The First Rule of Swimming: A Novel

by Courtney Angela Brkic

  “We met before,” she reminded him.

  “Doesn’t count,” he told her, pouring a healthy portion of wine into both glasses.

  “Why not?”

  “I didn’t impress you that time.”

  He wasn’t particularly impressive this time, but she was lonely. And she was tired of sleeping on the ground and she wanted a shower, so she let him pour her a second glass, and then a third, all the while allowing him to imagine that he was the one seducing her.

  “Are you still working for your cousin?”

  She had forgotten telling him that detail.

  “No.”

  “You ought to come work for me,” he told her.

  “My waitressing days are behind me.”

  He shook his head. “I have other businesses.”

  But she did not want to hear about these other businesses, and so she proposed a toast. “To America,” she said, lifting her glass.

  He was staying at an inn near the beach, only a short distance away. At one point on the walk there, he picked her up and hoisted her across his shoulder, and she knew by his steadiness that neither of them was as drunk as they pretended. His room had a crocheted bedspread and an old-fashioned soaking bathtub. It seemed an odd choice for him, but then Shelter Island seemed an odd choice to begin with. She could sooner picture him in the Hamptons or Atlantic City.

  “I was supposed to come with a woman,” he admitted, pinning her back against the railing on his balcony and kissing her neck. “But we had a disagreement.”

  She laughed at this. Even as he turned her and slid his hands beneath her shirt, she was laughing, looking at the way the ocean was the same inky black as home.

  He stopped kissing her. “What’s so funny?” he demanded, and there was the slightest edge in his voice. It made her shiver lightly, but it also made her nipples stand at attention.

  “Look,” she told him, pulling off her shirt to show him, not caring if anyone else could see her.

  “Ludjakinjo,” he told her softly. “Crazy woman.”

  She pushed him into the room, towards the bed. And when he turned she was amused to see the tattoo of a lion on his back.

  The bed was too soft, and she awoke in the middle of the night, unsure at first where she was. The stranger beside her was snoring softly, and the clock radio beside him read 3:27 a.m. On Rosmarina, she thought, her grandmother would have long ago unpacked the vegetables from her market basket.

  She was quiet as she slipped out of bed and closed the bathroom door behind her. In the shower she leaned her forehead against the tile, half afraid that Darko would awake and join her. He had already served his purpose—or, rather, he hadn’t, because she had been too wound up to come, release skittering away from her like dry leaves carried by the wind—and she had little interest in seeing him again.

  Come home, she imagined her sister telling her.

  But it was not that easy. It would never be that easy again. And she could not ask Magdalena to save her this time.

  We’re sisters, Magdalena would insist. It changes nothing.

  Jadranka wanted to believe this. I’m still what I always was, she had tried to tell her uncle. But he only held up an angry hand to stop her, muttering that he knew all there was to know about her kind.

  Her kind.

  When she returned to the room, she was relieved to see that Darko lay in the same position in the bed. She dressed and as she opened the door to the hallway, shoes in her hand, he stirred very slightly. But then he merely rolled over and faced the wall, half a lion roaring at her as she went.

  Chapter 17

  It was the postmark that gave Jadranka away, the canvas for their uncle arriving with the words Shelter Island on the upper right-hand corner of the wrapping. A surprising misstep, thought Magdalena, who hoped it meant that Jadranka wanted finally to be found.

  Her sister had been to the island during the children’s Easter holiday. She had played hide-and-seek with them in the woods behind Katarina’s house and dangled her feet from the dock into the still-frigid waters of the Atlantic Ocean. But despite Katarina’s descriptions of sandy beaches and golf courses, Magdalena pictured her sister amid the pine forests and white stone of Rosmarina every time she heard the island’s name.

  “Što znaći Shelter?” their mother wanted to know.

  “It means…” Katarina fumbled for the word.

  “Sklonište,” Magdalena said. “Refuge.”

  Ana looked startled at this.

  Mother and daughter had barely spoken since Ana’s arrival the day before. Magdalena had chosen to wait at the airport alone, pacing nervously as if death itself waited on the other side of those automatic doors. She did not know what to make of the news that her uncle had been in contact with her sister, and her mother did not elaborate.

  “You’re thinner” had been the first words out of Ana’s mouth as she took in the dark circles beneath Magdalena’s eyes and the bony shoulders that held no promise of an embrace.

  But Magdalena only stared at her. “I know who Jadranka’s father is,” she said, causing the skin around her mother’s lips to whiten.

  “Who told—?”

  “Nona Vinka.”

  Her mother said nothing to this, and they spent the taxi ride to Katarina’s in silence.

  Magdalena could not remember Rosmarina’s former chief of police. He had left the island at some point in the 1970s, though even today islanders lowered their voices when mentioning him. Evil, Luka had told his granddaughters once, so that the man haunted their dreams like a bogeyman. Some people poison everything they touch.

  They left for Shelter Island the next morning, Magdalena convinced that if they waited any longer, Jadranka would disappear again. For the duration of the two-hour journey to Greenport, Katarina made a valiant attempt at small talk with Ana, who only responded in grunts, while Magdalena pretended to sleep in the backseat.

  Shelter Island was different than she had imagined it. Instead of white stone, grassy hills and narrow arms of land cleaved the water like a swimmer. And while it was true that evergreens filled the forests, they were outnumbered by oak and ash.

  There was no sign of Jadranka in Katarina’s large Victorian house, and so the next morning they went to file a report at the island police station. They photocopied Jadranka’s picture, leaving flyers on bulletin boards in the library and in grocery stores. They tramped through the woods behind Katarina’s house, where an occasional silver birch stood like a pale, naked girl among widows. The dark glass panels of an ancient greenhouse observed their comings and goings, but when Magdalena started up the slope to investigate the structure, Katarina told her that it had been locked for years, and the children thought it haunted.

  Unlike in New York, where nobody had recognized her sister, they ran across several people who seemed to remember the young red-haired woman. One man claimed to have sat next to her in a bar just the week before; another said that he often saw her bicycling the roads around Dering Harbor. The island librarian was certain that it was Jadranka who brought a little, dark-haired girl to children’s story hour every Thursday at three o’clock. But although the next day was Thursday and Magdalena waited at the library for her sister, neither Jadranka nor the dark-haired girl appeared.

  Each evening they returned to the house, where Katarina watched television with Ana. Magdalena preferred to sit outside on the dock, letting her legs trail through the water. The wood was weathered and soft, and she imagined her sister sitting there at Easter, the same slats beneath her. On a whim she inspected every inch of its surface, looking for a place where her sister might have inscribed something. Once, she thought she found the curved line of a J but could not ultimately coax other letters from that rough surface.

  It took her four days to declare defeat. “She’s not here,” she told Katarina.

  “No,” her cousin said. “I don’t think she is.”

  On the return ferry ride, Katarina suggested showing Jadranka’s
photograph to the young men who guided cars onto the deck, something Magdalena had not tried on the way over.

  “She left the island a few days ago,” one of them told her. “She bummed a cigarette from me. But I couldn’t let her smoke it until Greenport.”

  “Do you remember which day?”

  “Wednesday,” he told her unequivocally. “Last boat of the night.”

  Her mother was watching her through the windshield of Katarina’s car, carefully, as if Magdalena were some hazard of the road that she hoped to avoid. But Magdalena’s thoughts were elsewhere, and her legs felt unsteady as she walked towards the car.

  It was Jadranka who claimed to understand their mother. “She’s had a hard life,” she would insist. But Magdalena always dismissed this line of reasoning, and she certainly didn’t trust Ana’s latest claims of sobriety, nor her impromptu arrival in New York with stories about her long-lost brother.

  “He thought that your grandparents were dead,” Ana said, as if that explained everything.

  “Why on earth would he think that?”

  The three women had returned from Shelter Island and were sitting in Katarina’s living room, drinking coffee.

  Ana only shrugged, but the hand that brought the cup to her mouth shook badly, and for the briefest moment Magdalena felt sorry for her mother.

  “He won’t recognize me,” she said, when she returned the cup to its coaster on the coffee table. “He won’t recognize this old woman.”

  “I’m sure he’ll recognize you, Cousin Ana,” Katarina protested. “You’re brother and sister, after all.”

  But Magdalena thought that her mother might have a point. Living like you did hasn’t helped, she nearly told her, because the consequences were writ large in the red veins of Ana Babić’s face. But she caught herself before the words flew out.

  Jadranka’s room was exactly as she had left it on the day of her departure, and neither Katarina nor Magdalena had stripped the bed. Once or twice, Magdalena had even fallen asleep there, burying her face in her sister’s pillow.

  “I could put your mother in there,” Katarina had suggested halfheartedly to Magdalena, who in turn gave her mother the choice. But Ana Babić took one look at the sweatshirt at the foot of Jadranka’s bed and the loose change on the windowsill and shook her head.

  “I’ll sleep with you,” she told her older daughter.

  The night of their return from Shelter Island, lying in the darkness of the guest room, Magdalena realized that her mother was crying beside her in the bed. She was tempted to reach over and take her hand, to offer some words of comfort. But she imagined Ana snatching her hand away and turning over. Telling her that she did not understand.

  Mother and daughter were due at Marin’s the next morning, but when Magdalena woke it was still dark, and she could tell by her mother’s breathing that she was also awake.

  “Did you manage to sleep?” she forced herself to ask.

  “Not really.”

  Downstairs in the kitchen, Ana drank coffee silently, her eyes red and swollen.

  Magdalena wet a dish towel at the sink. “Lean back,” she ordered, surprised when her mother complied wordlessly, allowing Magdalena to drape it across her eyes.

  Her mother had been different since arriving in America. Gone was the combative woman who argued over every minuscule fact. It was as if the blood had been drained from her, as if she were a pale imitation of the mother Magdalena had left in Split more than two months before, the one who derided her eldest’s profession by calling her Our Lady of Snotty Noses.

  At first Magdalena had suspected tranquilizers, searching her mother’s suitcase and handbag one evening on Shelter Island while Ana snored on the bed. But she had only turned up an old army photograph of Marin. For my little sister, he had written on the back.

  Now, Magdalena studied the face draped in the damp, white cloth. Her mother was right. It was a different face than Marin Morić would remember, and for a moment Magdalena imagined peeling the dish towel back to reveal the Ana Babić of early 1970s photographs, brows arched in amusement above dark eyes.

  When she lifted the towel, however, her mother’s face was less swollen but otherwise unchanged. Her eyes did not even focus on her but on some point behind Magdalena’s head.

  For my little sister, Magdalena thought, remembering stories she had heard of Marin Morić carrying his sister everywhere on his back.

  “Not long now,” Magdalena said, intending her words to be comforting.

  But Ana Babić did not look cheered.

  Two hours later they stood together outside his door. It was steely gray with two locks and a peephole at whose center shone a pinprick of light. Ana had arranged the visit by telephone, but now both mother and daughter hesitated, neither lifting a hand to knock.

  Magdalena had only visited Brooklyn once, on the day she followed the red-haired stranger into the subway station a few blocks from here. The neat brownstones of her uncle’s neighborhood were unexplored territory, as were the cafés and restaurants crowding its avenues. The pavements were smooth, and there were few of the weeds that grew in Damir’s neighborhood, fewer ninety-nine-cent stores. No plaster Madonnas or flags.

  When the door swung open—as if someone had sensed their silent presence in the hallway—her mother gave a little cry. But Magdalena did not recognize the man who stood on the other side.

  She knew that in the days after her father’s death she had accompanied Marin every time he left the house, with its black sheet in the window and its somber stream of visitors. Those excursions, she was told, were the beginning of her obsession with boats. They would wander the riva as he held her hand or travel in the boat whose outboard motor sang tuk-tuk-tuk all the way to the Devil’s Stones. It was her uncle, Luka once corrected her, not he, who had first allowed her to steer, placing his hand over hers on the shuddering tiller.

  Magdalena could no longer remember which shadows of her childhood had been cast by her father, which by her uncle. She was only familiar with photographs, so that her father was a man perpetually on his wedding day and Marin Morić did not age past twenty-six.

  But the man before her was older, much older.

  He said nothing before embracing both Magdalena and her mother, drawing them towards him at the same time so that their hands brushed, each woman’s face buried in a different shoulder. His embrace was so crushing that for a moment Magdalena could not breathe.

  “Lena,” he told her thickly.

  The parquet of the apartment’s entrance was scuffed and the leather couch in its living room smooth with age. Magazines and newspapers lay on many surfaces, and a diagonal crack in the window behind the couch made the building on the other side of the street appear as if it had split in two.

  To fill up the silence, her uncle’s wife, who had appeared behind him with a cheerful smile, explained in English that they had intended to replace the pane of glass for years. “But we have two sons, you know, and no sooner was something fixed than it got broken again.”

  Her name was Luz, Marin explained in careful Croatian, a name that meant light in Spanish. She kissed both of them in turn, Ana turning awkwardly to offer her cheek, her eyes so bleak that the back of Magdalena’s throat began to burn.

  She could not understand her mother’s joylessness. Here, at last, was her reunion with her only brother. And while it was true that Ana had long regarded his defection with bitterness—commenting frequently on the way he had abandoned his family—Magdalena could not make sense of the almost anxious way she regarded him now.

  For his part, Marin kept removing his glasses to wipe his eyes. “Those bastards,” he said, explaining to Magdalena about his returned letter, the way his parents had been slain with a single word. “Can you fathom the cruelty behind such an act?”

  She couldn’t, although it went some distance to explaining his silence of decades.

  But her mother sat primly on the couch, her purse on her knees as if she did not mean to
linger. “You should have tried harder,” she said in a quiet voice. “And I…”

  Marin waited.

  “I should have understood.”

  Marin opened his mouth as if to speak, but Ana cut him off.

  “We should have left things differently, you and I. But there wasn’t time.”

  “No,” he agreed sadly. “There wasn’t time.”

  Magdalena could not follow their conversation, and Luz, it was clear, did not understand Croatian, although her eyes did not leave her husband’s face.

  But neither sibling chose to clarify the situation for them, or to describe their last meeting in the darkness of the Rosmarina courtyard. Ana did not tell them of the way she had said to Marin in a whisper: “I made myself into a whore for you, so that he would leave you alone.” And Marin did not describe the dead weight of his sister’s eyes, unbearable even in the dark.

  “Don’t let it be for nothing,” Ana had finally begged, and instead of responding, Marin had been sick. The vomit struck the flagstones of the courtyard like hail.

  Now, each remembered the way she had cupped his forehead with her hand, just as their mother had done in their childhood whenever they were sick. The skin of her palm was so cool that he had pressed it more firmly to his brow. And when he had stopped heaving, he lowered it to cover his eyes.

  It was Marin who broke the silence that stretched between them in his New York apartment. “You look well,” he told his sister.

  “Liar.”

  “You’re alive,” he said. “You survived.”

  Ana closed her eyes and nodded. “That’s more than we can say for others.”

  When Luz went to make coffee, Magdalena volunteered to help her, relieved to escape the living room. She followed her uncle’s wife into a kitchen where cookbooks lined the windowsills, and the refrigerator was covered with postcards and an abundance of notes.