GINA CAUGHT HER breath as she walked into the opulent Wang Theatre in Boston. Opened in 1925 and meticulously restored in the early 1990s, its 3,500-seat theater was a gilded visual treat. Adding to the glamour was staging for the current show, Neil Goldberg’s Cirque, the chimerical acrobatic circus.
I could never afford to come to a place like this, Gina thought. Yet here she was, and soon she would be on that dazzling stage with hundreds watching and listening. She’d journeyed from a dark place to the golden theater. It had been less than sixteen months since the fire.
Following the demoralizing failure of the indictments and the continued agony of her recovery, Gina spiraled into vengeful and violent fantasies involving those who’d caused so much suffering. One night around the dinner table with her family Gina talked about torturing the nightclub bouncer and the Derderian brothers with the methods seen in the Saw horror movies, where victims were dismembered alive. She’d never do anything so barbaric, of course, but the fact that she thought and discussed it was troubling. Who had she become?
Psychiatric care had failed her since the fire. In the hospital, where doctors battled to keep her alive, the focus was her physical recovery. Gina remembered being told that she would likely experience crippling survivor’s guilt for years, although it would probably diminish in time. The first therapist she saw wore a bowler hat and inappropriately giggled whenever Gina mentioned the fire. Gina saw nothing funny about the grim, personal details she shared, and when she walked out she vowed to never return. She guessed the therapist had no experience dealing with anyone who’d gone through this level of trauma. Another therapist wept when Gina spoke. If she has a breakdown just listening, how in the world is she going to actually help me?
Counseling from a local priest was sincere and beneficial, and despite everything, Gina maintained her faith and still believed in God. But in the months following her return home she had developed her own form of therapy: writing.
The fire had not destroyed her ability to use her hands, as doctors once feared. Her fingers worked differently, due to the regrown skin, but she could type. On a computer keyboard, rather than the old typewriter she used at work to fill in bureaucratic forms, she became fairly proficient again at typing. That embittered letter she had written, but never mailed, to the men who had destroyed her life was the beginning. Since then she’d found comfort by journaling, especially writing letters to Fred.
September 5:
Today is your birthday and I miss you terribly. I want to spend this day with you and give you whatever would make you happy. I spent some of the day with your mother and Crystal. We went to the cemetery to be with you. Your headstone is beautiful but it’s so hard to look at it because I cannot imagine your beautiful body in the ground even though I know your soul is in heaven. I want you here with me, Freddy. I need you so much all I do is cry for you and everything we lost. I hope our love is strong enough and you will wait for me to come to you and then we will spend all of eternity together. I love you and please wait for me no matter how long it takes.
After the disappointing news of the indictments, she made another journal entry. She wrote on December 11.
I have been so sick and depressed since that meeting I just lost it and I realized I have no strength or energy left to fight this and am leaving this up to God. It’s his call and he is the only one who can make things right.
In a way that doctors and therapists could not help, the letters to Fred allowed Gina to release her emotions and find solace. She was hardly alone in her pent-up feelings, and others impacted by the nightclub disaster struggled in their own ways. At the site of the fire one of the makeshift memorials was vandalized. Diane Mattera, mother of twenty-nine-year-old fire victim Tammy Mattera-Housa, removed items dedicated to the memory of Ty Longley, the Great White guitarist who perished. Mattera threw into nearby woods a wooden cross, teddy bear, guitar, and photos of Longley’s son, who was born after the musician’s death, and left a note behind that said that Longley had “killed” her daughter.
“Ty’s cross does not belong with my daughter’s. That’s it, pure and simple,” Mattera told the Associated Press. “He was a victim too. But it was his band. He knew they were going to set off the pyrotechnics that night.” Supporters of Longley, whom some believed died trying to save others, later replaced the trashed wooden crosses with one of welded steel secured in cement.
“They must have known, as I did, that Diane is also a very determined person,” Gina later said.
The holidays were especially depressing for Gina. At first she thought the Christmas outreach from Phil Barr and his family and the Station Family Fund was degrading, proof of her maternal failings. “It was humiliating, it was embarrassing, and I remember at first saying, no way, there’s gotta be someone worse than us. Like, I knew I had my parents. My kids were never gonna want for anything,” she said. “It was humiliating to think that, crap, I might need that kind of help.”
To relieve the burden on her parents, she accepted help from the Station Family Fund and got to know the Barrs. They eventually became friends. “They were good, good people who just wanted to give back even though their son could’ve—” Gina paused. “Life could’ve been very different for their own son.”
Despite the outpouring of support, the holidays drove home the loss of Fred. Once again her therapy was to share her thoughts with him. She wrote in her journal on December 29:
Christmas has come and gone without you and it was awful. I made it through the day because of my family but my heart breaks every time I think of you … I doesn’t seem possible that it is coming up on 1 year since this tragedy nothing seems real to me. I sometimes find myself wanting to call you and need to tell you something, but then I remember that you’re not there for me to call so I can only say a prayer to you and hope you hear me. I love you so much and cannot accept your death.
Bearing her soul, even if only through a keyboard, helped Gina grapple with her anguish. She also found comfort meeting fellow survivors, and in small groups they’d ventured back to live music shows, although now they checked for emergency exits. She shared details of the shows and updates on their friends with Freddy. Storytelling became her self-medication.
Gina held the Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital in high regard. Despite enormous odds, the hospital got her walking, using her hands, and even driving. When the hospital planned a fundraiser for expansion plans, Gina was asked to share her story of recovery with an audience at the Wang Theatre.
“I’ll try,” Gina said.
Three of Spaulding’s patients spoke, including Dan Winston, a young tuba player who suffered a brain injury in a car collision involving an intoxicated driver, but after rehab was able to return to his high school orchestra. Also featured was Joseph Exter, a hockey goaltender critically hurt in an on-ice collision who went on to play for the minor league affiliate of the Pittsburgh Penguins. Gina learned that the hospital provided rehabilitation for many professional sports teams, including the New England Patriots, and star linebacker Tedy Bruschi was one of the hosts of the Wang Theatre gala. As fate would have it, Bruschi himself would later turn to Spaulding for treatment seven months after this night when he experienced a mild stroke from a blood clot, just weeks after winning the Super Bowl. The hospital helped nurse him back to health to play in the NFL again.
Gina had never done public speaking like this before, but she did not script her remarks, deciding instead to carry a few notes—this was her story, she knew it by heart. She was allotted five minutes, and was nervous when she walked to the microphone on the golden stage. The words poured out. The fire. Fred. Pain. Survival. It felt like an out-of-body experience, but it worked. The audience rose in a standing ovation.
“It was freeing to tell the story,” Gina said. “It was better than sitting in a room with a therapist, because the reality was, that therapist couldn’t answer me, couldn’t tell me anything. So, if you just tell your story, you don’t need to hear advice back, because there really isn’t any when you’ve been through that kind of trauma. Unless that person sitting across from you has experienced it, they have no clue. No clue at all. All the books they’ve read and all the college degrees, it doesn’t matter.”
As she walked off the Wang Theatre stage she felt she got a look from the Patriots’ star Bruschi that said, How am I going to follow that?
“This is your therapy,” Gina said to herself, thinking back to the lesson she learned that day speaking to the crowd. “This is what you need to do. Tell your story.”
This emotional healing led to other breakthroughs. In spring 2006 a mutual friend introduced her to Steve Sherman, a divorced father of three. The friend thought they’d be a good match. “What did you tell him about me?” Gina asked.
Just that you’re a survivor of The Station fire and you have scars, the friend said.
Gina feared meeting someone new. Who would accept her with all her baggage? Gina was blunt when she met Steve, telling him that she had scars on her arms and her back, her head was burned so badly that she would never grow hair again, and she had to wear a wig for the rest of her life.
“So what,” Steve said. “I’m going bald too.”