80 June 2019 _ PopularMechanics.com
mold. You need a flashlight to see your way. The temperature is freez-
ing, same as outdoors. Ashes coat everything.
It’s been four months, but it could easily be a decade, so drasti-
cally have fire and water aged the Gibbs family’s home of eighteen
years. No one was here that day. Lysa was styling a magazine photo
shoot. Bill, her husband, was in his office at Channel 4 in Boston,
where he works as a building supervisor. Hannah, their eighteen-
year-old daughter, was practicing with the volleyball team at Central
Catholic High School, and their son Harry, twenty, was sitting in
class at the University of Maine.
In the living room, plaster surfaces are spotted with green and
black mold, as if the house has measles. Flakes of peeling paint the
size of a hand curl off the ceiling and litter the floor like dead leaves.
A couch is overturned, its base a makeshift table for a half-hearted
cataloging of unburned items: a baseball cap, a kitchen drawer.
Against the far wall, a jumble of furniture is overseen by two wall
clocks stopped at different times. The room feels vandalized.
Lysa’s boots crunch on grit and crumbs of plaster. Her coffee mug
from that morning was still on the counter. The laundry was still in
the washer. A stick of butter remained in its dish beside the sink, and
she has watched in fascination as it collapsed under a shroud of mold:
a slow-motion ruin. Mold is the one thing in this house that’s alive.
Of the three cities, North Andover has the smallest fire depart-
ment: just two stations, with two engines, a ladder truck, and two
ambulances. Thirteen men working at a time, covering about twenty-
five square miles, handling an average of a dozen alarms a day. At 4:13
p.m. on September 13, twenty-one calls came in within the first ten
minutes. Between 4:15 and midnight, the department, led by Dep-
uty Chief Graham Rowe, responded to 114.
A neighbor called in the alarm for 11 Herrick Road at 4:26 p.m.
National Fire Protection Association standards
call for the first apparatus to reach the scene of
an alarm within four to six minutes, 90 per-
cent of the time. September 13 was a day for the
other 10 percent. It took seventeen minutes, at
rush hour, to get the first engine to 11 Herrick
Road—a ladder truck from North Andover. A
ladder truck has no pump, but the crew refused
to stand by and watch the house burn. They
plunged into it and fought it until they’d emp-
tied their extinguishers. They had to retreat;
thirty-five minutes later, a mutual-aid pump
arrived from Boxford, nine miles away. Some
time later, another mutual-aid truck, from
North Reading, arrived. By then, the only con-
ceivable strategy to apply was the blunt force of
four separate hoses: Water gushed ankle deep
out of the front door and all the way down the
hill to Mass Ave. The firefighters finally put the
fire out by 9:15 p.m.
In this century-old, balloon-frame house, as in many others,
flames that began in the basement shot straight to the roof. (You can
see it from the outside, plywood boards affixed to the shingles like
bandages.) As the fire consumed the attic, family heirlooms in stor-
age came crashing down into Harry’s bedroom: teething rings and
baby toys; schoolwork and toddler clothes. The fire melted all of it into
a lump. Somewhere inside the lump, Lysa says, is her wedding dress.
Seven weeks afterward, on Halloween, the Gibbses came back
here and tried to give out candy, but no kids would come to the door.
(“They thought the house was haunted,” Lysa says.) Bill still comes
by—he likes to sit out on the concrete deck, where there’s a white
picnic table and benches, and planters Lysa still fills with pansies.
Harry, driving home from college in Maine, takes the wrong exit
sometimes, because he forgets he doesn’t live here anymore.
“I don’t even look at it as our house,” Hannah says softly. “I know
what it was like at its best. It’s like if you ever had a grandparent and
they got sick, and looked so different you don’t even recognize them.”
But when she gets out of the car this afternoon with her mother
and brother, Hannah is first up the front walk. She pulls open the
screen door; a stack of accumulated mail spills out. “I wanted to get
into college at this address,” she says.
One big envelope makes her face light up: It is from the small
Catholic school that’s one of her top choices, and it is as thick as she
was hoping it would be.January 22, 2019
The Figueroa Family’s Apartment,
Downtown Lawrence
3 P.M.
OMAYRA FIGUEROA SITS at her dining-room table in a cavernous
living room that seems to emphasize the fact that there’s nothing
to fill it. In the explosion, Omayra and her kids lost everything she
owned, the surroundings that made up her life in that house. Their
clothing, their beds, their furniture, her plants. She lost her only
photographs of Joshua, her drowned son.
This new apartment, in a brick building near the Merrimack River,
she calls “jail.” There are no plants—she doesn’t feel at home enough
to cultivate them. Besides, the rooms get almost no natural light.
The family had to move to a first-floor apartment, because of
Shakira’s wheelchair.
Shakira.
She rolls her chair out of her bedroom, down the long hallway to
the far end of the table. She recently had her seventh surgery after
developing an infection near her knee as a result of the sixth. The
last time she could stand up, she was turning her
face to the mirror in her bedroom, getting ready
to put on some makeup before going to see the
mariachi band and have some dinner.
She’d been working as a server at Bertucci’s
and planned to return to school in the spring.
“I can’t now, of course,” she says, with no self-
pity. She spends a lot of time in hospitals, and
she’s learning a lot. She asks questions of the
doctors and nurses all the time. She’s curious.
She might switch her major from criminology
to nursing, or even premed. Someday, she wants
to help people.
When Omayra says she prays to God that
her daughter will walk again, Shakira’s face is
unreadable.
That’s the hardest thing for Omayra, prom-
ising her kids that they’ll all be okay. There have
been long nights w ith Sha kira , who sometimes
can’t sleep because of the pain. Christian is haunted by his deci-
sion to switch places with Leonel in the car that afternoon. The one
who was supposed to be there was me, he tells Omayra. If I hadn’t
moved, Leonel would be alive. It was Christian who had swum out
to Joshua in the water that day in 2010, and had been unable to save
him; he had let go only for a second, and then his brother was gone.
Omayra’s low, hoarse voice breaks. What can a mother say to a child
who’s suffering terrible guilt simply for being alive? Tears fall onto
her cheeks. She doesn’t bother wiping them away.OMAYRA TALKS QUICKLY, as if trying to build up momentum that
will carry her safely to the end of her story. She says she understands
now that when planes explode, the passengers don’t feel anything.
Things happen so fast. A couple of nights earlier, she’d been in the
shower, and she’d thought, If this building blows up, we’re all goingTHE NARROW
STAIRWELL IS
SO HOT AND
SMOKY THAT TWO
FIREFIGHTERS
CLEARING
THE BUILDING
BECOME TAN-
GLED AND FALL
BACK DOWN THE
STAIRS.