The Girl in Red

“Don’t talk about me like I’m not in the room, Mama,” Red said. “Anyway, I can make the walk better than you can, probably. I’ve been training.”

“But perhaps we should take the car part of the way—don’t interrupt me, Delia—so that you don’t have to go as far on your leg. Yes, I know you’ve been training and walking around with that crazy backpack for weeks, but you just don’t know what kind of effect all that exertion will have on you.”

“It’s my leg,” Red said. “It’s attached to my body and I know better than you what I’m capable of.”

“Don’t be rude to your mother,” Dad said.

Red wasn’t trying to be rude, but this was the worst part of being an amputee. She could deal with the fatigue and the swelling and the stares and the unbelievably rude questions from strangers. What she couldn’t deal with was people who were not amputees acting like they knew what was best for her, and yes, that included her family.

Even though she’d lost part of her leg years and years ago, her mother would still sometimes look at the prosthetic leg with big welling eyes and wipe away a tear.

Red didn’t cry over her lost leg. What was the point? But Mama did, like crying might magically make her daughter whole.

The second worst thing was when people said dumb shit like, “You’re so brave.” Red didn’t think getting hit by an idiot who was looking at his cell phone instead of the road while he was driving made her more brave than anyone else.

Besides, what else was she supposed to do? Refuse her fake leg?

She’d chosen the leg because she thought (even at the age of eight) it gave her the most mobility, and the lowest possibility of sympathetic glances (when she wore pants the prosthesis was covered, and only her limp gave her away). Sympathy made her back teeth grind.

“I’m not trying to be rude to Mama. I am telling you that I am just as capable as you are,” Red said. “And after all these years you should know that.”

“I am not saying that you’re not capable, just that you might get tired. I don’t think you should dismiss my concerns just because they don’t fit your view of yourself,” Mama said, her eyes narrowed.

“Stop treating me like half a person,” Red said. “I am missing my leg below the knee. My brain is still functioning. I know what I can do and what I can’t.”

“I said, don’t talk to your mother that way,” Dad said, but it was like he wasn’t in the room because Red and Mama were in the Death Stare Zone and nothing and nobody came between them in that place.

“Delia, you persist in thinking you are normal—” Mama began.

“I am normal,” Red said.

“I don’t think reading that much science fiction makes you normal,” Adam said.

“Stay out of it, Adam,” Red said.

“Yes, Adam, stay out of it,” Mama said. “Delia knows everything already, so why should adults who care about her try to tell her anything?”

“I’m an adult, too.”

“Then act like one. What if your stump gets blisters from all that walking? What if you get an infection? I’m not talking about this terrible disease,” she said, gesturing toward the window and the nebulous millions. “I’m talking about a regular bacterial infection. The kind that can get in your body through an open wound and kill you. There won’t be any ambulances or emergency rooms out there.”

“You can get an infection, too, you know,” Red said. “You could trip over a rock and cut your hand open and get just as infected as your poor crippled daughter.”

Mama sucked in her breath between her teeth, because Red had used the C-word—the word that had been forbidden since the day she came home from the hospital.

“You are not a cripple,” Mama said.

“You say that, but you don’t act like it,” Red said.

She hated the way her mother could make her feel like a little child, the way only Mama could make tears clog up her throat and her hands form helpless little fists.

Red shouldn’t have stayed home and attended her parents’ college. She knew that—she’d been accepted at better universities than Adam (much better, actually, and she’d been very mature about not rubbing it in his face, no easy task when she’d been seventeen) because her grades had been outstanding—but she’d been worried about them being alone.

Her parents were older than most of her peers’ parents—Red’s mother hadn’t had Adam until she was thirty-eight—and while they were hardly feeble they were approaching the age when little things started going wrong and getting more difficult. Red’s father took pills for his blood pressure, and Mama seemed to tire more easily. It was just part of aging, nothing especially unique about it, but Red had worried about the two of them in that house so far out of town, especially when winter came and their quarter-mile driveway would need to be plowed before anyone could even run to the grocery store for milk.

It had been easy for Red to say she would take her degree at the place where they were both on the faculty, and let them think it was because she still needed them to take care of her when it was actually the other way around.