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

stubborn — traits that were certain to test the staff but also hasten his own recovery. His face was scarred from second-degree burns, and both of his hands were covered with skin grafts, so he would need extensive physical therapy, but with luck, he would go home in three months, Mansour told Shawn’s mother.
    Shawn had other ideas. “Give me two weeks and a couple of days, and I’ll be out of here,” he promised Andy Horvath. “I always set ambitious goals for myself and I usually meet them.”
    “Why doesn’t that surprise me?” Horvath asked rhetorically, and they both laughed.
    Shawn took his first steps two days after his late-night request to see Alvaro. A nurse propped him up, keeping her hand under his arm, and led him around his room. He took eight steps, rested a minute, and then took another three. He was shaky and weak and it took all of his concentration to put one foot in front of the other. The next day he felt a little better, but he was discouraged by his overall lack of strength. The day after that, he managed to take fifteen steps on his own, using sheer will. “That’s it,” the nurse said, clapping her hands. “You’re getting better every day.”
    Shawn hadn’t mentioned it, but he was motivated by a single goal: to see his roommate. He also hadn’t told anyone that he couldn’t sleep at night, wondering why everyone was so vague when he asked about Al. He had started to remember the morning of the fire and how, in his panic, he had turned right out of their third-floor dorm room, toward the elevator he always took downstairs. There was a stairway to the left of their room. He hadn’t even thought about it as he fled for his life, and Alvaro had followed him. Had they turned left, they might have escaped the fire unharmed. How would he forgive himself if Alvaro was badly hurt? What if he had died and no one was telling him?
    One month after the fire, a nurse asked Shawn if he would like to try to walk to the tank room for his daily treatment. It would be a big step in his recovery, she said. The tank room was twenty-five feet away. This is my chance, Shawn said to himself. My chance to try to see Al.
    With the nurse next to him, Shawn took ten steps to the door of his room, then ten steps down the hallway of the burn ICU. He wasn’t sure if he could make it any farther. Those twenty steps had taken him several minutes. His legs were giving out and he was breathing hard. Shawn remembered hearing someone say that Alvaro was three doors down from his room, and he had put that information away for when he needed it. Now he needed to keep moving. He had to keep going. He counted each door he passed. The steps between the rooms seemed like miles.
    Finally he reached the third door. Room 4. Shawn turned and glanced through the glass wall. The nurse immediately guided him away. Shawn said nothing, but he had seen what he had wanted to see. He was sorry he had. The patient in the bed was wrapped head-to-toe in gauze and hooked up to a maze of tubes and machines. Shawn recognized the steady whir of the respirator. Then he saw a collage of photographs on the wall. Photographs of Alvaro. Now he knew why everyone had been so evasive: Al was in bad shape.
    I should have turned left, Shawn said to himself as the nurse steered him into the tank room. What was I thinking? Why didn’t I turn left?
    Shawn decided he would tell no one what he had seen, not Tiha, not even his mother. He would tell no one of the terrible remorse he felt. But every time he got the chance to pass room 4, he would take it so that he could check in on his friend.

Chapter 13
    T he day arrived faster than everyone had anticipated — everyone, that is, except Shawn. Christine had always told her son that he could do whatever he wanted to do, be whatever he wanted to be. When Shawn was thirteen, he decided that the street life, and selling drugs and stealing cars and all of the other things that went with it, was a dead end. At