Chapter 10

The baby came at 11:42 that night. A girl. Seven pounds, one ounce. She had a full head of dark hair and a loud, furious cry. I named her June, after my grandmother. I held her against my chest and felt her heartbeat and thought: he never touched you. He never will.

Dani arrived the next morning. She had driven from Colchester in a borrowed car with a black eye fading to yellow and green. She stood in the doorway of my room in the maternity wing and didn’t come in.

“Is Poppy okay?” she asked.

“She’s with Verne.”

“Did he hurt her?”

“Not the way you mean.”

She covered her mouth. I watched her cry. I didn’t have anything left to give her.

“I didn’t know,” she said. “I swear.”

“You knew enough.”

She nodded. “I knew he was dangerous. I just thought he was dangerous to other people.”

“He was dangerous to Poppy.”

“I know.”

Verne brought Poppy to the hospital that afternoon. Poppy was wearing new boots, both of them, and a coat that fit. She climbed onto my bed and looked at June.

“She’s small,” she said.

“You were small too.”

“Was I?”

“Yes.”

She put her finger near June’s fist. June grabbed it. Poppy smiled. It was the first real smile I had seen on her.

Dani stood on the other side of the bed. Poppy looked at her. Then she looked away.

“Mama,” she said.

“Baby.”

“Uncle D said you gave me away.”

Dani’s face broke. “I didn’t give you away. I gave you to him to keep you safe.”

“You didn’t come.”

“I couldn’t.”

“You didn’t come.”

Dani knelt by the bed. “I’m here now.”

Poppy didn’t answer. She just held onto June’s fist.

The investigation took months. The SIM card gave them Bo’s number, and Bo gave them names, and the names gave them charges. Derek was charged with kidnapping, child endangerment, assault, and drug trafficking. His lawyer tried to use my diary against me. The one from the minnow bucket. Forty-one pages of bruises and missing money and dates. The lawyer said I was a disgruntled wife with a motive to lie. The judge didn’t buy it. Neither did the jury.

I testified in April. I wore a blue dress Verne bought me at a thrift store. I stood in the witness box and told them everything. The ice. The shove. The line about the baby drowning. The shanty. The phone. The SIM card against my cheek. The pay phone. The gaff hook. I didn’t cry. I wanted to, but I didn’t.

Derek sat at the defense table. He didn’t look at me. When the prosecutor asked if I was afraid of him, I said yes. When she asked if I wanted him punished, I said I wanted him stopped.

He got fourteen years. Bo got twelve. Kyle Bouchard was picked up two weeks later on unrelated charges and held without bail.

Verne closed the shop in June. She couldn’t afford the insurance after the truck went through the door. She moved into a small apartment in Grand Isle with Poppy. Dani got supervised visits, then unsupervised, then weekends. It wasn’t fixed. It wasn’t a happy ending. But Poppy learned to sleep through the night.

I lost the apartment above the shop. I lost the job. Some people in town still cross the street when they see me. They liked Derek. He plowed their roads and towed their trucks. I was the wife who put him in jail.

I don’t live there anymore. June and I share a two-bedroom in St. Albans with a woman who works nights at the hospital. I wait tables at a diner off the interstate. The money is not much, but it’s mine. I have a bank account. I have a phone. I have a lock on my door.

Poppy sends me drawings. She is good at houses. She draws them with big windows and smoke coming out of the chimney and a family inside. She never draws Derek. She draws Verne, and Dani, and sometimes me and June.

Last week, she sent one with all of us standing in front of a house. The sun is yellow and too big. The grass is green. There is a little girl in the middle with two boots on.

I taped it to my window. When June is old enough, I’ll tell her about the ice. I’ll tell her about the shanty and the phone and the woman she almost was. But not yet. For now, she is small and warm and loud. For now, I say my name out loud every morning, just to hear it.

Emmie Rae Toussaint. I’m not dead. I’m not drowned. I’m not his.

And I’ll testify.