How I found out

I took my dad to the "Bodies" exhibit at the South Street Seaport when he visited this past weekend. Having scheduled activities like this are usually key with interacting with my father since we don't usually have much to say to each other outside of arguing. We paused at each glass-enclosed case, gazing upon the preserved organs.

"This is a lung infected with tuberculosis," I explained to him, pointing at a blackened lump.

"My father died of that," he said. "But he didn't have it. They thought he did, so they sent him to the hospital and he got it there."

"Didn't your mother die of tuberculosis also?" I asked him, fishing. (It is my conjecture that she was murdered in an honor killing since everyone tells me another story, and since they burned all of her belongings and images of her except one photograph which I stole from a great-uncle's album). My father was raised by his grandmother.

"No, she didn't die of a disease," he said, walking to another room where intestines were uncoiled.

I didn't let up. "How did she die then?" I asked.

"I don't know," he grunted, feigning interest in a bloated spleen.

"How come you don't know? Did she commit suicide?"

"No, she didn't kill herself."

"Did someone kill her?"

He gave me a surprised look. "Yes, I think so," he said without drama, his hands folded in the small of his back, sauntering to another glass case.

This was monumental! In a room with a dead man's entrails my father was finally coming clean, telling me the truth! I had to be careful not to blow this, not to push too hard or make it seem too important. Keep nonchalant, I told myself.

"This is a lung infected with cancer," I told him, pointing at another set. Then slyly, "Who killed her, do you think?"

"I don't know," he said, not making eye-contact.

"It was someone in the family, right?" I said, delicately. "It was your uncle, wasn't it?"

"I think so," he said, looking at me strangely again, wondering how I could have known. "Two uncles, her two brothers. One of them died last year."

"That's why you don't speak to them. That's why the other uncle who lives next door won't speak to him either, right?"

"How can he even look at me after what he did?" my dad muttered. "How can he have no shame?"

"But why? Why would you kill your own sister?"

"She had gotten divorced. Divorce was very bad in those days."

"Bad enough to kill your sister?" I asked.

"Well, I don't know..." he said.

"How did they kill her?"

"I don't know," he said. "I have heard different things. I heard they held her head in the garden fountain. I have also heard they used a knife."

I had always assumed they had strangled her, held a pillow over her face the easy way. I had always assumed it was the one uncle, not both.

"Where is she buried?" I asked, testing the limit of what I know is a room that will soon be shut again. We gaze over plasticized slices of abdomen, shiny like gem cross-sections. I could see the door closing before me, like a trap set off in one of Indiana Jones' temples, the kind you have to roll under at the last minute.

"I really don't know," he says. "Can you believe these bodies? Are they really real?"