The First Rule of Swimming: A Novel

by Courtney Angela Brkic

  “They’re upset,” she added in a voice that managed to fuse concern with irritation. “They can’t understand why she wouldn’t say goodbye.”

  Jadranka had made her bed, leaving a quilt neatly folded across the foot. A few garments still hung in the closet, but the small suitcase was missing from beneath her bed.

  They had searched the entire house for a note, unable to believe that Jadranka would leave without some form of explanation. Katarina had gone through the crumpled papers in the wastebasket in Jadranka’s room and found a few receipts, gum wrappers, a ticket stub for a film Jadranka had seen with the children, but nothing to indicate her current whereabouts.

  Three days, Magdalena thought with a sinking heart. Her sister could be anywhere by now.

  Jadranka had disappeared before, though never from her sister. She liked to slip her skin periodically, a habit Magdalena only grudgingly accepted. “I get restless,” Jadranka once explained. And Magdalena understood this to be true, her sister like an undomesticated cat that some well-meaning person longed to give a home. No matter how much milk you served it, no matter how soft its bed, it still chafed at confinement.

  Jadranka had once made it as far as Italy, earning money by sweeping up hair cuttings in an Ancona salon. After several weeks she returned so thin that her ribs made furrows above her breasts. “I wasn’t paid well enough to eat” was her only explanation.

  An object in continuous motion, she returned from Rijeka several pounds heavier, but after Dubrovnik her hair was dyed black, and she was thin again. “Your beautiful hair,” Magdalena said, picking up a length that was as dark as her own but with blue undertones.

  “We match,” Jadranka laughed, but by the next summer her dark red hair had grown out again, a shade so uncommon that people often stared and curious children grabbed for it in handfuls.

  Jadranka was not so much irresponsible as a force of nature, difficult to predict and difficult to contain. As a child she used to place her hand over candles and hold it there for as long as she could stand it. Once, her hair caught fire. But instead of frightening her, the singed pieces that landed on the tablecloth made her laugh. She liked their strange patterns and the way they turned to black dust when she tried to pick them up.

  “As long as you don’t disappear from me,” Magdalena had made her promise.

  Katarina did not know where Jadranka could have gone. She was unsure if she had made any friends since her arrival, as she preferred to spend most days off in her studio or visiting the city’s galleries.

  “I made a list of what she should see,” Katarina explained absentmindedly. Though the delivery of her words was innocuous enough, they made Magdalena’s eyes narrow. Professor Katarina, Magdalena thought. You always were a know-it-all.

  Magdalena felt the same flare of irritation whenever she read her cousin’s letters: the detailed descriptions of the other woman’s children and her house, her gallery and the holidays she took with her family to exotic locations, though never to Rosmarina. Magdalena’s responses were always terse and controlled, with a minimum of description and little that bordered on the personal.

  Magdalena had denied having an e-mail account, unwilling to face an in-box filled with her cousin’s messages, so that they continued to write to each other the old-fashioned way, Katarina’s parchment stationery now devoid of rainbows, while Magdalena always wrote back to her on the ragged pages she tore from a spiral notebook.

  I feel I hardly know you anymore, Katarina had written when they were in their early twenties, an observation that Magdalena did not bother to address.

  “She’s really pretty good,” Katarina conceded now, and Magdalena knew at once that she was referring to her sister’s painting. “A little rough around the edges maybe, but there’s a lot of promise there.”

  The words were clearly meant as a concession.

  “That’s nice to hear,” Magdalena said, even as she thought: Jadranka was better than you from the beginning.

  It was Magdalena who had driven Jadranka to the airport in January, the younger woman waiting on the riva when Magdalena arrived by ferry from Rosmarina. Clad in a coat and scarf, she had placed her suitcase beside her on the pavement, and expectation filled her face. Jadranka was happy, Magdalena realized as she drove their grandfather’s Fiat out of the hull. She looked happier than she had in months.

  “This way you don’t even need to see Mama,” Jadranka told her with a knowing look as they lifted the suitcase between them into the trunk, a job made more difficult by the wind.

  Magdalena ignored her sister’s comment but returned her quick embrace. “What’s the plan?” she asked, because Jadranka’s flight did not leave until the morning.

  Something jumped in her eyes, a light that Magdalena recognized from her wilder youth. “Who needs a plan when the possibilities are endless?”

  It was already late afternoon when they followed the coastal highway southward, through the urban sprawl of Split. They stopped for dinner at a roadside restaurant, Magdalena drinking a single glass of wine, Jadranka laughing as she polished off the first bottle and ordered a second.

  Halfway through their meal, two American men sat down at the next table, and Jadranka struck up a conversation with them in broken English.

  “Croatia is a beautiful country,” one of them told her. They both wore hiking boots, and their faces were sunburnt.

  “Yes,” she agreed.

  “Are you from here?” the other—a blond with very blue eyes—asked, prompting Jadranka to smile coyly.

  “I am like you. The stranger.”

  Magdalena frowned at this, but her sister was already on a roll, inviting them to guess where she was from.

  “Are you Polish?”

  “No.”

  “Russian?”

  “No.”

  “French?”

  “Non!”

  With her red hair, Jadranka did not look Croatian, and this was a favorite game of hers. It had amused Magdalena when they were teenagers, but now she found it tiresome, as if there were some made-up taxonomic system by which people believed all nations could be categorized. An Italian-shaped box for the Italians. A Chinese-shaped box for the Chinese. What would a Croatian-shaped box look like, she wondered? The bones of goats down one side, and grapevines down the other? She imagined it covered with an embroidered tablecloth, like the ones gypsies sold on Rosmarina’s beaches.

  “I am the Lapp,” Jadranka told them finally.

  This was a departure for her sister, but Magdalena only sighed.

  The men looked surprised at this. “Lapp?” asked the blond. “Like from the Arctic?”

  “Very good,” she told him. “People often think is in Antarctica.”

  “Nobody lives in Antarctica,” he told her.

  “No,” she agreed. “Only penguins.”

  The other man smiled. “Are you really a Lapp?”

  “Yes,” she said. “But tomorrow I go to America.”

  They looked at Magdalena as if for confirmation. Her English was better than Jadranka’s. She had studied it in school, and it was one of the subjects she taught, but now she only attempted to catch the waitress’s eye for their bill.

  “How long will you be staying?” asked the blond.

  As Magdalena studied her sister’s face, Jadranka shrugged. Instead of answering, she spent the next five minutes regaling them with entertaining facts about the Lapps. It was clear to Magdalena that the vast majority of these were made up, ranging from the uktuk building that Lapps lived in to the nicknames they gave their reindeer.

  “Akborg, she was my favorite,” she told them. “Her name means rosebud.”

  The blond’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. “Rosebud,” he repeated in amusement. “I assumed it would be too cold for roses in the Arctic.”

  “For ordinary roses,” she conceded. “But this is special, hardy type.”

  He grinned. “I think you’re making fun of us.”

  “No,�
� Jadranka insisted, though she herself was smiling broadly now. “Akborg bush. Official plant of Lappish nation.”

  When the waitress came over at last, Magdalena reached for the bill. But Jadranka pushed her hand playfully away. “Bad karma, big sister,” she told her in Croatian, forgetting her audience, who had returned to their meal. “I’m the one going on the trip, so I’m the one who has to pay.”

  “By whose logic?”

  “Mine,” Jadranka insisted, and Magdalena could not help but smile at the decisive way she said this.

  When they rose to leave, the blond man at the next table reached over to take Jadranka’s hand. “What’s your name?” he asked her.

  She hesitated. “Jay.”

  Magdalena’s eyebrows rose at this, but she said nothing.

  “Like bluejay?”

  “Yes,” she told him. “Okay.”

  “I’m Peter. Do you and your friend want to join us for a drink?”

  For a moment Magdalena was afraid that her sister would agree, but Jadranka shook her head.

  He released her hand. “Okay, Bluejay Rosebud,” he said. “Maybe I’ll see you around in America.”

  “Maybe,” she told him with a smile, though it was clear to Magdalena that she was already bored with this game.

  As night fell they had driven still farther southward, towards the mountains where the Magistrala crept upward and folded into serpentines. The road was cut into the mountainside, a thin ribbon of pavement between a sheer rock face and limestone cliffs that plunged hundreds of feet to the sea.

  When they had gone some distance, they passed a sign that indicated an overlook.

  “Stop here!” Jadranka ordered.

  “It’s freezing,” Magdalena said even as she pulled over. “And it’s nighttime.”

  Jadranka still cradled the second wine bottle from dinner in her lap, and when she got out of the car, she tucked it beneath her arm like an umbrella. For a moment Magdalena watched her sister walk backward in the headlights. She was smiling, and the wind blew with such force that it whipped her hair upward, as if Jadranka were no longer subject to the laws of gravity. She threw her head back and howled, a sound Magdalena could just make out above the wind.

  She sighed and turned off the engine, watching for a few moments more before opening her car door. There was a dangerous quality about Jadranka tonight, like something preparing to explode.

  But the cold outside nearly drove her back into the car. “You’re crazy!” she shouted at her sister’s retreating back.

  Jadranka was right, however, for although the wind was punishing, the view was achingly clear. Along the coast in either direction, Magdalena could see the cold lights of several towns and, behind them, the black weight of the mountains. Island after island lay in front of her, their shorelines glowing like Christmas trees, and when she made out a soft light on the horizon, she wondered if it was Rosmarina.

  “Come on!” her sister shouted, and Magdalena jogged towards the place where she was standing, at the very edge of the pavement. Jadranka stepped forward a little unsteadily so that Magdalena grabbed the back of her coat, not trusting the railing that separated them from the edge.

  “No you don’t,” she said with a short laugh. “Unless you want to go to the hospital instead of America.” She could not see the point below them where the waves broke upon the rocks, but she could hear the crash of water above the wind.

  Jadranka appeared not to have heard her. “Look at the stars,” she insisted happily. “How often do you see stars that bright?”

  Her sister began to sway slightly, and Magdalena hid a smile. “All the time,” she answered.

  But Jadranka ignored this, too. “There’s Sirius,” she said so softly that Magdalena strained to hear her. “And Orion.”

  Magdalena looked up. “You haven’t forgotten,” she said.

  Jadranka snorted. “How could I forget? The number of nights I spent in Dida’s boat when all I wanted to do was sleep.”

  Magdalena’s heart jumped painfully at this because she knew that while they drove around, their grandmother would be watching his face for signs of life.

  Luka Morić had always hated the way the island hemorrhaged its population to the mainland. He regarded with melancholy the fact that in a decade or two, there might no longer be working fishermen on Rosmarina, nor enough hands to combat fires after the tourist season ended. Most of all, Magdalena knew, he hated the glass cabinet in the kitchen where his wife kept a shrine to family members who had died or emigrated.

  Over the years, the cabinet’s shelves had become filled with photographs as Luka’s sisters had died one by one or, as in the case of Vinka, left for good. His only daughter wanted nothing to do with Rosmarina, and his only son had disappeared, sending no word even after the end of communism. This silence had prompted Magdalena’s grandmother to add the pictures of saints to Marin Morić’s shelf, a blessed rosary from some cousin who had visited the Vatican, and a medal of Saint Christopher.

  Magdalena knew that their grandmother prayed in front of the cabinet when she thought no one was watching, but that before his stroke Luka could barely stand to look at it when passing through the kitchen. He had once confided to Magdalena that Marin’s shelf too closely resembled a grave, and what other explanation could there be for her uncle’s continued absence?

  Due to her relative proximity in Split, their mother warranted only one corner of a shelf, together with assorted cousins and friends, and on rare visits to the island she regarded the cabinet with irony. “Our saint!” she would salute her brother a little bitterly, announcing her certainty that he had become prosperous abroad and merely discarded his links to the island like so much ballast.

  The last time Jadranka had visited the island, she brought their grandmother a photograph of herself. “This way you can keep an eye on all of us together,” she told her, already planning her escape.

  Magdalena alone had caught the look of despair that crossed the older woman’s face. “You shouldn’t have said that,” she chided Jadranka later.

  They had driven for the rest of that January night, Jadranka remembering the way they used to ride Magdalena’s scooter around the island as teenagers. In the first year of the war there had been blackouts, and Magdalena had taken the bulb out of the scooter’s headlight, so that they had flown through the dark. “I’d look up at all those stars,” Jadranka said in a dreamy voice, “and you’d be going so fast that they’d start shooting.”

  Magdalena remembered her sister’s arms clasped around her waist and the way she would sometimes sing, the wind distorting her voice, her hair so long that it lashed Magdalena’s cheeks like little sparks. They had not worn helmets in those days—nobody did—and they had traveled the roads so quickly that the tires barely made contact with the island.

  “I remember,” she told her. “It’s a wonder we’re alive to tell the tale.”

  At this, Jadranka turned to look out the passenger window. She studied something, some feature of the dark sea that was invisible to Magdalena’s eyes.

  “That’s the problem,” Jadranka told the window. “You remember too much.”

  Her words stung Magdalena. After all, it was Jadranka who had started these reminiscences. She gripped the steering wheel more tightly and concentrated on the road in front of them.

  “Lena?”

  But Magdalena refused to turn her head.

  “I know you hate to talk about it—”

  The tiny door that Magdalena had left open in the presence of her sister now slammed promptly shut.

  “—but you’ve been alone for ten years. Not even widows wait this long.”

  They were climbing a hill, and the car heaved as Magdalena shifted into a lower gear.

  “Not even Mama waited this long.”

  Silence.

  “And I hate leaving you like this.”

  “You’re not leaving me,” Magdalena said, at last. “You’re going. There’s a difference.” She sh
ifted gears again, satisfied by the car’s violent lurch.

  “Because the truth is that I may not be coming back.”

  Magdalena looked sharply at her sister, remembering how she had ignored the American’s question about how long she would stay. But Jadranka had turned to look out the window again. “Don’t be dramatic,” Magdalena told the back of her head. This time there were lights on the dark sea. A ferry, perhaps, or a night fisherman with a death wish. They flickered for a moment before disappearing into the black.

  She told none of this to Katarina, who insisted that Jadranka had been happy, that she had put on a bit of weight, a vast improvement from the pale, skinny girl who had arrived in January, poorly equipped for the harsh New York winter with her paper-thin coat. She had gotten on well with the children, playing with Christopher in the park and standing for hours in the bathroom with Tabitha as she experimented with her mother’s lipsticks and eye shadows.

  She adored her studio, though she had only shown Katarina a little of her work, preferring to keep the rest under lock and key.

  “Was it locked when she left?” Magdalena asked.

  Katarina hesitated. “Yes. We had to break in because she took the key with her.”

  Magdalena considered this.

  “We hoped it was a sign that she’d be back, but…”

  Magdalena waited.

  “I think someone had better break the news to your mother.”

  And so the next morning Magdalena took the ferry to the mainland. The fires had been extinguished during the night, but smoke still hung above some sections of the island. The wind had died, and there was something eerie about those unmoving clouds. Magdalena sat on deck and watched the island retreat, those gray patches of sky visible long after Rosmarina itself had disappeared.

  When she arrived at their mother’s apartment in Split several hours later, she found the shades still down and the air so still that a cold sweat broke out on her skin. In the kitchen a fly flew in drunken circles over three slices of stale bread, and she watched it make several revolutions while she waited for water to boil.