The Fire That Wasn’t
The night everything changed and the truth that burned deeper than flames
Story by Grace Aukschun
Illustration by Grace Matson
To my mom and big sister, who taught me to be strong yet soft, kind yet fierce, and broken yet beautiful.
The first time I asked about my baby blanket, my mom told me it was lost in the fire. It wasn't till I was eleven that I realized there was no fire.
Still, our world had gone up in flames. We had no idea at the time, but one night took everything we once loved.
I was welcomed into the world into the loving arms of Trina and Shane Aukschun. I was the fourth member of our happy family. We began creating memories that would soon be too painful to remember.
My mom and Shane ran a prosperous landscaping business. “He was truly talented; he made it an art, but it was physically really grueling work,” exclaimed my mother.
I was three when Shane crushed his finger connecting the trailer hitch. He was prescribed Oxycodone for the pain. When the prescription ran out, the need for the high didn’t.
“I knew it was bad when I became an expert at searching for his pills. I realized just how bad it was when I walked in on him smoking meth,” my mom confessed.
To finance his drug problem, Shane began stealing money from clients. He would spend the money that clients paid him for projects on a high, then use the money from the next client to attempt to complete the project, forming a vicious cycle.
“Your mother tried her best to cover it, but we were all around,” my aunt recalled. “It was hard not to notice; there was no food, no power; it was clear things were crumbling.”
We refer to the night we left as the fire. I remember it as the night that ended everything. My aunt remembers it as the beginning of the end.
“I didn’t think I was in a domestically violent relationship; he had only laid his hands on me a matter of times,” said my mom.
My mother didn’t recognize the relationship as abusive, justifying his actions because his violence was sporadic. However, fear does not require frequency to take root. As my aunt saw it, there was no doubt the situation was dangerous.
“I remember her calling me scared after they had gotten in a fight and he threatened to kill her,” remarked my aunt. “I was scared as shit. I immediately drove to our parents and pleaded to our dad to go get you guys out of that house.”
That night, after Shane had left, my grandfather and aunt drove to our house on the hill, carried us to the car, and left. We never returned to that house.
“I kept fighting for months, trying to drag him to meetings. I never imagined that night would be the last,” my mother uttered. “Eventually, it had just been too long; I was tired of being the only one fighting.”
After the fire had subsided and the ashes had settled, it was time to rebuild. In the famous words of my grandfather, “It is what it is, life goes on, get over it,” and that we did.
To cope with being 24 years old with two young daughters, my mother became a master of compartmentalizing. She set goals and once she reached them, she’d set another.
“There was one night he promised to come to your sister's school's open house, but we got into a fight that night and he left,” my mom said. “I had you on my lap when the principal took the stage. I was mesmerized by her. She was so eloquent and well-spoken that she truly commanded the room. I looked down at you girls and said: ‘That's going to be me one day.’”
I am my mother's daughter and choose to cope with the loss in a similar way, suppressing and eventually losing the memories of Shane.
Any good memories I may have had were overshadowed when he put his hands around my mom’s throat. I stopped eating and doing things that I once enjoyed with him.
Every time I was reminded I had his eyes, hair or last name, I was filled with shame. I spent my childhood thinking of Shane as a monster who never loved us.
This was not the case. My grandmother recalled how I was always covered in dirt as a baby because even when he was working outside, he wouldn’t want to put me down. She said he carried me around like a trophy.
“You wanna paint the picture that they were always awful so it doesn't hurt as much to lose a person to the disease,” my mother explained.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve feared Oxycodone. I understand why it exists, yet for years, I only knew it as the drug that made Shane leave.
I have never and will never see Shane as my father; I can now say I no longer see him as a monster. I can now see clearly that he, and we, were victims of the real monster in this story — his addiction.
As for my mom, 15 years later, she's become the eloquent and well-spoken woman and principal we always knew she would be.