing me with something hard, like Brillo pads. It really hurt, and I used to get really mad, but I couldn't say anything because I couldn't talk."

The burn staff was encouraged by Alvaro's spirit.

When Libby Davis, a burn technician, challenged him to remember her name, Alvaro didn't miss a beat. "Superwoman," he cracked.

Alvaro was an inspiration, physical therapist Bond told the Llanoses during a burn team meeting with his parents in the second week of April.

"He's made a lot of progress already," Bond said. "He took 10 steps this morning."

"His attitude is incredible," added Kapner, Alvaro's occupational therapist.

"This morning I came in right after Roy was working with him, so I told him I'd give him a little bit of a rest and come back. He said: ‘No, please stay. I want more therapy.' "

That was the boy the Llanoses knew: Strong. Motivated. He wasn't a quitter.

They were so proud of Alvaro. But would he ever be the boy he was before the fire?

"He will have disfigurement, but the worst burns are on his chest, abdomen and back," said burn surgeon Marano.

"Does he have brain damage?"

The team laughed.

"Have you heard him talk?" Bond asked the couple. The Llanoses enjoyed a rare chuckle.

"What about his ears?" Mr. Llanos asked.

Trying to reassure Alvaro's father, Marano answered:

"Most of his ears are there."

In the book "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone," there is a mirror as high as the ceiling. It is called The Mirror of Erised: "a magnificent mirror ... with an ornate gold frame, standing on two clawed feet."

An inscription carved around the top of the mirror reads, Erised stra ehru oyt ube cafru oyt on wohsi. Read backward, it says, "I show not your face but your heart's desire."

While Alvaro was still unconscious, Denise Pinney, a publicist at Saint Barnabas who spends much of her time in the burn unit, dreamed about the Mirror of Erised, or Desire.

"In my dream," Pinney said, "Al stood before the mirror and he was whole again."

If only Alvaro could have seen himself that way.

Instead, he saw himself for the first time in an ordinary hand-held mirror. The decision — that it was time for Alvaro to face himself — was made the morning of Tuesday, April 19.

Catherine Ruiz, the kind but no-nonsense head of occupational therapy, had learned that Daisy Llanos had told her son his face had been spared. Good intention. Bad mistake. The most important rule in the burn unit was never lie to the patient.

Ruiz was incensed that Alvaro had been awake for nearly two weeks and still hadn't seen his face. She summoned therapist Kapner into her tiny office and shut the door.

Ruiz, a 14-year veteran of her profession, knew how critical it was for burn patients to see their injuries. And the sooner, the better.

She also knew the most seasoned members of the burn team squirmed when it came time for the mirror to come out.

Kapner was relatively new to the team. This would be her first time and the anticipation made her feel sick.

Alvaro already knew the truth, Ruiz was sure. She also was convinced that, alone in his room, he was torturing himself with anxiety. Maybe the anticipation of seeing himself was what was making Alvaro nauseous lately.

"He needs to see his face," Ruiz told Kapner.

"This needs to happen now. Today."

Kapner headed up to the second-floor burn unit. Alvaro was in a chair when she got to his room. She sat on his bed and leaned in close.

"It's time for you to see yourself," she said gently.

"I don't know," he said, his eyes widening in fear. "I'm scared."

Kapner wished she could be anywhere but there. "You have to do this, Al. We're going to bring in a mirror so that you can see. We're all friends here. You can scream. You can cry. You can yell — do whatever you want. We'll be here for you."

Tears streamed down Alvaro's cheeks.

Just the night before he had lain awake fretting about how the kids at Seton Hall would stare at him. A couple of days earlier the stitches were removed from his eyes and he had seen his hands for the first time. He broke down and cried. They didn't look anything like his hands.

Susan Fischer, the burn unit social worker, was dispatched to fetch the mirror, locked in a drawer near the nurses' station.

Shawn, who was in therapy downstairs and had heard what was about to happen, arrived in Alvaro's room at the same moment the mirror did.

He and Kapner stood on either side of Alvaro. Ruiz watched from the doorway with Fischer.

Kapner placed the mirror on Alvaro's lap, but he couldn't look at it.

"Al, pick up the mirror," she prodded. "You have to pick it up and look at yourself."

Shawn rubbed Alvaro's left hand. With his right hand trembling violently, Alvaro reached for the mirror and slowly drew it up to his face. He studied his eyes, his cheeks, his chin, saying nothing.

"What's that?" he asked, pointing to darker skin below his mouth.

"Your chin has been grafted, but your cheeks were not," Kapner told him. "You still have beautiful eyes, and a beautiful mouth."

Alvaro stared at his image in the mirror. He was frightened by what he saw. Kapner groped for words. "Shawn is going through the same thing," she said, then urged, "Al ... Al ... Look at his face. Look at Shawn's face, Al."

Shawn removed the surgical mask he was required to wear in the ICU, revealing for the first time to his friend his own burned face.

"See, Al?" Shawn pleaded. "It's my face, too. I look like you. We're going to get through this together."

Alvaro studied Shawn, then glanced back in the mirror one last time. The face looking back didn't look like him. It was unfamiliar and scary.

"Okay," Alvaro said, resignation in his voice. He put the mirror down in his lap.

There is no way to hide a burned face, or burned hands.

Two days after Alvaro saw himself in the mirror, Shawn asked Ruiz if patients ever wore gloves after their burns had healed.

He thought he would.

Shawn's hands — burned so deeply that initially the doctors were afraid he would lose fingers — were grafted with skin from his shins a week after the fire. But three months into the healing process, they looked like melted wax.

Shawn was embarrassed by them. What was worse was no one could reassure him that his hands would ever look normal again.

Scarring from burns is unpredictable. With all their years of experience, Mansour and his staff can never say precisely how their patients will scar. Genetics plays a role. Very light-skinned people, blue-eyed blonds, generally scar less than patients with darker skin. Browner pigments scar more thickly. No one knows why.

The scarring process goes on for one to two years, so it is not uncommon for burn patients to look worse later on than they did when they left the burn unit.

Shawn studied his image in the bathroom mirror every morning. He looked at his forehead and questioned whether he had made the right decision by refusing Mansour's suggestion of another skin graft. He also wondered whether the rich brown color would ever return to his pink, mottled cheeks.

Shawn rarely wore the clear plastic mask prescribed for him, even though the doctors and therapists told him that it could significantly reduce his facial disfigurement by stretching the skin and compressing the scars.

The scarring process was aggressive and constant — 24 hours a day. Pressure garments acted in place of natural skin, replacing the pressure that normal skin provided. This decreased blood supply to the area, hastening scar maturation and flattening the scarring.

"The more hours you are out of the mask, the scar will grow thick and bumpy and can distort your features," Ruiz told Shawn. "Do you understand?" The mask was tight, hot and scary. It reminded Shawn of the Michael Myers character in the "Halloween" horror movies. He would deal with some disfigurement and skin discoloration, he decided, rather than wear it 12 hours a day.

What Shawn couldn't deal with were his hands.

He rarely removed his black, tightfitting Jobst gloves, also prescribed to compress his scarring. When he occasionally misplaced one, he became agitated and shoved his hands into his pockets. He knew the gloves were temporary. They stopped working once the scarring process was finished. What then?

"I know my mother and a lot of my women friends have always said they always look at a man's hands first, and I always kept my hands nice," Shawn said.

"Catherine (Ruiz) says she knows people who continue wearing the gloves after the healing process is done. I'm thinking about doing that, or maybe I'll have some nice custom leather gloves made. I guess I hope I don't always feel like I have to hide them."

At least his girlfriend, Tiha Holmes, was not bothered by his burns. Tiha, a junior at University High School in Newark, met Shawn in music class in 1997. The two became fast friends and started dating a year later. After Shawn was home, Tiha told friends that, honestly, she didn't see his burns and that their relationship was stronger than ever.

"You know what I love about Tiha?" Shawn would ask. "She doesn't care about my burns at all. She wants to work on my hands. She puts lotion on them. She asks lot of questions. ‘What hurts?' and ‘What will change?' Tiha's the person I feel most comfortable with besides my mother. I could never, ever see her leaving me because of my burns.

"I'm more concerned about strangers' reactions than hers."

With her son on the mend, Christine Simons had time to think about what had happened to him.

She was angry at Seton Hall for what she saw as the university's indifference to her son and his roommate.

Mrs. Simons scanned newspaper stories quoting Seton Hall's president, Monsignor Robert Sheeran, talking about the fire. He would invoke the names of the students who had died in the fire, but never Shawn or Alvaro. Asked later, Sheeran would say he didn't mention them to protect their privacy.

To make matters worse, when she went to Seton Hall to see about her son's belongings, Sheeran told her he kept the telephone numbers of the families of the deceased in his wallet. Earlier, a priest had run into Shawn in Alvaro's room at Saint Barnabas. The priest told Shawn he was sorry he hadn't inquired about him after he was released from the hospital. "We seem to have lost track of you," the priest told him.

Mrs. Simons was devoted to Shawn. It hurt her when someone hurt him. So she sent a letter to President Clinton.

"My son was critically injured in the dormitory fire at Seton Hall University on Jan. 19," Mrs. Simons wrote. "His hands have been grafted and he has had to learn to use them all over again. The scars on his face will be there for the rest of his life. ... I've had to take an unpaid leave from my job to take care of my son. He still needs physical therapy every day. I don't know if we'll be able to eat tomorrow, or pay the rent next month. ... The victims of the Seton Hall fire seem to have been forgotten. The staff at Seton Hall is pretending we don't exist. No one from State Government has asked if we need assistance. Our Governor doesn't even inquire about the health of the injured children. ... I am a citizen of the United States. I voted to help put you in office. Yet I don't even know if you are aware of what we're going through."

Her letter was never answered.

With all that his son had been through — the fire, the grueling recovery, his changed looks — Ken Simons wondered why Shawn wasn't angry.

Ruiz suspected Shawn was, but she saw him express it in indirect ways. Shawn had come a long way in the weeks since he had left Saint Barnabas, and was making significant gains in his daily 90-minute outpatient sessions with Ruiz. The third-degree burns caused a loss of sensation in Shawn's hands, but the exercises with Ruiz had begun to give him back some flexibility and strength.

By the end of April, Shawn could dress himself, except for buttons. He finally was able to bathe himself, wash his own hair and brush his own teeth. He could pull on his gloves and turn a doorknob with one hand. Chronic pain in his joints and from his scars sometimes caused Shawn to wince when Ruiz bent and stretched his hands.

The corners of Shawn's mouth were so tight from scarring he could open it only half as wide as before he was burned. Even laughing was hard.

Shawn wanted more than anything else to drive again, but that was still weeks away. Ruiz anticipated that Shawn eventually could regain 90 percent of the dexterity in his hands — but there was no guarantee, even with additional surgery or skin grafts, which he resisted.

"He'll kick and bite and scream, but he'll get better anyway," the therapist predicted.

"For an 18-year-old he has the capacity to handle so much. He has such inner strength. He has a level of faith that most people don't. A lot of this comes from his mother and he's extremely lucky to have her."

Shawn's obstinacy, Ruiz suspected, was a disguise for his anger. "Not the seething anger we see in some burn patients," she said. "But it's there — where he comes across as dawdling in therapy, joking all the time, being stubborn — that's how it's manifesting itself, I think. To me, it's healthy."

There was another way Shawn expressed his anger, though, that troubled Ruiz and others on his medical team. He frequently made cracks about the "settlement" he thought he would eventually get. Both the Simonses and Llanoses had hired personal injury lawyers and intended to file lawsuits.

When he was a millionaire, he would say, everything would be better. He would buy a big new house in Livingston, a Mercedes-Benz, and enough expensive designer clothes that he would never have to wear the same outfit twice. Ruiz hoped Shawn understood that even millions wouldn't make up for all that he and Alvaro had lost.

His resentment was predictable, though — and it was part of the process. "The way people deal with burns is the same as the grieving process," Ruiz said. "You're grieving the body image you had prior to the burn. Burn patients mourn their looks years later. Anger, denial, sadness, acceptance. That's what I expect burn patients to go through. Right now I see all four of them in Shawn. I see him angry, but I also see him planning ahead, and that is acceptance."

Alvaro Llanos had his eye on the future, too.

He knew his recovery would take at least a year, and probably much longer. He was burned at 18. He would be in his early 20s before he didn't have to deal with the consequences of that event every single day. Reconstructive surgeries to improve the appearance of his neck and his torso could go on for years.

Alvaro was anxious to get on with it.

His daily routine at Saint Barnabas was heavy. Physical therapy to restore his agility and build his strength and endurance. Occupational therapy to relearn the basics: walking, writing, feeding himself.

The goal was to get him well enough for the next stage of his convalescence: the inpatient program at Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation in West Orange, where the actor Christopher Reeve had recuperated after his spinal cord injury.

Every step Alvaro took was hailed as a victory. His first 25 steps earned him a standing ovation from the whole burn staff. Pushing a video into the VCR, raising a fork to his mouth, holding a cup of juice were all causes for joy. The most critical aspect of Alvaro's recovery was also the toughest: stretching his burned skin to counteract scarring. That job fell to the mighty Bond. For an hour at a time, the brawny physical therapist bent, pushed and pulled the boy's grafted arms and kneaded the thickening tissue from his chin to his neck. Sometimes, the scarred skin would rip and bleed from the stretching.

The process was torment for burn patients, but it had to be done faithfully. "It's a constant tug of war between you and the scar," the therapist told Alvaro. "You can't say, ‘Okay, I'll do this tomorrow' because the scar will win."

Bond knew that Alvaro and his family were concerned about his appearance. All burn patients and their families were. But the consequences of scarring were more than cosmetic.

Scarring could cause muscles and joints to contract permanently, leading to deformities. If Alvaro wasn't stretched regularly during the months-long scarring process, he would wind up unable to raise his arms more than 90 degrees or turn his head from side to side. He wouldn't be able to reach high enough to open a kitchen cabinet, drive his jazzy blue Mazda or hug his girlfriend tight.

So Bond stretched until Alvaro wept. "Give me more," Alvaro would say as tears streamed down his cheeks. "Go on. Keep stretching. I want to get out of here and go home."

For a boy whose future seemed so far off, Alvaro was making big plans. "I see myself finishing school, finding a nice job, buying a house — I want to buy a house for my parents, too," he said one day.

"I want to get married and have two kids, a boy and a girl. A house somewhere nice and quiet, not Paterson. A job where every day I love to go to work, not a job that I work at every day and hate it. Marriage, to a person like Angie. A person who is independent and works hard, just like me."

Alvaro turned 19 in the Saint Barnabas burn unit. It was not altogether a happy birthday.

The day — Wednesday, May 10 — started out well. Occupational therapists Kapner and Jennifer D'Aloia planned the celebration: a combination therapy session and birthday party. Shawn would be there.

Shawn and Alvaro had grown closer since the fire. Once compatible roommates, they had become faithful friends. Shawn was there for Alvaro for every momentous event. He gave Alvaro pep talks and filled him in on what lay ahead in his burn treatment. Alvaro was happier when Shawn was around, and Shawn was happy to be with him.

A piñata in the shape of a baseball hung from the ceiling in the center of the therapy room. While Shawn led a chorus of "Happy Birthday," Alvaro was handed a baseball bat and told to "have at it."

The party was good therapy. Alvaro, who loved to play baseball, got to swing a bat for the first time since the fire. It felt good. He decided he wanted this to be a day of firsts. "Let's see if I can write," he said.

With the same look of determination he had when he was playing ball for the Kennedy Knights, Alvaro picked up a pen and gripped it in his gloved right hand. The hand shook so violently he had to steady it with his left. Then he began to write, ever so slowly. The printing was shaky, but the message was clear. "Shawn," Alvaro wrote. "You are a good friend."

The roommates' relationship had been based on kidding each other. In college, everything was said in jest. Shawn kidded Alvaro about being a neat freak. Alvaro cracked about the clothes that were strewn all over Shawn's side of the room. Shawn teased Alvaro about being bookish. Alvaro called Shawn a ladies' man.

Shawn never expected such tenderness from his friend.

"Oh my goodness, Alvaro," he said, first laughing, then choking up. "I thought you were going to write something silly!"

The birthday celebration continued when Alvaro went back upstairs to the burn unit, where the nurses had planned a little party of their own. The cake was maple walnut and the gift of a music box was inscribed, "A friend is one who knows you as you are, understands where you've been, accepts who you've become."

Alvaro looked at the box for a long time. He was touched by the nurses' gesture.

Now he couldn't wait for the family party to start. While he was waiting, Jabrill Walker, the 8-year-old burn patient who had become friends with Alvaro, came to visit. Alvaro was like an older brother to him, coaching him on what was to come in his burn treatment. Jabrill idolized Alvaro, following him whenever he could.

Angie arrived first at 5 o'clock. Shawn, who had spent most of the afternoon visiting with the nurses, returned to Alvaro's room. While the three teens talked and laughed, Mrs. Llanos sat alone in a waiting room down the hall. She didn't want to be in the same room with Angie.

"She doesn't love my son," she said. "She didn't get him a birthday present. She didn't even say happy birthday. I used to love her. No more."

The tension between Angie and Alvaro's family had been escalating for weeks — since mid-March when Alvaro was still in a coma and Angie had spent spring break in Puerto Rico with her mother.

Tonight it would boil over.

The family birthday party began in earnest at 7:30. Alvaro's family arrived in bunches. Aunts, uncles, cousins, friends — 45 people crowded into the hospital room. Contemporary Latin music played. A giant buttercream sheet cake waited to be cut. Everyone took turns having their picture taken with the birthday boy.

Angie, crowded out and ignored, watched TV in a corner.

When the party spilled over into the larger waiting room, Angie followed, then stood by herself away from the crowd. She was thinking about last year when she planned Alvaro's party at his parents' house and even brought the cake.

Suddenly, Angie felt tears coming on. She was determined not to let Alvaro's family see her cry.

As the candles on the cake were about to be lighted, Angie made her way through the crowd to Alvaro, who was sitting in a wheelchair. She leaned close so no one but he could hear. "I love you. I really love you," she said.

Alvaro couldn't look at her. "I know you're leaving," he said. Angie told him she felt too uncomfortable to stay. "Your family doesn't want me here. You see, right?"

Alvaro wouldn't take sides.

"I want you here, but I know you have to leave." Angie kissed him on the cheek, then fled to the elevator. When the doors closed, she sobbed.

Moments later, after the candles had been blown out and the cake had been cut, Alvaro cried, too. He had wanted to spend his birthday with Angie more than anyone else. Now she was gone.

Alvaro wondered if she would ever come back.

---

Part Six: Healing

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.”

---

Part Seven: Return

Frail as an old man, his face scarred and his forehead bandaged, Alvaro Llanos Jr. held his head high as he walked on the campus of Seton Hall University on the first day of the fall semester earlier this month.

No one who knew what he had gone through since he was severely burned last winter in a devastating fire in the freshman dormitory expected to see him when classes resumed in September.

Yet there he was.

Eight months earlier, in the frigid predawn hours of Jan. 19, a fire had ripped through the third floor of Boland Hall, where Alvaro lived with his roommate, Shawn Simons. They were both 18 years old.

The fire, deliberately set in the third floor lounge, trapped some students in the dormitory and stalked others until three were dead and 58 injured. Four, including Alvaro and Shawn, were in critical condition.

Alvaro and Shawn had spent the months since the fire in and out of hospitals.

Shawn, who was less seriously burned and healed faster, had been at Alvaro’s side throughout his difficult convalescence. He was there the day Alvaro finally awoke from his long coma.

It was Shawn who held Alvaro’s hand when he looked at himself in the mirror for the first time, and it was Shawn who reassured him those times when it seemed as if he might break down.

When Alvaro was moved from Saint Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston to the Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation in West Orange in mid-May, Shawn was his first visitor and his last —he was there when Alvaro went home in late July.

Now, although Alvaro was not well enough to take classes on campus, he wanted to be with Shawn when he returned to resume college life.

It didn’t take long for the news to spread. E-mails flew across the South Orange campus from student who knew them and students who only knew of them:

They’re back! Both of them!

When Shawn left his home in Newark that morning, Christine Simons felt like her son was going off to kindergarden for the first time. How would Shawn feel once he was back on campus? Would he be able to adjust? Would he feel afraid? Awkward? Isolated?

By now, Shawn didn’t look much differently than he had before the fire. A navy blue Yankees cap hid the scars on his forehead and his cherished black curls had grown back. His burned hands stayed in the pockets of his baggy Polo jeans most of the day.

Shawn took five classes. None of the professors fussed over him and there were no double takes from students as he went from class to class. It felt like he had never left.

Seton Hall appeared to have recovered, too. Over the summer, Boland Hall had been rebuilt and a new class of freshmen had already moved in.

Alvaro, however, still had a long way to go. As he walked around campus with his parents, students who were friendly with him before the fire now passed without recognizing him.

"I’ve counted four so far," Alvaro said as he headed to the university bookstore to buy a Seton Hall decal for his car — though he wasn’t well enough to drive. "They were friends, people I knew pretty well. They didn’t know who I was."

Alvaro called out to two or three of them.

"Hey, it’s me. How ya doin?"

"Al? Is that you? I wasn’t sure," said one girl who ran to hug him was not strong enough to go to class full time and he wasn’t sure he was still Angie’s boyfriend.

Angie, who was living on campus, seemed to be avoiding Alvaro lately. She hadn’t returned his telephone calls in days.

Alvaro had thought about Angie the night before. About how much he loved her. About why she

wouldn’t call him back. He didn’t want to be a pest, but he needed answers. He would try to catch her later at her dormitory after he visited Carlos Rodriguez, his professor.

Rodriguez taught Spanish for Hispanics, one of two courses Alvaro would take at home in Paterson. Rodriguez wanted him to meet his classmates.

By the time Alvaro got to Room 237 in Fahy Hall, 29 students had assembled. Trailed by his parents, Alvaro self-consciously took the first seat by the door.

The day’s lesson was on the board: Getting to know each other.

Rodriguez already knew Alvaro. He had come to Saint Barnabas Medical Center after the fire to see what he could do for the families of the injured students, and immediately he struck up a friendship with Daisy and Alvaro Llanos Sr.

They spoke the same language, and Rodriguez told them how, three years earlier, his mother had been scalded by boiling water while he was visiting her in Puerto Rico. At the time, Rodriguez thought her burns weren’t that serious, but when she died a few days later from a stroke, he blamed himself. Helping the burned students and their families was a kind of requital.

When Shawn and Alvaro were in the burn center, Rodriguez visited regularly. He was a companion to their parents, and sometimes translated for the Llanoses. Before long he was accepted as part of the family.

When Alvaro showed up in class Rodriguez felt as if he were introducing a surrogate son. He had come to love the boy. Now, as Rodriguez introduced Alvaro to the class, he began to cry and stepped out of the classroom to compose himself.

His eyes red and swollen, Rodriguez returned a minute later and wrote on the board: Amor. Compasion. Valor. Sacrificio. Lealtad.

Love. Compassion. Bravery. Sacrifice. Loyalty.

"To me, they represent all of these qualities," Rodriguez said, turning to Alvaro and his parents. "It’s very easy to love them. For me, it was love at first sight."

The anxiety in the classroom had been palpable before Rodriguez spoke. Alvaro had been too timid to face the other students, and they had been afraid to look at him.

Now the tension broke.

One of the students stood. "I have a great amount of respect for you for overcoming what you have," he told Alvaro.

"No words can express the respect I feel for you," another added.

Alvaro lifted his head, faced the students and grinned widely.

"It feels very good to be here with you," he said.

When Rodriguez dismissed the class, the students filed past Alvaro as if he were an honored guest. Most offered smiles and words of encouragement. Some still avoided his gaze. When they did, Alvaro extended his hand.

"He’s awesome," one boy said as he walked away.

One student, Marina Cruz, stayed behind. She had been on the verge of tears all during class. Now she knelt beside Mrs. Llanos and sobbed.

Cruz, now a senior, was one of the nursing students who had gone to Boland Hall the morning of the fire. She had helped Alvaro as he lay moaning on the couch in the dormitory lobby. While Mrs. Llanos stroked her hair, Cruz, still sobbing, recalled how Alvaro’s skin had peeled off in sheets. His face was burned so badly she hadn’t realized that she knew him.

Hani Mansour, director of the Saint Barnabas Burn Center, was astonished that Alvaro had returned to Seton Hall with Shawn. The boy had such courage and such dignity.

Mansour, 53, was upbeat about Alvaro’s future. He would need physical and occupational therapy for months to come; there would be more surgeries, and he would never look the way he did before the fire. Even the slightest breeze would irritate his skin. He would be hypersensitive to heat and cold as the new nerve endings matured.

But Alvaro would be okay. He and Shawn could be a real inspiration for other burn patients.

Both boys attended the burn support group at Saint Barnabas, where they encouraged others rather than complain about their own injuries.

One of them was Kadeem McCullers, a 6-year-old boy from Long Branch who was burned while playing with matches near a drum of paint thinner. It blew up in his face.

At a support group meeting at the end of August, Kadeem’s mother Rozina worried aloud about whether people would stare at her child or ridicule him.

Shawn answered first. People did stare, he said. At the mall. In restaurants. Even in his own neighborhood. It was something Shawn had had to deal with, and her son would, too. Sometimes when Shawn caught people staring at him he’d ask whether they wanted to know what had happened. Most were just curious. It was natural. They weren’t judging him, he realized. When he did explain what had happened to him, everyone responded with words of encouragement.

Alvaro told the group that people gaped at him. He wasn’t able to hide his burns with gloves or a baseball cap the way Shawn could. Sure, it bothered him. Maybe they thought he was ugly.

"But I know I’m still me," Alvaro said. "I am still the same person I was before I got burned. And I am going to get better in time."

The tragedy had taught Alvaro an important lesson. "I think I’ve learned more because of it. I’ve seen so much that other people haven’t seen. I learned life is so precious and no matter how bad things seem — say you don’t have money or you don’t look the way you did once — you still have your life. That’s what’s important."

Eight-year-old Jabrill Walker, who had spent two months in the burn unit while Alvaro was there, often turned to Alvaro and Shawn for comfort. Jabrill had been burned as badly as Alvaro in a house fire.

Jabrill especially idolized Alvaro because they had spent so much time together in the burn unit. One evening in late summer he telephoned Alvaro at home. He was happy to be home with his mother and his brother, Jabrill said. But some of the kids in the neighborhood made fun of him because of the way he looked.

"Do people stare at you, Al?" Jabrill asked in his tiny voice.

"If they do, I don’t pay much attention."

"Well, sometimes when I go out with my mom, people stare at me," Jabrill said.

"I think they’re probably staring because you’re so cute," Alvaro told Jabrill. The little boy giggled.

People did stare at Alvaro. They stared in restaurants. In stores. At Shea Stadium, when he went to see the Mets play.

"The other day I was standing in line at the movies, and this girl about my sister Shirley’s age just stood there staring at me," he said a couple of days after he comforted Jabrill on the telephone.

"I decided she was staring at me because I’m so cute," Alvaro said with a chuckle.

Mansour knew there would be times when Alvaro hated his body, hated himself. But then Alvaro would realize he had survived something most people did not, and he would be grateful for being saved. Mansour wouldn’t be surprised if Alvaro changed his plan for a career in computers and instead became a burn therapist.

For Shawn, the fire would someday be a distant memory. Mansour was sure of it.

Shawn’s hands would always be scarred, although his face had healed better than Mansour and the other burn surgeons had imagined.

The fire hadn’t changed Shawn’s view of life. It hadn’t humbled Shawn the way it did so many other burn patients. Maybe that was good. The kid was feisty and tough. A real survivor. He would make something of himself someday.

As for himself, Mansour would not be the director of the Saint Barnabas Burn Center forever. He loved the place, there was no denying that. But he longed to return to Lebanon. His wife Claudette, who was from Connecticut, had agreed to live there someday. The couple had visited several times, and she liked the culture as well as the landscape. A burn center was needed in Beirut. Who better to start it?

Until then, Mansour would continue to promote what he considered to be one of the best burn centers anywhere.

It troubled him when other hospitals didn’t send their burn patients to him.

As New Jersey’s only certified burn center, Saint Barnabas was where all seriously burned patients belonged. They suffered so much anyway, but in places where there was no specialized burn team, they suffered unnecessarily.

Mansour still prayed for Dana Christmas, the only badly burned student who had not been brought to the burn center that first day. She spent months recovering at University Hospital in Newark and was now home in Paterson. Christmas, who was a resident adviser in Boland, had gotten several awards for her heroism the night of the fire.

Burn nurse Susan Manzo knew she was instrumental in helping the Llanoses and the Simonses through their long ordeal.

She also was fond of Tom Pugliese, the other badly burned Seton Hall student, whom she had cared for on that very first day.

Recently Manzo had received a card from Pugliese thanking her for taking such good care of him. She was happy he had recovered so well and was back at Seton Hall.

Nevertheless, Manzo had decided to leave the burn unit for a position in the cardiothoracic intensive care unit. It wasn’t an easy decision.

Manzo, 34, was the quintessential burn nurse. She was smart, unselfish and a little bit on the wild side. Mansour liked her compassion and her spunk. He wanted her to stay.

Manzo would never form the kind of bond with her cardiac patients that she had with her burn patients, Mansour told her.

When her own 9-year-old son, Anthony, went off to college in a few years, he would leave with a smoke detector packed in his bag. She could thank her Seton Hall patients for that. Manzo cared for them as much as if they were her sons or nephews.

But that was what made the job so difficult.

"I have no problems with having very sick patients," Manzo said. "But after a while it’s like, ‘Can I let this one go?’

"I’m tired of seeing babies die. It gets to you after a while."

Manzo needed a new challenge. She knew burn nursing inside and out, and she knew she was really good at it.

"Is this the smartest move?" she asked herself. "I don’t know. But I’ll be right down the hall. I’ll always be there for them in some capacity. That’s the best part of being a burn nurse. You’re always a burn nurse. If a big fire happens, they will call. My phone will still ring. And I will still go."

As she reflected on what she had learned in the burn unit, Manzo thought about the one lesson she would always carry with her.

"It taught me you don’t take any day for granted, because God knows what can happen."

While Manzo began to withdraw from the burn unit, Daisy and Alvaro Llanos Sr. were learning to let go of Alvaro.

He still needed their help, but every day their son was becoming stronger and more independent. Mr. Llanos rejoiced as he watched Alvaro and his cousins again play cards and dominoes.

For Mrs. Llanos, the baths and daily dressing changes that had been torture were now routine.

She was finally sleeping, and she was relaxed enough to eat a full meal. So many people seemed to care about her boy. Strangers sent their prayers; some even sent gifts and checks.

In early September Mrs. Llanos called her best friend, Millie Deleon, and the two of them went to a beauty salon for a haircut and a manicure. It was the first time Mrs. Llanos had allowed herself that luxury in the eight months since the fire.

Mrs. Llanos found herself smiling again. When Alvaro went to his cousin Marco’s house to watch the Roy Jones Jr. prizefight and didn’t get home until two-thirty in the morning, Mrs. Llanos was giddy with happiness.

Ken Simons, never a part of his son’s daily life before the fire, now saw Shawn more frequently.

For Christine Simons, life had pretty much returned to normal. She was back at work at her overnight job with Federal Express. Shawn could do most things on his own, though he still went to Saint Barnabas for therapy two days a week.

Not a day passed when Mrs. Simons didn’t think about the parents of the three students who lost their lives. She prayed for them every day.

She thought about how when Shawn was 13 or 14 she had lost touch with him for a while. He had been going through typical teenage stuff. She and Shawn had always been so close and suddenly he wanted only to be with his friends. She often felt lonely after that.

But the day before the fire Shawn had surprised her with a phone call from his room in Boland Hall. "What are you doing, Mom?" he had asked.

The two went shopping and then spent all day together. It was just like it used to be.

It was her hope that the parents of the students who died had a similar memory of their sons.

Through the months, Mrs. Simons had stayed close to the Llanoses, and it was she who encouraged them to loosen the reins on Alvaro.

"If our children sense our fear, it won’t help them," she said to Mr. Llanos one day.

"But I thought he was safe and secure (at Seton Hall)," Mr. Llanos replied.

"We all felt that way," Mrs. Simons said. "But this could have happened anywhere. None of us wants to let our children go, but you can’t protect him from everything."

Shawn had also done some letting go. He let go of his memories of the fire, and he let go of his anger at Seton Hall. Life was good again. He was back in college. His romance with Tiha Holmes was going strong: She was even getting jealous again. When Shawn went to a party without her one Saturday in early September, Tiha wanted to hear every detail.

"Did anybody try to kick it to you?" Tiha asked, using the neighborhood phrase for "pick you up."

"Why would they do that?" he replied.

"Because you look so good."

Alvaro wanted his relationship with Angie to survive the fire, too. Only after he went home from the hospital did he realize it probably would not.

Letting go of Angie would be one of the hardest things he’d ever have to do.

In late August, Alvaro told Angie he didn’t love her anymore. That wasn’t true, of course. He said it to spare her — and to spare himself — because he suspected she had already moved on.

Alvaro tried to see Angie over Labor Day weekend, but she was busy. She had to work. She had a wedding. She had to visit her father, her aunt, a friend.

He finally caught up with her that first day back at Seton Hall.

Angie was agitated when she saw Alvaro in the lobby of her dormitory. She had not known he was on campus until an hour earlier when he telephoned to say he was there.

"Hi, sweetie," Angie said stiffly, giving Alvaro an air kiss on the cheek. "I tried to call you yesterday. Really, I did."

The former lovebirds were ill at ease. They seemed to be dancing: Alvaro took one step forward. Angie took one step back.

Twenty feet away, Mrs. Llanos, standing next to her husband, felt as though her heart might break. She pretended to look anywhere except at her son and his girl.

Fifteen minutes later they were apart. Alvaro had to go home. Angie had to get away.

Taking refuge in the campus cafe, Angie slumped into an overstuffed couch. She wished it would swallow her. Everything was so different now, Angie tried to explain.

"Sometimes it’s not even him. It doesn’t even look like him anymore. It’s just hard to see him like that. I’m not embarrassed, but every time I see him I feel so bad. I’m afraid to talk to him about the relationship. Sometimes I feel like my life just stopped. I can’t meet people. I guess I just want to move on. But I feel so guilty."

Other students had been scrutinizing Angie. "Even when I go out with friends, people say, ‘How’s Al?’ They throw it in my face.

"In the beginning I was trying

to be there for him. When he woke up from his coma, he wasn’t communicating with me. Then he realized I was trying my best, but that wasn’t good enough. Then for him to say, ‘I don’t love you anymore’ — that hurt.

"I’m only 19," Angie continued, wringing her hands and staring into her lap. "I should be able to date other people. I don’t want people putting this on me that I can’t live because of Al. There’s no right or wrong in this. I know a lot of people will disagree with that. They’ll say I’m bad. I’m the type of person who, like, I hate it when people don’t like me. But you can’t judge someone unless you are in their position."

Angie wanted to leave Seton Hall and go to college in another state. "I feel trapped. The fire is going to haunt me forever. I have to deal with all of his friends watching me. If I was to go out with someone at Seton Hall no one would accept it. I want to be there for him, but I just can’t be there for him as a girlfriend. I want to be able to have the option to move on and I don’t feel like I have that option, and sometimes I resent that."

Nearby, another student strained to hear Angie.

"I used to bug him all the time, ‘When are we going to get engaged? C’mon, when, Al?’ I really thought I would marry him. If this accident didn’t happen we would have gotten married and had kids and that would have been my life. But right now, he’s not the one."

Angie started to cry.

"I sang to him when he was asleep for all those months, but he will never know about it. No one will know exactly what I went through. I guess my love left awhile back when people were trying to keep me there. I’ve been trying to live on memories. I tried to stay so focused, to love him, to be there, but it’s just not the same anymore.

"This is like a love story that doesn’t have a happy ending."

Two days later Angie drove to Alvaro’s house to tell him how she felt.

"We talked the way we used to talk and I know she still loves me," Alvaro said afterward, relieved that at least the conversation had finally taken place.

"We decided to be real close friends for now. I have to become a man and she has to become a woman. Then we’ll see what happens.

"I explained to her how I felt — that I love her and I will always be there for her. I’m not ready to be a boyfriend. I will do anything for her, but I can’t hold her or take her away somewhere."

It would still be a long time before Alvaro could put the fire behind him. His back and his head were still raw in spots and frequently bled. His scars sometimes split open as he was stretched in therapy. Pain had become a part of his everyday existence and he still required large daily doses of painkillers.

Mansour scheduled surgery for October to sever the cords of scarring under Alvaro’s arms and chin, which restricted his movement. He would be back in the burn unit for at least a week after that, and probably two. Cosmetic and laser surgeries were on the horizon, but that would be months, maybe years, away.

Alvaro felt good about the way the talk with Angie turned out. "Before she left, I told her that if she was dating someone else when I got better that I would be there to take her back."

The passionate girl with the thick copper hair would be a hard act to follow. Angie was Alvaro’s first love. She was smart and gregarious, always challenging him. Angie wrote her own poetry. She sang and danced and she was a whiz on the computer.

"And she’s beautiful," Alvaro said, looking away.

"To me, she’s beautiful."

At least he still had Shawn.

What began as an association based on a room assignment had grown into a deep friendship.

Two teenage boys, both from underprivileged neighborhoods, felt rich in each other’s presence.

In August, when Shawn threw a 19th birthday picnic for himself, he invited two people to help him blow out the candles on his cake: his mother and Alvaro.

When Angie broke up with Alvaro, Shawn was there at the Llanos home, waiting in the wings to catch him if he fell.

Sometimes still they talked about the fire. Shawn and Alvaro heard the rumors and read the newspaper stories saying investigators believed the dormitory fire had been set. They wondered why no arrests had been made. Yet they felt little bitterness.

"I don’t know who set the fire so there’s nobody to be angry at," Shawn said one day.

"I don’t know how I’ll react if there is a name. You can’t go around hating someone you don’t know. But whoever did this, I don’t think they were trying to hurt anybody. It’s like getting hit with a stray bullet. They weren’t aiming for me."

Alvaro used to think a lot about the fire and wonder how it happened, but he didn’t much anymore.

"I used to get mad because these kids did something so stupid," he said.

"I think they probably lit a fire and it got out of control. Something little got real big.

"I still get mad when I think about the three boys who died. It makes me feel sad to think of how much their families are hurting. But the kids who died are in heaven now, so at least they’re safe."

The former roommates talked often about moving back on campus one day. They decided they probably would, but only when they could live together.

From that first day at Seton Hall, when Alvaro picked Shawn out of all the other freshmen milling around campus and told his parents, "That’s my roommate, I just have this feeling," he knew theirs would not be an ordinary relationship.

"There’s something different about me and Shawn," he would say. "I don’t know what it is. We don’t even have to talk. I sense his strength and it makes me strong, too.

"The day he came dancing into my hospital room, wearing regular clothes, and I was in my bed, it made me a little jealous. But it made me stronger. Right then, I decided that I wanted to get better, too."

After the Boland Hall fire, Shawn and Alvaro found something precious and unexpected — a diamond in the ashes. They discovered a kind of friendship that was hard to explain. But they understood.

"I have a bond with Alvaro that I can’t have with anyone else, ever," Shawn said. "We survived a terrible ordeal together, and even though we still talk to each other the way we did before — you know, we still joke and make fun of each other — there’s something more.

"I love Alvaro. Definitely. I love him. Al’s going to be all right. I have no doubt in my mind.

"And I’ll be right there with him."

---

2001 Dart Award Judges

2001 Preliminary Judges

David Boardman is an Assistant Managing Editor of The Seattle Times, with oversight of investigative and computer-assisted reporting, the Sports and Business departments, news research and the newspaper's legal matters. He has directed two Pulitzer Prize-winning team projects: an investigation of abuses in the federal tribal-housing program (1997 Pulitzer for investigative reporting), and coverage of the Exxon Valdez oil spill and its aftermath (1990 Pulitzer for national reporting); three other stories he edited were Pulitzer finalists. Boardman has received other major national awards, including the Goldsmith Prize in Investigative Reporting from Harvard University, the Worth Bingham Prize in Investigative Reporting, the Investigative Reporters and Editors Award, and the Associated Press Managing Editors Public Service Award. He is a member of the Board of Directors of Investigative Reporters and Editors. Boardman graduated from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, and has a graduate degree from the University of Washington.

Jason Cubert is a second year Master's student at the University of Washington School of Communications. It is also his second year as a Research Assistant for the Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma. While his personal scholarship concerns itself with alternative media, identity, and cultural studies, Jason's work with the Dart Center has focused primarily on newspaper coverage of domestic violence fatalities in Washington State, following up that study by questioning journalists about their approaches to DV coverage. Cubert is currently interested in shedding light on the oft-ignored phenomenon of domestic violence in same sex relationships.

Mike Henderson has been a lecturer at the University of Washington School of Communications since 1994. He teaches journalism-skills courses and is director of the School's News Lab student news bureau. Prior to arriving at the UW, Henderson was an editor and columnist at The Seattle Times, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, The Everett Herald, Eugene Register-Guard and Anchorage Daily Times. He continues to publish newspaper articles and reviews. Among the publishers of his approximately 4,500 articles are Newsday, the Los Angeles Times and others. He also is co-author of several books, including "Why I Am an Abortion Doctor" (Prometheus, 1996). Henderson's awards include a 1991 humor-writing honor from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. He is anthologized in "The Best of the Rest," featuring columns by American newspaper writers.

Phuong Le is a reporter at the Seattle Post Intelligencer, covering neighborhoods and civic issues for the past two years. She has also worked for the San Jose Mercury News, reporting on education, and has covered crime and courts for the Chicago Tribune. Phuong Le grew up in California, and holds a BA in English at UCLA and an MA in Education at the University of Michigan.

Cindi Sinnema was victim advocate and Program Coordinator for Separation and Loss Services at Virginia Mason Medical Center (1992-1998). Her primary responsibility was contacting families following homicides in King County, and providing assistance with Crime Victim's Compensation, the criminal justice system, and media interaction. She also facilitated support groups for survivors, as well as education and support services to workplace, church, school, or community groups following a violent death. Prior to that job, Sinnema was Outreach Coordinator for Families and Friends of Violent Crime Victims (1990-1992), and held an Internship with the Seattle Police Department Victim Witness Unit. She is a 1990 University of Washington graduate.

 

2001 Final Judges

Betty Winston Baye is an editorial writer and nationally syndicated columnist for The Courier-Journal in Louisville, KY. Other positions she has held since 1984 include metro reporter, assistant city editor, and assistant neighborhoods editor. Previously, she covered urban affairs for the Daily Argus in Mount Vernon, NY. Baye holds a masters degree from Columbia University School of Journalism. She was a 1990-91 Nieman Fellow, and has taught at Hunter College and at the Poynter Institute. Among her honors are Best of Gannett (column-writing), NABJ Region VI Hall of Fame Award, and Black Achiever of the Chestnut Street YMCA. A former off-Broadway actress, Baye has hosted and produced a public affairs and African American cultural showcase, “The Betty Baye Show” since 1995. She is the author of the novel, The Africans (1983) and Blackbird (August Press, 2000), a collection of columns and original essays. Baye is past national vice president of the National Association of Black Journalists, a charter member of The William Monroe Trotter group (a collective of African American opinion writers), and is founder of the Black Alumni Network at Columbia University School of Journalism.

John Briere, Ph.D. is president-elect of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies. He is Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at the Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, Director of the Psychological Trauma Clinic at LAC-USC Medical Center, and a Fellow of the American Psychological Association. Briere is author of a number of books, articles, and chapters in the areas of child abuse, psychological trauma, and interpersonal violence. Recent books include Psychological Assessment of Adult Posttraumatic States (American Psychological Association), Therapy for Adults Molested as Children: Beyond Survival, Second Edition , and Child Abuse Trauma: Theory and Treatment of the Lasting Effects . He is co-editor of the APSAC Handbook on Child Maltreatment , and author of two standardized psychological tests, the Trauma Symptom Inventory and the Trauma Symptom Checklist for Children, as well as four new tests in progress with Psychological Assessment Resources. Briere is a recent recipient of the Laufer Memorial Award for Outstanding Scientific Achievement from the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, and the Outstanding Professional Award from the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children. He provides consultation on clinical, forensic, and scientific issues to various groups and governmental agencies.

David Handschuh is President of the National Press Photographers Association. He has been a staff photographer at the New York Daily News for 14 years. Before that he was on staff at The New York Post and freelanced for the Associated Press, The New York Times, and other daily and weekly publications. Handschuh has been nominated three times for a Pulitzer Prize, and has received numerous awards for photography from the Pictures of the Year Competition, The New York Press Photographer's Association, The New York Press Club, Society of Silurians, and many police, fire and EMS organizations. Handschuh was a 1999 Dart Fellow, and continues to work with that group to formulate a Critical Incident Response Team for Photojournalists exposed to work-related traumatic situations. He is an adjunct professor at New York University, and co-author of The National Media Guide for Disaster and Emergency Incidents. Handschuh lectures often to photography and civic groups and to public safety agencies on photojournalism, news and feature photography, and on ways to improve the relationship between the media and public safety providers.

Sonia Nazario is urban affairs writer for the Los Angeles Times. She previously worked for the Wall Street Journal as a staff reporter covering social issues and Latin America, as a summer intern for The Washington Post, and as a reporter for El Pais (Madrid, Spain). Nazario received a 1994 (team) Pulitzer Prize for local reporting of spot news, presented to the staff of The Times for coverage of the first day of the Los Angeles earthquake. She was a Pulitzer finalist in 1998 for “Orphans of Addiction,” a series for which she received a National Council on Crime and Delinquency PASS Award, a Greater Los Angeles Press Club-40th Annual Southern California Journalism award for feature reporting, first place for Investigative and Enterprise reporting from the California Newspaper Publishers Association, and a Times Mirror Chairman's Award, among others. In 1997-98, for “Suicidal Tendencies: When Kids See Death as an Answer,” she received a Life-Time Award and a commendation from the American Psychiatric Association. Others include a 1996 Los Angeles Times Editorial Award for “Driven to Extremes: Life in the Antelope Valley,” and a George Polk Award for Local Reporting in 1994 for “The Hunger Wars—Fighting for Food in Southern California.” Nazario has a master's degree in Latin American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley.

Susan Russell is Project Coordinator with Vermont Victim Services 2000, a national demonstration project to improve the range, quality, and accessibility of services to all crime victims in the state. A survivor of violent crime, Russell has been active in victim services since the mid-1990s. She was a Victim Advocate at Addison County Women in Crisis, served as Chair of the Sexual Violence Task Force of the VT Network Against Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault, and currently serves as a consultant to the Office for Victims of Crime (OVC). In 1998 she was appointed by Governor Howard Dean to serve as the victim representative on the Vermont Center for Crime Victim Services' Victim Compensation Board; she has also served on the Vermont Network Legislative Committee (1996-1999) and was appointed by the Commissioner of Corrections to the Addison County Reparative Probation Board (1998-1999). Russell has spoken at workshops and conferences in Vermont, Toronto, Hawaii, and at the U.S. Department of Justice. In 1995 she was awarded Outstanding Victim Advocacy and Awareness by the Vermont Center for Crime Victim Services and the VT Network. Russell holds an M.A. in Public Policy from Norwich University.