Our beat-up Nissan sedan inched forward, with Mom keeping a healthy distance behind car No. 80. Our SUV was totaled in the accident.

The town alarms had sounded, and the evacuation was shifting into high gear. And so, apparently, was Hank Bradshaw’s Ford F-350. Mom was rushing to pick up Dad at the plant, not knowing that he wouldn’t be joining us after all. She certainly didn’t know that we’d sustain a direct hit to the passenger-side door and would all wind up in the hospital and then the so-called sick camp.

Her right leg got snapped like a wishbone, though now she not only was walking without a limp but had resumed her morning jogs. Charlie took some flying glass in his left arm and across his forehead but otherwise, miracle of miracles, was in tip-top shape. As for me, well …

Like I said, we were gone for eleven months. I remember ten of them. I was in pretty bad shape, or so they tell me. Mom tallied the surgeries for me: seven. Her tearstained face was what I saw when I finally came out of the coma-slash-delirium that the docs had me in. Being a mom isn’t the easiest job, and I admit I’m no walk in the park.

“How’s your head?” she asked now, eyes fixed on the road.

“Fine,” I replied, though it had been aching over the past few days. I reached up and touched the scar on the back of my scalp. I’d never been able to adjust the mirrors in the hospital or our trailer to get a full view, but my phone camera captured the spiderweb of pink scar tissue that contrasted brightly against my smoky skin.

My skull had been fractured in three places, though doctors said there had been zero lasting damage. I couldn’t say the same about my right arm, which had a zipper running lengthwise along its underside. It was full of pins and screws and always felt a little numb. My right knee had a neat circle drawn around the cap, and my chest wounds looked as if they were outlining pectoral muscles that I was just starting to develop. The four broken ribs on my right side hurt whenever I did anything athletic, which was going to be a problem when I tried out for football.

Mom breathed in and out through her mouth, in the shape of an “o,” then said, “What if our house was looted?”

“That’s what you’re worried about?” I laughed.

“It’s been sitting there for almost a year. You never know.”

She stretched an arm to the back-seat floor to grab a cigarette pack in her purse.

“No,” I said.

She’d quit smoking before I was born but started again after the evacuation. She went from smelling like lavender shampoo to stinking of stale smoke, but at least she smoked only outside. She knew better than to make Charlie and me suffer in the car.

“Sorry,” she said, dropping the pack back into her purse. “It’s just, they said at the camp that we shouldn’t get our hopes up that everything is going to be perfect. Why would they say that if there wasn’t going to be a lot of damage?”