The First Rule of Swimming: A Novel

by Courtney Angela Brkic

  “Don’t go wandering around back there,” he had warned her, citing poison ivy and snakes.

  In the kitchen, she unpacked milk, bread, and peanut butter, a substance she was growing heartily sick of. She had washed her clothes under the tap at Shelter Island, and she was wearing her last clean T-shirt, so she emptied the contents of her backpack into the tub, rubbing each item with soap and wringing it out.

  She heard low voices outside, and the slamming of a car door. When she rose and looked through the window, the two men from the workshop were driving away.

  She did not think she could spare money for pencils and a sketchbook, and so she spent the first few days sitting on the porch’s front step, swatting mosquitoes and listening to occasional noises from the basement. The two men did not speak to each other, and when she did hear something, it was usually the stouter one cursing.

  It surprised her that their basement machinery made no noise, and that some days they did not come to the house at all. She preferred the solitude of those days, and by the end of the first week, she bought a package of crayons at the ninety-nine-cent store, returning to the house to find that Darko had come and gone, leaving her another hundred together with a note that read: Don’t spend it all in one place. Back next week.

  She had already decided that she would leave then, after the next hundred dollars. This would bring her savings to over four hundred, enough to get far away from here. She would try Maine next—the name of that state coming to her one night as she was drifting off—which she remembered was as far north as she could go.

  But until then she needed something to occupy her time.

  The walls inside the house were all a uniform whitish gray, the paint worn so thin in places that she could see the plasterwork underneath. They were not ideal as canvases, but she was bored, and so she started upstairs in the master bedroom, across the hall from where she slept. To amuse herself, she drew windows onto a second room, one with flowering plants and lace curtains at the windows. A black dog lay curled on the bed, and a woman sat in a rocking chair, her back towards the windows, a bowl of figs on the table beside her.

  As a child, Jadranka had been fascinated by houses, by the way one room led to another, all of them fitting neatly together. She defied these conventions in her sleep, however, and dreamed frequently about rooms that changed shape even as she entered them. Often the dreams were about her grandfather’s house, so that the structure she had known for all her life—and whose every hiding place she had explored—became like a magician’s box in her sleep, unfolding from the inside to reveal new stairways that led to unknown floors and entire wings that had been waiting patiently for her to discover them.

  The dreams had their genesis in the bedroom she had shared with Magdalena, which Luka had repainted one summer long ago. Removing a section of rotten plaster, he had been surprised to find a block of chiseled limestone identical to the house’s external walls. It looked like the edge of an old fireplace, but as he gouged more plaster away, the graceful stone outline of a Renaissance window emerged, albeit filled with rubble.

  “Just look at this,” he had told his granddaughters in awe, inviting them to touch the column that bisected it. “Your ancestors carved this and fitted it. They probably didn’t know how to write or read, but look at what they did know.”

  Necessity or ignorance had prompted their grandchildren’s grandchildren to reuse fragments of their sculptures and columns in more modern building projects, to fill in windows and doorways that were no longer of practical use. Throughout the town were new houses that had been built atop existing bases, and columns that had been placed on their sides in gardens to separate tomato plants from spinach. Sealed windows sometimes began at ankle height, and doors hovered several feet above the ground.

  Jadranka had begged Luka not to plaster over the window again, and in the end he had even removed some of the rubble, making a small recess into which she could fit as a child.

  The wall had clearly once been the outside of a house, and she used to lie in bed, imagining the flowering vines that wrapped around the column hundreds of years ago, snaking up from a garden that, today, was the kitchen. Imagining clandestine lovers who whispered to each other through that space, sealed for a period longer than the span of any person’s life.

  In New Jersey, she frequently pictured that window, and the soft light that had once glowed from the room behind it, where nothing but a wall now stood. A room that was lost entirely in her present circumstances.

  She picked one of the rooms on the first floor for her next project, an olive grove that stretched from wall to wall. She added the figures of children between the trunks of trees, wearing the crayons down into nubs of wax.

  Darko had left her with a pack of Marlboro Reds on the first night, though he had told her not to smoke them inside the house, an edict she had been ignoring by leaning out of the bathroom window upstairs and flushing the butts down the toilet. Only one cigarette remained, and when she finished the last of the figures, she went out on the porch to smoke it, sitting down on the front step just as the stockier man from the basement—whom she had nicknamed “Rottweiler” in her mind—came around the side of the house.

  He reached her in a few steps, snatching the cigarette from her lips and stomping it out. “Are you fucking crazy?” he asked her.

  She stared at him.

  “You can’t smoke here.”

  Jadranka looked around her at the sagging porch, and the weeds that had driven up between some of the slats like tiny yellow knives. There was nothing remotely flammable, and she frowned. “Why the hell not?” she asked him.

  “We use chemicals in the basement,” he hissed. “One spark and we’ll all go up in smoke.”

  “For tool and die?”

  Something moved in his throat. “Of course for tool and die.”

  “Okay,” she told him easily. “Now I know.”

  But he only turned on his heel, muttering something about the stupidity of women.

  She should have left then. She should have walked calmly away, pretending to make another foray to the strip mall. She had already asked directions to the bus depot and knew that buses departed for points north every hour.

  Instead she waited until the two men left for the day, watching their van from the second floor until it disappeared.

  There was a locked door in the kitchen that obviously led to the basement. It had an old-fashioned keyhole, but she could tell by looking at the gap between the door and frame that the lock was not engaged, prompting her to conclude that the door was padlocked from the other side.

  It was a strange precaution for a tool-and-die business, even one run illegally out of a basement. Walk away, said the same voice that had been speaking to her for days. Just pack your things and go.

  She had not ventured behind the house since her arrival, but now she observed that the basement door used by the two men was reinforced steel. She was about to give up and return to the house when she saw it: a small rectangular window at ankle height, almost hidden in the weeds.

  Before she could think better of it, she dropped to her stomach and pushed the window inward. She understood that the house—and Darko—were trouble, but she was curious to see what happened in the basement. She suspected that it was used to store stolen property, and anyway, she had always had a talent for extricating herself from difficult situations. If Rottweiler appeared on the scene, she was capable of thinking up some excuse.

  The window was barely wide enough for her shoulders. She slid through it up to her waist, bracing herself against the inside wall with her hands so that she felt like the figurehead of a ship, allowing her eyes to adjust to the gloom. When they did, she was able to make out a long table with a jumble of vials and beakers. Rather than flat-screen televisions and piles of jewelry, there were large drums and a profusion of plastic vats. She had been wrong about the stolen property, but whatever went on in the basement had nothing to do with tools, either.<
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  She assumed that the workshop was for drugs or explosives, and she cursed her own stupidity. She would need to leave tonight, after all. She had enough for a bus ticket to Maine and a few meals. Darko could go fuck himself as far as she was concerned. But as she pulled herself back, her elbow caught the open window, sending a shock wave of pain down her arm and leaving a star-shaped fracture in the glass.

  “You’re bleeding,” a familiar voice said from behind her.

  She went completely still, but he had already wrapped a hand around her ankle and was dragging her back so roughly that both elbows scraped the ground. He did not give her a chance to respond but turned her neatly over with his foot.

  The sun was behind him, and she blinked.

  “What am I going to do with you, mila?” Darko asked her.

  He took her to the room where she had been sleeping, propelling her up the stairs so quickly that she twice lost her footing. He stared only for a moment at the picture of a sailboat on the landing.

  “It’s nothing to do with me,” she told him when he pointed at the mattress, then pushed her when she did not sit.

  He sat on the windowsill across from her, arms crossed. “Why did you have to complicate things?” he asked in a voice so reasonable that only now did she begin to feel afraid. “Haven’t I been fair with you?”

  She nodded. “More than fair.”

  “Why then?”

  She swallowed. In English, she told him nervously, “Curiosity killed the cat?”

  He rose at this. “Stupid cat,” he told her, almost gently. But there was nothing gentle about the way he pulled her to her feet again, propelling her towards the open window so that for a moment she thought that he was going to throw her out.

  “Look at that drop.”

  She took in the two and a half stories that separated them from the ground.

  “There’s no way out of this room,” he told her. “Try it and I’ll bury you in the garden.”

  A part of her was tempted to laugh. The threat sounded like something from a film about the Russian mob, but when she looked at his face, she found no hint of make-believe.

  “If that happens, there’s no chance of your sister finding you.”

  For a moment, Jadranka forgot to breathe. “I don’t have a sister.”

  But he only smiled at this bluff. “She’s looking for you. She even came into my bar yesterday.”

  “My sister is in Croatia.”

  “Your sister is in New York.”

  When he saw Jadranka’s expression, he gave a bark of laughter. “Don’t worry, mila. She’s not my type. Too skinny and I don’t like irritable women—”

  Jadranka closed her eyes.

  “On the other hand, it wouldn’t hurt her to learn a little respect.”

  “Respect,” Jadranka echoed, remembering that word being wielded like a club.

  When he closed the door behind him, turning a key in the lock, she sat down hard and faced the windowsill.

  Outside, it was growing dark, but from the bedroom window she watched him walk to his car, where he sat for a time with the engine running. He was talking to somebody on his telephone, and as she watched he struck the steering wheel with his open palm. Her elbows burned, and she could feel the stickiness of blood, but she did not take her eyes off that car. If he turned off the engine and walked back towards the house, she knew that she could kiss this life goodbye.

  But five minutes later he tossed the telephone onto the seat beside him and drove off.

  She had never mentioned a sister to Darko. She was too careful and, in fact, had made up a different family name, inventing an entire history to go with it. But the description—skinny and irritable—was unmistakable, and for the first few minutes after his departure, she sat on the floor shaking.

  Magdalena’s face came to her, white and furious, hatcher of plans and purveyor of rat poison. Of course she had come to America. Of course she had. And so Jadranka dragged herself to her feet again, imagining that dark head nodding.

  The door did not budge, even when she kicked it, and so she returned to the window, to that drop which took her breath away, damning herself that she had been too cheap to do more than buy a single sheet for the mattress. Two sheets might have delivered her halfway to the ground, but one sheet would do almost nothing.

  The overhang of the front porch was more than five feet away, and she could not imagine completing the Tarzan-like maneuver necessary to reach it. But when she felt around beneath the window, her hands brushed a thick cable or cord affixed to the side of the house. Staples would never support her weight, she knew, but when she leaned forward, she could feel a solid metal bracket. Two feet below that one, she could just make out a second.

  She threw her backpack out the window first, watching as it landed in a thorny bush below her, then wrapped the sheet around herself to protect her bare arms. Darko had taken her shoes, but once on the windowsill she flipped onto her stomach and felt gingerly for the bracket with her sock-covered foot. When she at last made painful contact with the metal, she lowered her other foot, finding the next and letting go of the windowsill with one hand. She hung there for a moment, easing her weight slowly onto the brackets and grasping the cord with a shaking hand.

  It was as she reached the third bracket that she felt herself peel away from the wall. She fell for most of the first floor, landing in the bush with the cord still clenched in her hands. The sheet did little to protect her from the thorns, and she crawled away from the house on hands and knees, panting.

  The house behind her was dark, and it came to her that for once she could not simply walk away, as had been her plan. Not when Darko knew about her sister. She imagined Magdalena coming here. Magdalena who would not give up, who would instead follow her trail like a bloodhound. She imagined Darko intercepting her at the front door, inviting her to come inside, all smiles and false promises. She had misjudged the situation badly, she now realized.

  The house’s front door was unlocked, a fact that suggested he would be back soon. But it took only a moment to find an empty glass bottle in the kitchen. Days ago, she had found the rusted tin of Sterno beneath the sink, and she carried these outside again with the leftover twine.

  She was still wrapped in the sheet. It billowed behind her like a rogue winding cloth, but she cast it off and seized it in both hands. The fabric would not give, no matter how her knuckles burned, but when she used her teeth she was able to tear off a piece with a satisfying sound.

  She hung the larger section on the washing line and, after a moment of deliberation, took off her shirt, which she hung beside it.

  Her hands trembled as she used a stick to empty the Sterno onto the smaller scrap of sheet, smearing it on the cloth as best she could without her hands, then stuffing it into the bottle. The can had only been a quarter full, and she decided that it was the most pitiful Molotov cocktail that had ever been made. She carried a plastic lighter in her pocket, and now she flicked it nervously, careful to keep the flame away from the cloth.

  Behind the house, she nudged the same small window with her foot, the broken pane of glass shining as it swung inward.

  She would have to throw it close to the table, a problem because she could no longer make out anything inside. As she lowered herself to her knees, she half expected to hear Darko’s voice again, to feel his hands around her neck this time, and so she felt something approaching joy when the cloth caught in a burst of blue flame.

  She threw it in the general direction of the table, watching its arc light up the beakers, vats, and vials. She had aimed well, and it rolled along the table until stopping beside a container that trailed a piece of rubber tubing. She did not really expect it to work, but the voice inside her head said Run, and by the time the bottle shattered she had nearly reached the wood.

  The explosion was deafening. At first she thought that Darko had found her, that he had thrown his entire weight against her. It was black and feral, this thing at her back.
She could feel its teeth in her neck, and all she could do was cover her face with her arms just before crashing into one of the trees.

  The impact stunned her, and she landed on the ground face up. Before losing consciousness, she thought she saw his face above her. Nikola’s, perhaps. Or even her father’s, and she wondered if this had been the face her mother watched as she, Jadranka, had come into being.

  He placed a boot in the center of her chest and smiled in the dancing light of the fire.

  Chapter 19

  The explosion made the morning newscast in New York City. Katarina was watching the television with half an eye as she buttered toast, and Jazmin readied the children for summer camp in the next room. Ana was asleep upstairs, but Magdalena had not yet stumbled in from wherever she had been spending her nights, a mystery Katarina had so far resisted the urge to ask about.

  The volume was turned low, and so she did not hear the newscaster describe the suspected meth lab, nor did she see the man with the shaved head being led out of a Queens apartment building in the early morning hours, turning his face—spectral in the camera light—into the shadow of a squad car. Had she been listening, it might have registered that his name was Croatian, but he meant nothing to her and she would not have recognized his face.

  It was Jazmin who saw the wreckage of the house, the charred debris spread across the property as if the grass itself had combusted, beams of wood still smoldering as news helicopters circled overhead. Passing through the kitchen on the trail of a stray shoe, she clucked her tongue at the screen and then exited again, prompting Katarina to look up in time to see a sooty sheet and T-shirt hanging from a laundry line. And while the cameras returned in the next instant to the newscaster’s face, Katarina lowered her knife to the counter as if the blood supply to her hand had run out.