Shayna, 12, takes pictures with her sister Heather, 23, who has her own apartment in Providence but comes to the Johnston house every day to help their mother take care of things. Despite the 11 years separating them in age, Heather and Shayna are close.

The Providence Journal / Kris Craig

JOHNSTON

The fire took a mother’s hand, but not her instincts. The debt a parent feels to a child doesn’t burn away.

“Want me to dry your glasses?” she asks her son, who has just come in from the rain.

This little, everyday sign of love takes Gina Gauvin’s full concentration. She pinches the eyeglasses between her short thumb and the knuckle that remains from the index finger on her right hand. Her left arm, which ends just after the elbow, presses the glasses against her body to trap them there. Then her right hand can slowly massage the lenses with her shirt.

She holds them up to check for smears, and then returns them to 10-year-old Joseph.

“Take off your coat,” she encourages him. “Stay a while.”

Gina Gauvin was one of the most severely injured survivors of the blaze, five years ago Wednesday, that leveled The Station nightclub in West Warwick, killing 100 people and injuring 200 in the deadliest fire ever on Rhode Island soil. The state rewrote its fire codes after the blaze, demanding new safety measures that are still being installed, and debated.

Three months after the fire, Gina’s daughter Shayna, then just 7, sat with her aunt, Renee Walton, at a State House hearing room for testimony before a legislative committee on the trauma the fire had done to her family. Walton told the legislators: “Shayna saw her mom for the first time on Easter Sunday, and her concern was, ‘Is mommy’s hair going to grow back?’ And she asked, ‘Will her hand grow back?’ I said, no, her hand won’t grow back. She said, ‘Well, can mommy still tickle me and can mommy hug me?’ Those were her concerns.”

Five years later, Shayna is a 12-year-old Hannah Montana fanatic who talks in a blur with friends on the phone and bangs around the family’s rented ranch house, gathering her equipment before karate class.

Gina’s older daughter, Heather, 23, stoically fixes mac-and-cheese for her younger siblings. Heather has her own apartment in Providence, and her own babies, too. She still comes every day to Gina’s home to help with the tasks of running a house. “I help with breakfast and lunch and dinner and the kids, regular everyday stuff,” she says.

Joseph is quiet. He still can’t talk about the fire that burned some 70-percent of his mother’s body when he was 5 years old. He tells his mother that when his friends ask him about The Station, he wants to cry.

Shayna and Joseph still don’t like their mother to go out alone, as she did Feb. 20, 2003, to a concert at an old wooden roadhouse with bad exits, no sprinklers and flammable soundproofing foam illegally glued to the walls. “They both get scared when I go out without them,” Gina says.

She was afraid to drive for more than a year after she got home from the hospital, 133 days after the fire. But now Gina makes local trips in the car, though in hot weather the steering wheel can burn the delicate skin on her hand.

She’s not self-conscious about her injuries, except the bald patch on the back of her head. Her draping ringlets of red hair used to be her trademark. “My friends and I used to be called the Hair Club,” she says. She left the hospital bald, but much of her red hair has grown back.

There have been some awkward moments in stores over the past five years, when register clerks can’t decide how to give her the change. “People can be more uncomfortable with me than I am with them,” she says. “Whenever I go out with the kids, I feel a little bad for them because I’m afraid they’re self-conscious about it.”

Heather used to notice the strangers who stole looks at her injured mom. “Of course people look,” she says. “That used to bother me, but then I kind of grew out of it. To us, nothing has ever changed. She looks a little different but she’s still the same.”

Shayna comes to her mom with a household crisis. “Do we have jelly?”

Sorry, there’s none left, she’s told.

“But Heather just made a peanut butter sandwich, and there’s no jelly?”

“See if you can scrape the rest of the Fluff out of the jar,” Gina suggests.

Gina is 47. The demands of being a single mom did not end when she got hurt. She is unable to work and surviving on Social Security. “I have a hard time making ends meet as a single parent. The hardest part is supporting the kids, making sure they have what they need.”

“She doesn’t want people to do stuff for her,” Shayna says.

“I’ve always been very independent,” says Gina. “I had my first apartment when I was 16. I want to do things for myself. I have always wanted to open a business. I have always wanted to have a farm.”

She’s comfortable talking about the fire, and hasn’t dreamed about it for a long time. But she remembers the hush that fell when the screams inside The Station fell silent, and she still doesn’t like quiet. “When I got out of the hospital I always needed to have a light on because it felt like I was suffocating in the dark,” she says. “Really quiet nights, I have a problem with that. It’s comfortable for me to have the TV on, just like in the hospital when the TV was on all the time. I still sleep on the couch watching TV because of insomnia. I don’t turn off anything until I go to sleep.”

The skin over her knuckles is thin and breaks easily. Just pushing a button on a microwave can cut her. She carries Band-Aids wherever she goes. “A lot of the time I have to use my teeth to open things. I’m lucky that I have teeth.”

She is shocked to be pushing 50 years old. “I worry about cancer down the road from the lung scarring. I worry about being old. What will my injuries be like in another 30 years?”

Last December, Gina started her first painting since she left the hospital. She was a left-handed artist before the fire and has taught herself to paint with her right. The bright painting of a waterfall came partly from a photograph she remembered, and partly from her imagination. The work takes so much longer than before she got hurt. “Now I’m right-handed and I don’t have all my fingers. It hurts to hold a brush for a while. I can’t work for more than a half-hour at a time.”

Today, Gina Gauvin will return to The Station site for a memorial service for the victims. The annual gathering is like a sad family reunion, she says. She’ll help read aloud the names of the 100 people who died.

“I’m lucky, definitely lucky,” she says. “I’m with my kids. I’m disabled, but here. It could have been worse. I have a lot of injuries, but I don’t think I’m that terrible-looking.” She laughs and laughs.

marsenau@projo.com