The First Rule of Swimming: A Novel

by Courtney Angela Brkic

  Jadranka was fond of that T-shirt and wore it often. She had designed the stylized picture of waves for a friend who ran a Split tattoo parlor, and the friend had been so pleased that he had repaid her by putting it on a shirt. The blue tones were startling against Jadranka’s pale skin, and it was one of the first items that Magdalena had looked for in her closet upstairs, taking its absence as further proof—Katarina knew—that her sister would not be back.

  Downstairs, the front door opened and closed, Magdalena’s footsteps echoing on the stairs. By the time she entered the kitchen, Katarina had turned the television’s volume up, despite the fact that a Labrador puppy was now advertising the softness of toilet paper.

  “Good morning,” Magdalena said stiffly behind her.

  But Katarina could not face her in light of this thing beginning to take shape.

  “Sit down,” she said instead of turning. “And listen.”

  The police had questioned Darko briefly in New York City before remanding him to New Jersey. Moments after hanging up the telephone with her local precinct, Katarina was navigating her car towards the Lincoln Tunnel, Magdalena staring intently at the slow-moving Buick in front of them as if she hoped to vaporize it through sheer will.

  “All this fuss over a shirt,” Ana muttered from the back. “That probably isn’t even hers.”

  “It’s hers,” Magdalena told her, but did not turn around.

  For the past hour the details of the newscast had been going through Magdalena’s head: Suspected illegal activity…neighbors evacuated…fire department on the scene. But at no point had there been any mention of a red-haired woman, and she clung to this fact.

  She had no doubt that it was the same Darko who owned the bar on Steinway Street, which she had called only two days before. The woman who answered in Croatian claimed never to have heard of Jadranka.

  Something about the exchange had struck Magdalena as strange at the time. Perhaps it was the way the woman covered the mouthpiece of the telephone, not entirely muffling the annoyed male response in the background. Or perhaps it was the woman’s voice, as artificially bright as a halogen bulb in winter: Sorry, but we’ve never heard of your sister.

  That couldn’t be right. According to Damir, every Croatian in Queens knew of Jadranka the red-haired Rosmarinka, who had disappeared somewhere among the tenements and subway tunnels of America.

  Magdalena and Damir had gone to the bar that night, standing for a few minutes on the pavement outside as music pulsed in raw waves each time the door swung open. Inside, a black light had made shirts and teeth glow like a haunted house. In many ways it resembled a discotheque from home, something she had not set foot in since her twenties. But there was a manic undercurrent to Club Darko that made Magdalena scan the women’s made-up faces uneasily, relieved that her sister was not among them.

  “Where’s Darko?” Damir had shouted to get the attention of a passing waitress.

  In the moment before she turned to point him out, Magdalena saw the man standing at the end of the bar, studying his mobile phone. He was easily three times her size, with the flattened nose of a prizefighter. Please don’t let that be him, she had thought as the waitress gestured in his direction.

  She did not so much walk towards him as launch herself in his direction, Damir at her heels. “Wait—” he was telling her.

  But the shaved head was already lifting at her approach.

  “I’m looking for my sister,” she said, raising her voice above the music. “Jadranka Babić.”

  He shrugged and turned away. “No idea.”

  It was the way he spoke without looking at her that had made her suspicious. “Are you sure?” she shouted, prompting a few of the men at the bar to look uneasily in her direction. “She came here a few months ago.”

  “A lot of people come here. Why would I remember any of them?” He continued to scroll through his telephone. When she did not move, he lifted his head at last. “Do you have a picture?”

  She fumbled in her purse for the photograph she carried, aware of his amusement as he watched her. When he took it, he whistled long and low. “Not bad,” he told her, handing it back. “I bet a girl like that gets up to all sorts of things. Are you sure she wants to be found?”

  Magdalena felt her eyes narrow. “Majmune,” she told him. “I’m surprised your knuckles don’t drag on the ground.”

  “Majmune?” he asked, the amused look still on his face. He pushed himself off the bar to his full height, and it was then that she saw the metal butt, half hidden by his jacket.

  She stared at it.

  “Time to leave,” he said to Damir.

  Ordinarily, Magdalena could sniff out danger the same way that a dog picked up the scent of blood. It was the only gift that Nikola had given her: this second sense, this ability to detect the savagery in others. It was enough for her to have a conversation with somebody or to lock eyes with them on the street. A single moment could tell her everything she needed to know. But still, the gun surprised her.

  She allowed Damir to propel her towards the exit, but when they reached the street, she shook him off. An alley ran alongside the bar, and she made for this, for the shadow at the far end. She braced herself against a wall just as he caught up with her.

  “Lena—” he said, but she was already bent over at the waist, the music from inside vibrating against her hand.

  The explosion had taken place in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, but Darko and two other men were being held at a police station in neighboring Morristown. When Magdalena arrived with Katarina and Ana, a detective led them to a small, windowless room. Short and broad shouldered, with a helmet of graying hair, the detective reminded Magdalena of the older Scandinavian visitors who descended upon Rosmarina in the off-season. She took their statement with the same single-mindedness those women exhibited when hiking up the Peak in matching anoraks.

  “When was the last time you heard from your sister?”

  “Nearly two months ago.”

  The detective wrote this down, then excused herself, returning a short time later with a plastic bag.

  It was Ana who began to moan, a sound that made the hair on Magdalena’s arms rise. Belatedly she understood that her mother believed a piece of Jadranka to be inside the bag. “Shut up,” she told her in fierce Croatian, angry that their mother would give up so easily.

  She recognized the T-shirt at once, despite the sooty perforations in the cloth. They looked like cigarette burns, but the detective hastened to explain that the holes had been caused by debris from the house’s explosion.

  “It was pure chance that the laundry line didn’t burn in the fire,” she told Magdalena. “The force of the explosion traveled up, and in the opposite direction.”

  She tapped her pencil against a photograph of the property, the first in a stack. Blackened ground extended from the charred wreckage of the house all the way to a line of trees. Magdalena studied it before passing it to her mother and cousin.

  Ana looked at the photographs mechanically, shaking her head at each one, but when she got to the single photograph of the laundry line—the T-shirt hanging beside a sheet—she stared at it.

  “What is it?” Katarina asked.

  Ana did not respond, studying the image as if she half-expected Jadranka to emerge in order to reclaim the T-shirt once again.

  The detective had been watching them during this interchange, and Magdalena addressed her in English, pointing at the design of blue waves in the plastic bag. “This is my sister’s.”

  The detective’s pen made a scratching sound as she added this detail—officially—to her report.

  Katarina straightened. “Have you found a body?”

  Magdalena glared at her, but the detective shook her head. She picked up an aerial shot of the wooded property. “Along the periphery of the fire are things we can recognize. These were thrown out during the explosion. But the center…”

  Magdalena looked at the charred black hole on the ph
oto beneath her finger.

  “We’re running tests now.”

  “But?” Magdalena prompted her.

  “The suspect has already admitted that a young woman matching your sister’s description was staying in the house, in an upstairs room.”

  Magdalena felt a sudden pain beneath her navel. It was like something clawing at her from the inside, and she was only dimly aware of the way that Katarina raised a hand to cover her face.

  “What did she say?” her mother muttered in Croatian, continuing to stare at the photograph of the laundry line. When Katarina translated the words, Ana’s mouth tightened, but she did not look up.

  The detective cleared her throat. Something else about her struck Magdalena as familiar, and for the first time as an adult, she saw very clearly the day when Pero Radić had come to inform them that her father was dead, the fisherman’s face wearing the same expression of pity and discomfort.

  “I’m sorry,” the woman was saying. “But the fire reached such high temperatures that there may not be anything left to find.”

  It would end like this, Magdalena thought. A dead end. A wall. A canvas so blank that it could render one blind. She would return to Rosmarina empty-handed, and her sister would be nothing more than a cautionary tale that island mothers told their children.

  There would be no more sketches. No more long red hairs, which Jadranka left behind her on every visit to the island, not knowing that Magdalena often rescued them from the bathroom floor, holding them in the light of the window before letting them float into the courtyard, believing that her sister would return for as long as there was a part of her on Rosmarina.

  Outside the police station, she leaned against Katarina’s car and closed her eyes.

  She felt hands on her arms, and for a moment she allowed herself to be pulled forward into her mother’s embrace—something she had not permitted for years, decades perhaps—before pushing her away. “I’m fine,” she mumbled.

  It was her mother who insisted on seeing the property.

  “Cousin Ana,” Katarina said softly. “I don’t think there’s anything to see.”

  “I don’t care,” Ana retorted. “I still want to see.”

  And so they drove there in silence, behind a school bus that stopped every few blocks, a stream of children pouring from its doors. More children—Magdalena thought—than could surely fit inside. And at every stop, groups of mothers waited for them. Mothers in shorts and T-shirts. Mothers with strollers. Mothers with ponytails, chatting to one another in the shade of oak trees.

  The property was at the end of a dead-end street and had been cordoned off by yellow police tape. The fire had been extinguished during the early morning hours, and the three women sat silently in the car, looking at the gap between the trees in front of them. A blackened chimney was all that remained, and off to one side, the laundry line was bizarrely white where the sheet and T-shirt had hung.

  “Strange that there aren’t any police cars,” Katarina muttered.

  There was nobody, in fact, the evacuated houses dark and ghostly on either side, the air so still that no leaf or blade of grass moved.

  Ana was the first to exit the car. She walked resolutely towards the police cordon, then stopped. She placed a hand on the yellow tape that was tied around the trunks of trees as if debating whether to snap it in two. Magdalena and Katarina did not move, and a moment later Ana returned, an intent look on her face. She walked to Magdalena’s side and opened the door.

  “Come,” she told her elder daughter.

  Magdalena ignored her.

  “Come, I said.”

  Magdalena wanted only to leave, to put as much distance between herself and that length of burnt ground, but Ana’s face was determined, and so she allowed her mother to pull her from the passenger seat.

  “I don’t think you’re supposed to—” Katarina began, but then fell silent.

  Her mother led her to the tape, then lifted it so that Magdalena could pass beneath. For a few moments, Ana paced back and forth inside the tape’s perimeter, nose lifted to the air, as her daughter watched.

  “She’s dead, Mama.”

  It had been a long time since Magdalena had called her mother by that name, and she did not know what made her use it now, but it caused Ana to turn slowly and approach Magdalena, who steeled herself for another embrace.

  Instead her mother took Magdalena by the arms and shook her. “The photograph,” she said.

  Magdalena frowned. “What are you talking about?”

  “Think, girl.”

  “You’ve lost your mind,” she said, throwing off her mother’s hands.

  But Ana had spied the laundry line. She approached it carefully, then pulled as if testing its tautness. “Think,” she repeated, more insistently this time, and turned.

  Magdalena only looked at her blankly.

  “Your grandfather’s stories.”

  Katarina was still sitting in the car. Through the windshield, the cousins’ eyes locked, and Magdalena shrugged.

  “When things were all right, when it was safe for your grandfather to come home, his sister always placed the sheet first, closest to the house.”

  “The sheet wasn’t first.”

  “Of course not,” her mother snapped in exasperation. “Your sister was trying to warn you.”

  “Me?”

  “Of danger.”

  Her mother had finally lost it, Magdalena thought in that moment.

  “Which means that she had time.”

  “For what?”

  But Ana did not answer, making a beeline for the trees at the back of the property.

  Magdalena watched her go. She wanted only to return to her cousin’s car, to fall asleep and wake up to find that she was back on Rosmarina. But when she looked in Katarina’s direction, a squad car was approaching with silent, flashing lights.

  Katarina had seen it, too. She got out of the car and closed the door, turning to look at her cousin. “Go,” she mouthed.

  Magdalena’s mother was surprisingly quick. For a middle-aged woman who had lived three decades in a city of stone and concrete, she navigated the uneven ground with remarkable agility.

  “For Christ’s sake, slow down,” Magdalena told her, following the back that disappeared every few seconds only to reappear, the cheap yellow material of her blouse—doubtless purchased from one of the stalls in Split’s marketplace—bobbing like a flashlight.

  But her mother ignored her.

  Magdalena’s anger built as they went deeper into the woods. It was their mother’s fault that they were here. Her fault that Jadranka was dead.

  At this final realization, she stopped. “It’s because of you!” she shouted at her mother’s back.

  Ana slowed for only a moment.

  “All of this happened because of you.”

  She moved out of sight again, and for a moment Magdalena thought she had not heard, but then a retort came floating back: “Poor Magdalena. Always crying about the past.”

  In that moment, Magdalena wanted to abandon her mother to the spiders and mosquitoes, to the vines that hung from the trees like nooses, and the burrs that had already lodged themselves in her socks. But they had come far enough that she was unsure of the direction back.

  “My father killed himself because of you!” she shouted at the underbrush.

  Something rustled in front of her, but it was only a squirrel, and Magdalena dropped onto the decomposing trunk of a fallen tree. She bent forward and pressed her forehead into the heels of her hands.

  Her mother’s return was more laborious, and Magdalena did not look up even when two feet in flat cork sandals appeared in front of hers, the stockings around the ankles shredded and flecked with blood.

  Ana’s voice, when it came, was more tired than angry. “Look here, girl, you think I went with him by choice?”

  Magdalena lifted her head in shock. “What?”

  But Ana had already turned. “None of your business,” sh
e said, over her shoulder.

  Magdalena started after her. But her foot caught on something—a root or a vine—and she landed in bracken with thorns so sharp that she cried out in spite of herself.

  When Ana retraced her steps a second time, she stood above her daughter for a long moment, the woods so dark that Magdalena could barely see the features of her face.

  “I’m caught,” she told her mother miserably, bucking so that the bracken shook.

  In the end it was mainly her hair that pinned her to the ground, caught in the brambles of that bush, and both women were silent as Ana untangled it.

  “You never said anything,” Magdalena accused her, still lying on the ground.

  But Ana put a finger to her daughter’s lips, a gesture that made Magdalena feel unexpectedly like weeping.

  “Why didn’t you?”

  Her mother lowered her head, and instinctively Magdalena lifted her face as she had once done long ago at bedtime. Before Split. Before Jadranka, perhaps. But her mother did not kiss her forehead. She took each of Magdalena’s ears in her hands, not painfully, but not gently either. “Some things,” she said, “belong only to the people who lived them.”

  Magdalena thought that they must be miles from the road now. Miles from Katarina’s car and the quick talking that her cousin must be doing to explain why she was parked at the scene of a crime. Or perhaps they were not far away at all. Magdalena had lost all sense of direction, following her mother silently for the last five minutes, so that she was not sure if they had walked a straight path or in circles.

  Several times Magdalena thought that she saw things in the wood: a symmetrical scattering of stones or leaves that formed a pattern on the surfaces of large rocks. But each time she investigated these configurations, she decided that nature had left them there by chance.