One Breath Away by Heather Gudenkauf Page A

smoke-filled hallway, feeling my way out with my feet. When I finally found the front door and stepped out onto the front stoop blinking blindly in the hot sunshine, my mother was on her knees, a group of neighbors bent over her. Next to me on the ground, P.J. was trying to get out of the blanket, and when he finally wriggled out, his brown hair was standing up like a porcupine and his glasses were lopsided on his nose.
    The sirens from the fire trucks and the ambulance drowned out his voice as he cried, “Mom?” and tripped down the front steps, but before he could get to her the firefighters were running toward us and we were scooped up and taken away from the house that was still leaking gray smoke.
    I can imagine P.J. in his classroom right now, his arms and head tucked into his sweatshirt like a turtle, thinking to himself, If I can’t see it, it isn’t there. “Stupid weenie,” I accidentally say out loud, and Noah elbows me in the side, hard.
    Our neighbor, Mrs. Florio, called my dad for us and explained what had happened. We rode in silence in the back of Mrs. Florio’s rusty station wagon to the hospital where my dad would meet us.
    “Do you think she’s going to be okay?” P.J. asked, his brown eyes scared and big, magnified through his glasses that were smudged with soot from the fire.
    “I don’t know,” I answered honestly. The burns on our mother’s hands looked so bad, her hair on one side was burned away, her face was bright red and one ear was blistered and oozing. Before the smoke soaked into my clothes and hair, making me smell like a campfire, I could smell her skin burning, sweet and sharp at the same time. I swallowed hard, trying not to throw up.
    “Do you think she’ll be able to come home tonight?” P.J. asked. “Do you think we’ll be able to go back home?”
    “I don’t know,” I said, and pinched my nose, trying to squeeze the awful smell away.
    “What will we do for clothes? Where will we sleep tonight? Oh, my gosh.” P.J. groaned. “My homework. Do you think my homework burned up? They make you pay for the books if you ruin them.”
    “P.J., shut up!” I said angrily. “I don’t know any more than you do.” I scooted to the far side of the car and leaned my head out the window, gulping in big breaths of fresh air.
    “You could get decapitated that way,” P.J. said snottily. “Not that you need your head.” He waited for me to ask why in the world I wouldn’t need my head, but I didn’t give him the satisfaction, and pushed my face farther out the window. “Because you don’t have a brain,” he finished proudly.
    “Ha, ha,” I answered.
    “Now, now, you two,” Mrs. Florio said with her thick Spanish accent. “You need to take care of each other. Not fight.” I loved the sound of Mrs. Florio’s voice. Sometimes I would lock myself in the bathroom and stand in front of the mirror and try to copy her deep voice, which came from far inside her throat like a cat’s purr. I imagined that I had her black, smooth, shiny hair instead of my own plain brown hair that just laid there. I’m not sure why we called her Mrs. She didn’t appear to have a husband but there were dangerous-looking boyfriends who roared up in front of her house and left early in the morning before the sun came up.
    “Augie,” my father said, coming up to me and wrapping his big arms around me. I buried my face in his chest and breathed in. He smelled like he always did, like the thick leather belt he wore around his waist and his mediciney shaving cream. “Are you okay?” he asked, stepping back and looking me up and down. “What happened?”
    “There was a fire and Mom got burned and the house smelled like smoke and Augie had to drag me out in my blanket, and the fire department came and an ambulance,” P.J. said all in one breath.
    I watched my dad’s face carefully. He tried so hard when it came to P.J., but he couldn’t always hide whatever it was he felt about