Physical, Mental Scars Linger After Fatal Fire

She wore tan gloves her first few days back at the restaurant, to shield herself from customers staring at the scars on hands so scorched by fire that it seemed she might never wait tables again.

But the gloves got in the way when she cleaned her tables, so she discarded them.

She won’t let go, however, of the long-sleeved sweater she wears over her company-issued pastel golf shirt. She wears it, her manager says, even when she comes back sweating to the kitchen and plants herself at an air vent to cool off.

This is Michelle Spence’s life 10 months after she was so badly burned by fire at the Station nightclub in West Warwick that she couldn’t grip a soda can or lift her arms over her head. She works four evening shifts a week, including one that lasts until 3 a.m. Sundays. It’s about the same schedule she had for five years before the fire that took 100 lives.

Desperate to support herself and her 11-year-old daughter, she recently returned to Bickford’s Restaurant. She had to stop feeling sorry for herself. She had to confront the stares and her own reluctance to open herself up to a new world that just feels different.

That first week, Spence took restaurant manager Jo-Ann Andrade to a back room and revealed what she’d been trying to hide. She peeled back her sweater sleeve. Andrade rubbed the ribboned, raised skin with all the tenderness of a mother caressing a newborn.

“She said, ‘Look, I have knuckles again. And fingernails,’ ” Andrade said.

Spence knows that people look at her. Some are furtive, others more open in their curiosity. She tries to pretend that it’s no big deal, tries to laugh it off. Many of her customers, after all, are early morning revelers who stop in for a bite after the bars close.

“They’re so drunk most of the time they don’t know what they’re eating,” she said.

But the stares make her feel awkward. They make what should be a light, airy introduction -- “I’m Michelle. Can I get you something to drink?” -- a tense encounter. It torments her because she knows that she’d look, too, if she weren’t the one with the scars.

Her first few days back, her co-workers didn’t know if talk of her injuries was off-limits.

“One was like, ‘Can I talk about it? Should I talk about it?’ ” Spence recalled. “And, I said, ‘If you got to say something, then say it.’ ”

There are lingering physical limitations. She has trouble with the weight of the thick drink glasses and has to make more trips than usual. But there’s no denying that the woman who customers say has a bit of an attitude and laces her conversations with sass has come a long way.

“I was so happy that she could actually come back to work and be a whole and not a half,” said her mother, Wanda St. Hilaire.

The scars are no longer fiery red and so tight that she can’t fully extend her arms. Yet they’re still prominent and visible, especially the ghostly white ones that curl around her wrists like thick, braided wristbands. The skin on her forearms is composed of rectangular patches with tiny dots in neat rows, like a flesh-colored field that’s just been planted.

Her reddish hair is growing back. She no longer wears bandanas to cover the bald spots created by the fiery goo that rained on her head when flammable ceiling foam caught fire. She doesn’t need the wig anymore -- no one can mistake her for a guy.

For months, Spence withdrew from the world. She couldn’t cook. She couldn’t drive her daughter, Hailey, to school. She was dependent, and she hated it.

St. Hilaire had also worked at Bickford’s, but she stopped to care for her 29-year-old daughter and granddaughter. The family lived off donations from family, friends, a relief fund and income from Spence’ssister, Tammy St. Hilaire.

By October, the donations were used up, the relief fund had paid its maximum three months of bills, and state-subsidized disability aid for Spence and her mother had ended. All that was left was Tammy St. Hilaire’s earnings from Bickford’s. And she was working herself to exhaustion seven days a week, some of them double shifts.

It wasn’t enough. The bills piled up. Rent was due. They owed an auto mechanic for work done three months before.

“I was at the point where I couldn’t go to the store and get a candy bar. I couldn’t spend that extra 50 cents because I needed it,” Wanda St. Hilaire said.

So she returned to Bickford’s, still unstable herself and worried about her daughter. On a typical day waiting tables, she’d make $50 in tips, and she and Tammy would pool the money and buy a meal.

Wanda’s income was helping, but it wasn’t enough. One evening, the three women sat at the kitchen table in Tammy’s apartment in Lincoln and talked. Tammy couldn’t work any more hours; it was making her sick.

Spence felt anger welling inside her. She had never hated anybody, but, oh, how she hated Great White, the rock band whose pyrotechnics sparked the fire. She hated the club’s owners for installing cheap foam on the walls and ceiling that accelerated the blaze.

“There was a lot of pressure, a lot of crying,” she said. “I’d get totally [angry] at the situation, why we were here, why we were not better off.”

Besides, Spence wasn’t ready to return to work. She had grown to cherish her time with Hailey. They watched movies. She saw Hailey off to school, proud that her daughter was enrolled in a parochial school and being set up for a better life. The two had grown closer perhaps than ever before.

But it was either lose time with Hailey or fall deeper into debt, maybe even lose the little apartment they rented. Spence knew that the choice was cruel; she also knew she really had no choice.

Within a month of returning to work, Spence felt like she’d gotten a slap in the face. A grand jury handed up involuntary manslaughter charges against club owners Jeffrey and Michael Derderian and Great White tour manager Dan Biechele. The indictment mentioned each of the dead, but not a single survivor.

Spence has mixed feelings. She’s grateful for the charges, but wishes that someone would be held criminally responsible for her scars, ones that cut far deeper than the marks on her arms, hands and torso.

“I am upset that they’re not indicting them [for] the rest of us who were hurt,” she said.

But she’s beginning to accept the way she looks. She’s thankful for the days when she makes good money and there aren’t many reminders about the fire, or of her close friend and manager, Mark Fontaine, who died that cold February night.

“Some days you’re happy, some days you’re not. That’s how it changes you,” Spence said. “You’re happy you’re here, but you’re not happy your friends aren’t.”