An Extraordinary Life

As it Began.

January 11th, 1982. Vermont, USA.

It had seemed like the entire small-town of Bennington, Vermont showed up to the Johnson family's wake service.  From the old couple who owned the town hardware store, the entire faculty and staff from the Bennington school district, to the Johnson family's pediatrician, you name it, they were there.

A tragedy like this hadn't struck the town in years. It took an additional two neighboring fire departments to extinguish the flames that demolished the two-story house and surrounding woodland.

The electrical fire had started inside the garage around two o'clock in the morning.

Due to a faulty fire detector, by the time Ann and Nick Johnson woke up from the smell of smoke, it was too late. Bright orange flames doused the stairwell that led to the upstairs portion of the house where their daughters Isabella and Victoria slept. Fire enveloped their home faster than their eyes could process.

Thick, black smoke poured down their throats with every breath the couple took. Going up the stairwell to reach their children was to them the most natural decision they could have ever made. They screamed their daughters' names before they even thought to scream at a 911 operator.

Victoria Johnson, fourteen, had woken up to the sound of her parents screams. For a split second, she assumed she was having another one of her nightmares, which she would always get like clockwork, a week or so before her monthly. When the unmistakable smell of smoke burned her nostrils, though, she knew it wasn't a dream.

Despite the burn of her scalding doorknob, Victoria opened her bedroom door, and began to scream back. By now, she could no longer hear her parents and a wall of fire had reached her doorway. What she could hear, was her little sister Isabella, screaming across the hallway.

Victoria screamed back, a shriek that resembled that of horror movies. She was trapped in her bedroom.

It was jump or burn. 

There is something about the smell of flowers that to those who have stood in a funeral home long enough would agree that blossoms and death become two in the same. Isabella Ann Johnson could not seem to focus on anything else. She had never hated the smell of flowers more in her life until that moment. Nothing about this was beautiful. Nothing about this deserved the décor of lilies or roses or carnations.

Three ornate urns were set up at the front of the blue carpeted room, with photo-boards filled with pictures of Victoria, Ann and Nick respectively.

Isabella had come from a very much middle-class family. Her father was a manager at the local brewery and her mother, a school nurse. She didn't know exactly where any of the money came from for her parents and sister to have gold-plated urns or what felt like millions of flowers or already-paid for headstones, which she didn't see the point of anyway as they were all cremated.

All she knew was that her mother's sister Gina and her husband Tom arranged the services, with the help whoever was on the other end of the same international call they made every day at 2pm eastern time.

It was all too much for her eleven-year-old brain.

Isabella didn't have a large family. Her late-father was an adopted only child and his parents were long gone. Her mother had one older sister who had two children of her own, 13-year-old Kate and 15-year-old Eric. Isabella and Victoria had grown up closely with their cousins, from playing outside in her cousins' treehouse in the rain to playing "Marco Polo" in their pool, she always felt she had two extra siblings. Now, they felt like strangers to her. Everyone did.

Isabella shifted sorely in her chair, her pain medication clearly waning. She used her uninjured hand to shake people's hands as they offered their condolences, and gently turned her neck into the never ending hugs.