The First Rule of Swimming: A Novel

by Courtney Angela Brkic

  “That’s how we communicate when we spend different shifts at the restaurant,” Luz said from behind her. “Your uncle and me. And then we never have the heart to take them down.”

  Studying the scraps of brightly colored paper with their details of telephone numbers and shopping lists, Magdalena’s eyes stung, witness to all those hearts and crosses, those doodles and asides. Let’s go to a movie this weekend, suggested one message in bold print. You need a new winter coat, a feminine cursive responded.

  When Magdalena turned, the other woman fell silent at her expression. “Oh, my dear,” she said, misunderstanding. She came around the counter and took both of her hands. “We had no idea who your sister was.”

  Magdalena only nodded.

  On one kitchen wall were dozens of horizontal markings that rose at least a foot above Magdalena’s head: a yardstick that clearly measured her cousins’ heights.

  Luz followed her gaze.

  “They’re tall,” Magdalena said lamely.

  “Yes,” their mother agreed, handing her a picture frame from the counter.

  Magdalena stared at the handsome boys who shared their mother’s olive skin, but with faces so like their father’s that they looked like one man aging within a single frame. She saw something of Luka in them, as well, and she felt her eyes burn a second time.

  “What are their names?”

  “José and Adriano,” Luz told her. “You’ll meet them. Both you and your sister.”

  When Magdalena returned to the living room, carrying the coffee tray, her mother and Marin were sitting side by side on the couch. He had draped an arm around her shoulders and was telling her something in a low voice. She was nodding, her purse surrendered to the floor beside her feet.

  They did not sense Magdalena’s approach, and for a moment she watched them, surprised to see her mother in such close proximity to anyone. But although Ana’s face had lost its pinched quality, there was still something careful about the way she held herself, as if she suspected her brother was an impostor.

  “The letters—” Magdalena heard her say in a choked voice, breaking off when a floorboard creaked beneath her daughter’s foot.

  “Lena,” Marin hailed her, for the second time using the familiar form of her name. When she did not respond, he studied her more closely. “You don’t remember me at all, do you?”

  “Only bits and pieces,” she admitted.

  “He thought your sister was UDBA,” Ana broke in. “He thought she’d been sent to blackmail him.”

  Marin looked ashamed. “She had so many questions and she didn’t tell me who she was, you see.”

  “There’s no more UDBA,” Magdalena said with a frown. “It was dissolved years ago.”

  Marin swallowed. “I didn’t even know she existed.”

  Luz had come into the room behind Magdalena, and while she could not have understood the exact details of the conversation, she clearly gathered that they were talking about Jadranka.

  “Show her, Mio,” she told him in English.

  Marin led her down a short hallway and opened the door to his sons’ room. There were posters on the wall, a stereo with a collection of CDs that went from floor to ceiling, and a framed shadow box with an autographed Mets jersey. But Magdalena immediately spotted the canvas that leaned against a closet door.

  He lifted it. “This is the room where I slept as a child.”

  Magdalena nodded. It was her room today, though she did not say so to her uncle.

  He pointed at the grapevine. “Your father and your grandfather planted that the day you were born.”

  “My father is dead,” she told him.

  “I know.”

  “—and my grandfather is dying.”

  Although he nodded, this last comment clearly pained him, and they spent a long, awkward moment staring at the painting, neither looking at the other.

  “I’m sorry,” she told him.

  But Marin surprised her by handing her the canvas. He lowered the blinds at the windows and closed the bedroom door. “Look up,” he told her when he had turned off the ceiling lamp.

  Still holding the canvas, she took in the glow-in-the-dark stickers that covered the entire ceiling. Like real stars, they were brightest when viewed obliquely, and she studied the carefully mapped configurations in which Orion hunted and Canis Major stalked the dark sky. Directly above her, Andromeda raised her arm.

  “Dida told me that she was chained to a rock,” she told him, studying the arm with its glowing shackle. “And that Perseus saved her from the sea monster.”

  “Yes,” he told her softly. “He taught me that, as well.”

  “—but I didn’t like the idea and so I used to insist that she was holding something.”

  She was conscious of her uncle studying the faintly glowing circles. “What is she holding?”

  “I used to think that the star was a knife, and not a chain.”

  There was a moment of silence as he took this in.

  That’s not how the story goes, little one, her grandfather had told her in amusement when she insisted that it was Andromeda who defended both the warrior and the winged horse, marking her territory in that patch of northern sky. But from that day forward, it was thus in all the stories Luka told her.

  Her mother wept only once, as they were saying goodbye. She clung to her brother as if another thirty years were about to separate them, although they had already made plans to see each other again. Magdalena did not hear Marin’s words of comfort, but whatever they were, they seemed to calm her mother.

  “It’s not his fault,” Ana said when they reached the street.

  “What isn’t?”

  “He thought they were dead.”

  “Yes,” Magdalena said. “I know.”

  But Ana’s mouth had resumed its familiar hard line. “You and your sister, you know nothing.”

  Magdalena studied the mascara that blackened her mother’s eyes and decided to let this go. They did not speak for the duration of the subway ride back to Katarina’s, their morning truce effectively ended.

  Marin did not know where Jadranka might have gone after Shelter Island. Towards the end of her time at the restaurant, she had found a place to stay. With friends, she told him, although he later discovered that she had spent a week sleeping on his headwaiter’s couch, disappearing from his apartment without a trace on the same night she had left the restaurant for the last time.

  From what Magdalena could tell, Jadranka had made only one true friend, and he had not heard from her since June.

  “Still not a peep,” Theo confirmed when she telephoned to ask him. “Although I remembered the name of that place she took me. Club Darko.”

  It did not sound familiar to Magdalena. “And you’re sure it was in Queens?”

  “Sure as sure can be.”

  Damir had never heard of the club either. “I can call around,” he told her in the darkness of his bedroom that evening, his hand tracing circles on her bare hip.

  She had left her mother with the vague excuse of running errands and caught the train to Queens. When she rang his apartment’s buzzer, his voice had betrayed neither elation over her appearance nor irritation that he had not heard from her in nearly two weeks. Still, Magdalena was surprised to find herself here again. Nothing about their situations had changed, after all, and whatever his next destination, she knew that it would not be Rosmarina. But she was weak, and although she berated herself soundly for her weakness, it had not once occurred to her during the subway ride here to turn around.

  “She took her friend there months ago,” she pointed out. “She probably never went back.”

  “Probably not,” he told her reasonably, but the next morning she watched from his bed as he stood at the kitchen counter and telephoned a colleague at a local newspaper.

  “Ever heard of it?” he asked, meeting Magdalena’s eyes through the open bedroom door. There was a long silence, and then he hung up the telephone.

&n
bsp; “No luck,” she guessed when he returned to the bed.

  “On the contrary.” He opened his hand to reveal a yellow scrap of paper. “Club Darko. It’s on Steinway Street.”

  Magdalena looked skeptically at the line of numbers in his palm.

  “You’re famous,” he said, handing it to her. “At least in the Croatian sections of Queens.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your flyers,” he told her. “Apparently everyone is talking about a dark-haired Rosmarinka who’s looking for her red-headed sister.”

  She snorted. “It sounds like a fairy tale. Snow White and Rose Red.”

  He smiled at this, but a moment later he was asleep again, his arm thrown across her chest. She waited until his breathing deepened before extricating herself and padding to the kitchen, where she stared at the yellow scrap of paper.

  Jadranka had always loved fairy tales, with their stories of curses and enchantments. It had been their mother who bought them the book of Grimms’ stories, a German edition with gold edges. It was an uncharacteristic gift and—considering that they did not speak German—a largely useless one. But Magdalena could still remember the vividly rendered illustrations, so different from the washed-out colors of the country’s socialist presses. And the way Jadranka had made up stories to fit those pictures.

  Chapter 18

  When Jadranka boarded the ferry in Shelter Island, the lights on the other side beckoned her like a runway. She could go anywhere from here, she realized. More importantly, she could be anything. But her bravado ebbed in the five minutes it took to cross, and she disembarked to a line of cars that slipped, one by one, into the night.

  She had not seen Darko again, had avoided Shelter Island Heights for several days after their encounter. He had seemed harmless enough, despite his shaved head and his crooked boxer’s nose. Despite even the fact that his place of business was an unmarked storefront on Steinway Street full of male patrons who looked just like him with their thick necks and gold chains, their swagger, their nicknames like Zmaj—Dragon, she had translated for Theo while snickering into her beer—and Lucky.

  The truth was that he had offered to help her, producing a business card from his wallet. “I can give you a job.”

  “What makes you think I need a job?” she asked, and he lifted one of her hands, the nails ragged from her art projects in the woods.

  “A girl like you shouldn’t be doing manual labor,” he told her.

  “Waitressing is manual labor.”

  “Who said anything about waitressing?”

  She had not taken him seriously, but now, as she sat on the curb at the ferry landing, the next bus to New York an hour away, she began to look at things differently. She had little money left and nothing to lose. Going back to her cousin’s was an unattractive option. Going back to Rosmarina was unthinkable.

  She called Darko three hours later from a Port Authority pay phone. “Your offer of employment?” she asked him. “Does it still stand?”

  There was a moment of silence on the other end, but he recovered too quickly for her to change her mind. “For you, mila?” he told her. “Anything.”

  Waiting in front of the bus station, she considered turning around and walking back into the arrivals hall, which teemed with people at three in the morning. She could catch a bus northward. She could try Boston next. Or, better yet, some seaside town where no one cared about green cards in the middle of a tourist season. But though she could picture it in her mind—a mixture of Shelter Island and a romantic comedy she had once seen about a New England bed-and-breakfast—she did not know the name of a single place that met these requirements.

  She missed his approach. She had been scanning the street, assuming he would pull up in an SUV with tinted windows, or a Mercedes-Benz. But he came from inside the station behind her.

  “Ciao, mačko,” he hailed her. “You disappeared on me.”

  Her talent for smiling easily came in handy now. “Family business.”

  She allowed him to take her backpack, and for the first time since calling him, it occurred to her that she was making a mistake. But he seemed innocuous enough. “Let’s roll,” he said, and so she followed him up Eighth Avenue.

  If he was angry about the way she had left, he did not let on. But neither did he make any further reference to that night.

  The New Jersey property had come to him in a business deal, and he only needed her to live there, to maintain a presence and wave at the neighbors. “You’re perfect,” he told her. “You can be my nice cousin from the Old Country.”

  She was surprised to realize that he wanted to take her there tonight, his car parked two blocks away from the bus station. “What’s the hurry?” she asked him.

  “No hurry,” he told her. “We could always go back to my place.”

  But Jadranka responded vaguely about not wanting to stay too long in the city.

  “Avoiding someone?” he asked her.

  You, she thought. “Lots of people.”

  It was still dark when they arrived, but Jadranka could tell that the house—at the end of a cul-de-sac—was nearly derelict. The porch sagged in the middle and light blue paint peeled from wooden clapboards in the headlights of Darko’s car.

  “You’re not afraid of ghosts, are you?” he asked in a low voice, then laughed.

  “Just mice,” she said, though this was not really true.

  “No mice,” he promised.

  She stared at the house. “Why don’t you rent it out?”

  “I need to fix it up first.”

  Two men ran a tool-and-die business out of the basement. They didn’t have permits for the machinery, and so the business was not strictly legal. But there was a separate basement entrance, behind the house, and so she was unlikely to see much of them.

  Something about the way he said this made Jadranka hesitate.

  “And you stay away from the basement,” he told her, turning off his headlights so that she could no longer see the house. “Don’t go distracting them with that pretty face.”

  Inside, the house’s windowsills were covered with dust. It was as large as Katarina’s Shelter Island house, but whereas each doorknob in that structure had been oiled, each pane of glass pristine, this house had clearly sat empty for years.

  Darko’s footsteps echoed loudly in the empty rooms. In the kitchen there was a refrigerator, but a sepia-colored gap stretched between cupboards where a stove had once stood. Not a problem, Jadranka thought, looking at it, because the house was stifling and she would be staying only as long as it took to plot her next move.

  She followed him to the second floor, where a tiny room contained an oscillating fan and a single mattress.

  “I crash here sometimes,” Darko told her. “But it’s yours now.”

  She looked dubiously at the naked mattress.

  “Unless you want some company?”

  When Jadranka did not answer, he only laughed. “Don’t worry, mila,” he told her. “We’re business associates now.” He reached into his wallet for a hundred-dollar bill. “There are stores at the end of the street. Buy what you need, and I’ll be back in a week.”

  She looked at the crisp bill in her hand. Together with what she had, she could make it even farther than Boston. But she was aware of the way Darko watched her, and so she nodded and tucked it into the pocket of her jeans.

  A claw-footed bathtub stood in the bathroom. It was discolored with age, but the water that ran from the tap was clear and cold, and after she heard Darko drive away, she turned off the light and sat beneath the steady stream. She did not have soap or a towel, and afterwards she walked naked from room to room in her shoes, allowing the dark, warm air to dry her.

  She slept heavily until the next morning, when she heard a man’s voice below the window.

  “Kreten,” he was telling someone in Croatian. “You can’t do it that way.”

  The tool-and-die guys, she guessed, although the only thing she could see
in the driveway was a battered van, its rear doors open towards the house.

  She dressed in the clothes she had worn the night before, making a mental note of how to spend Darko’s hundred-dollar bill. She would conserve as much as she could. He had promised her the same amount in a week, and she had already started thinking of it as her escape fund.

  When she walked onto the front porch ten minutes later, a light-haired man around her age sat there eating a doughnut. Bone thin, he did not look up, but when she went to walk past him, he startled.

  He held up a hand in greeting, and it came to her suddenly that he was deaf.

  She raised a hand as well, but he went back to his doughnut, and so she walked down the steps just in time to run into another, older man, more like Darko in build.

  “Hello,” she told him, blinking.

  She would have identified them as Croatian from a mile away. She could tell by their track suits, by the way the second man wore his hair, clipped so tightly to the scalp that it took a moment to realize how far his hairline had receded.

  He nodded at her but did not respond, climbing the steps to kick the thinner man’s boot lightly with his own. “Time to go back to work,” he said.

  When they passed, the Darko look-alike gave Jadranka a measured look. It traveled from her hips to her neck before coming to settle somewhere beneath her collarbone. My tits don’t usually make eye contact, she was tempted to tell him, but something held her back, and a moment later they both disappeared around the side of the house.

  The shopping area was a strip mall, about a mile away. There was a small supermarket and a ninety-nine-cent store, and in addition to food she bought a hand towel, soap, and some twine. Darko had said to make the house look inhabited, and when she got back she stretched a length of the twine tightly between two half-dead trees.

  He had told her to wave at the neighbors, as well, but she had seen nobody on the walk to and from the strip mall, and his house was almost invisible to its neighbors, set back from the street and surrounded with trees and overgrown bushes. Behind the property line, which he had pointed out to her with a flashlight the night before, were woods even thicker than the ones that surrounded Katarina’s house on Shelter Island. They gave Jadranka the impression that the property bordered an abyss.