Rosie saw all of this. She saw the whole thing. She saw it the moment she peeled back the clothes. The only thing she couldn’t figure was the barely gunshot wound. If they were going to shoot her, why not in the head, the heart? If they were going to kill her, why not kill her?
Later, when the whole story came out, or as much of it as could be pieced together, it turned out it was Chad who’d gotten the gun, that having kicked off what quickly got out of control, he couldn’t get his fraternity brothers off Jane Doe. He screamed and pulled at the backs of their shirts and tried to push them off her and away, but they wouldn’t listen anymore, couldn’t listen anymore, and so he’d gone into the house and into the room of a brother he knew kept a handgun in his nightstand. He’d meant to fire it into the air or something to get everyone’s attention, but he missed. It was his first time with a gun. An inch to the left, and it would have been over instantly. He’d very nearly killed Jane Doe. He’d very nearly killed her anyway. He’d also very nearly saved her life. But not quite.
Mapping
Rosie had a map and a headache. For the latter, she had taken an aspirin she didn’t have the remotest hope would work. For the former, she had three different colors of highlighters and the opposite kind of hope—the impossibly high kind, the this-will-solve-everything kind, the kind where you fix the problem you can instead of the problem you can’t. It was sometime after three, maybe four. The kids would be up soon, she knew. She should go to bed, she also knew. But she had not been sleeping well. She had not been sleeping at all, and better to get up and do something—anything—than to lie there and think about why.
So she got up and spent midnights and after with her map. It was the whole of the United States, road and topographic. Fully unfolded, it took up the entire dining-room table, but she didn’t need it fully unfolded. For a while, the middle five pleats had stayed closed, but that left a bumpy mass in the center that sometimes made her color coding awkward. Eventually, she got a scissor and cut them away, carefully laying tape along only the back so that she could use her pens and markers wherever she needed without interference. She was on her second map, in fact, the first having become too messy with notes and arrows and big and bigger Xs.
Penn said, “Come to bed.” Penn said, “Eschew the crazy,” because he thought phrasing it quirkily might make her laugh and soften—while still planting—the suggestion that she was being insane. Penn said, “Madison is perfect. It’s liberal and beautiful. It’s broad-minded with smart, educated citizens and world-class medical facilities.” Penn said, “You can’t control everything. Anywhere you live, there will be some bad people. Anywhere you live, shit will occasionally happen.” But Rosie knew Penn said these things because Penn was a poet and a storyteller and a disciple of the cult of narrative theory, a grown man who still believed in fairy tales and happy endings. For her, diagnosis and treatment were much more clinical propositions. She assessed the infirmity as she always did: initial presentation, physical exam, symptom analysis. She took into account patient history and environmental factors. She developed a treatment plan.