My brother went completely still.
It's hard to describe. Eamon is not a fidgety person, but he's a person who's always slightly in motion, a hand adjusting a cuff, a foot tapping. Now every part of him stopped. He turned his head and looked at me, very slowly, and the red went out of his cheeks.
"Say it again."
"'Look at me, not at them.'"
"Where did you get that?"
"I don't know. I've always said it. Since I was little. I used to say it to my dolls. Mom used to—" I stopped. Because I remembered, suddenly, my mother at the kitchen sink, when I was eight or nine, me playing on the floor with my Polly Pockets, and me saying it to one of them, look at me, not at them, and my mother turning around from the sink with the water still running and looking at me with an expression I didn't understand and then going upstairs without turning off the tap. I had turned off the tap. I had stood on a chair to do it.
"Eamon," I said. "What?"
He reached into the back seat and pulled his briefcase over the console into his lap and opened it. Inside, among the legal pads, there was a thick redweld file with a rubber band around it, and he took it out, and I saw the label on the end of it in his neat block capitals. COMMONWEALTH V. HABERLE. 2003.
"You keep that in your briefcase?"
"Not usually," he said. "Today." He didn't explain. He took the rubber band off and opened the redweld and went through it the way he goes through files at work, fast, with his thumb, and pulled out a photocopy with a police department header, several pages stapled together, and turned to the third page and held it out to me without a word.
It was a witness statement. The typing was the kind they used to do in police stations, on forms, all capitals. It had been taken at 6:52 p.m. on Sunday, October 19, 2003, at the Erie Police Department, from a witness named LORNE T. LINDEMUTH, age 44, who had been driving north on Peach Street behind my father's car.
I read it in my brother's car with the rain coming down. I am going to put down the part I read three times.
WITNESS STATES HE PULLED OVER AND RAN TO THE VEHICLES. WITNESS STATES THE BUICK DRIVER (HABERLE) WAS ALREADY OUT OF HIS CAR AND HAD OPENED THE REAR DRIVER SIDE DOOR OF THE CHEVROLET. WITNESS STATES HABERLE WAS BLEEDING FROM THE HEAD AND SMELLED STRONGLY OF ALCOHOL. WITNESS STATES THERE WAS A SMALL FEMALE CHILD IN THE REAR SEAT IN A CAR SEAT WEARING A PINK COAT AND SCREAMING. WITNESS STATES THE CHILD WAS TRYING TO LOOK AT THE FRONT SEAT WHERE THE DRIVER (FENNESSY) WAS. WITNESS STATES HABERLE GOT INTO THE BACK SEAT WITH THE CHILD AND HELD HER FACE IN HIS HANDS AND TURNED IT TOWARD HIM