He is the one who lived, and that’s not an easy burden.

Wilder Vasquez, 16, was asleep in an Immokalee trailer in March when someone set fire to the structure, killing five people and injuring five more.

He was burned over his entire body. His mother, sister and brother died.

After months in the hospital, Wilder has returned to Immokalee to live with family, to return to school and to continue healing.

His body is getting stronger. He has learned to walk again, and to write with a hand that was badly burned.

He returned to Immokalee High School last week, a few days earlier than planned, because he couldn’t wait to go back.

But ask him what he hopes for, and Wilder will tell you that what he wants most in the world is the one thing he can’t have.

He wants his mother to be alive again.

“It hurts me, a lot,” Wilder said quietly, his dark eyes traveling upward briefly, then down to a pile of family photos resting on his lap.

Wilder spoke in a low but steady voice as he pieced together memories of the night he woke to find his home burning.

He remembered how smoke poured into the bedroom when he opened the door, and how his brother Rodrigo, 6, and sister Luciana, 15, were still asleep.

His hands, both covered in gloves to protect his healing skin, fidgeted a bit as he spoke, fingers worrying the edges of the fabric.

“When I opened the door everything was in flames,” he said. “I could see nothing, just smoke ... and flames.”

The sides of the trailer were burning, making noises as they fell apart.

Luciana woke, and Wilder remembers seeing her shaking their mother, Pascuala Mendez de Vasquez, 34, trying to wake her.

He ran through the flames, trying to get out, and his clothes caught fire, burning his flesh.

“I was just hurting, falling on the ground,” he said. “I couldn’t see.”

He remembers how it felt to be burned.

And he remembers hearing his mom scream.

Wilder was pulled out of the fire by Immokalee firefighters, and he was so badly burned that it took about two weeks for his family to identify him.

Officials classified the fire as arson, posting a sign on the burned-out trailer offering cash rewards for any information about what happened. It was the third attempt to set that trailer on fire.

Wilder didn’t know until after the fire that someone had tried to set the trailer on fire before.

He has no idea who wanted to burn down his home, or why they did it, he said.

Not many people ask him about what happened that night.

“I prefer not to talk about it,” he said. “It hurts more.”

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Wilder’s strongest memories of his mother are of how she cared for her family.

She worked every day, and on the weekends went shopping for groceries, did laundry and took her family to church.

As the oldest child, Wilder took care of his mother and helped her, he said.

Sometimes he cooked for the family, making eggs with peppers and onions.

He taught his younger siblings to play football — the American kind — and took care of them.

When Gloria Hernandez, a farmworker advocate and friend, handed Wilder large, blown up photos of his family members one by one, he swallowed, and looked at them quietly.

The photos were from a press conference that the fire victims’ lawyers held last week to announce that the insurance company for Cleve’s Trailer Park had awarded them $6 million in a settlement to resolve lawsuits filed after the fire.

Wilder didn’t have many photos of his family, so when Hernandez asked him if he wanted to keep the pictures, he said yes.

He sat looking at the smiling faces of his family members and touching the surface of the photos. He planned to put them in his bedroom, he said.

Hernandez has been visiting Wilder a couple of times a week to offer support.

She has helped his aunt care for his burned skin and planned to take him shopping for school supplies and clothes.

“He’s my angel. I love him,” she said. “Every time I see him I tell him, ‘You’re so strong, Papi. You’re getting so strong.’”

His new home is in Immokalee with Juana and Pascual Vasquez, his father’s sister and her husband, and their three children.

It didn’t take him long to fit into her family, Juana Vasquez said.

When Wilder was in the hospital in Cincinnati, she and other family members traveled to spend time with him.

She also learned to care for his burned skin, change his bandages and help him exercise. It’s a 11⁄2-hour to 3-hour process that they do together, twice a day.

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Wilder was so anxious to start school again that he went back last Thursday, a few days earlier than planned.

It was good to see his friends, he said. They all asked him how he was doing, how he was feeling.

But it was strange to ride the elevator, which he had to do because stairs are still a challenge, and to have to stay out of the sun.

Every day, he wears a protective fabric covering all of his body to shield his healing skin. It covers his damaged left ear, which was burned off and had to be reconstructed.

It was difficult to learn to write again, he said. But he did it. Learning to walk again was harder.

Wilder has three years left before he finishes high school, and he’s not sure yet what he will do after, he said. There will be money from the settlement to help him go to college, and buy a car and a house, someday. But until he is older, that money is in a trust controlled by a lawyer.

His favorite class so far this year is driver’s education, he said. Although he learned how to drive before the fire by practicing with a minivan in the fields, he will have to learn again. And he has to learn how to park, which looks hard, he said.

What kind of car would he want?

A convertible, maybe, he said, with a flash of a smile.

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Wilder was born at NCH North Naples Hospital on Immokalee Road and plans to live in Immokalee for the rest of his life, he said.

He wants to be near his family and friends.

Knowing that he has the insurance settlement from the fire for the future makes Wilder feel “just a little bit more support,” he said. “But not that much.”

More than anything, he wants to be strong again.

And he wants his family to be alive.