The First Rule of Swimming: A Novel

by Courtney Angela Brkic

  “Your chess partner,” she said flatly.

  “That’s right,” Damir told her with no hint of irony. “You came up during our last game.”

  Professor Barić cleared his throat a little anxiously. “One runs into so few people from Rosmarina, you see. And I really did think that it was worth looking through the newspapers.”

  She stared at Damir. His dark brown hair was shorter than she remembered. His body, too, was different, as if the substance that composed it had hardened like clay, making his shoulders more pronounced and deepening the grooves in his suntanned face. Beneath his smart clothing, she knew, there was an oval birthmark on his shoulder and a scar that ran down one knee. And there would be new marks, of unknown shape and location, although his newspaper had reported the shrapnel wounds from Iraq as non–life threatening, just as his mother had promised.

  What did he see when he looked at her, she wondered?

  But his face gave no indication of what he might be thinking.

  Chapter 11

  His car stood in front of Professor Barić’s house.

  “I nearly missed you,” he said, descending the front steps and turning to look up at her. He made his voice light. “You wanted to make a break for it.”

  It was more a statement of fact than an accusation. As she followed him down the steps, regarding him with equal caution, she was aware from the way the curtains trembled that the professor continued to watch them from his living room window. She nodded.

  “What stopped you?”

  “The door was locked.”

  He smiled at this. “Foiled,” he told her softly and unlocked the car doors.

  Going for a drive was his idea, and for the first few minutes they said nothing. They turned from Professor Barić’s quiet street to one with a profusion of restaurants and fabric stores, throngs of people pushing past each other on the pavements and into the crosswalks.

  “I saw your sister,” Damir said as they waited at one of these. “That’s why I wanted to see you.”

  Magdalena met his eyes in surprise. “When?” she demanded.

  “A few weeks ago. She invited me to an exhibit at your cousin’s gallery.”

  Jadranka had said nothing about this in her letters, and Magdalena felt herself sink into the leather of the passenger seat. “You didn’t mention it when you telephoned,” she told him with a frown.

  “I wanted to see you,” he told her again. He reached over to touch the back of her hand. “I really do want to help you, Lena. Can you believe that?”

  Magdalena stared at his hand. When she did not answer, he returned it to the wheel.

  “What did she say?”

  “We talked about New York, mostly. She said she was happy here. She told me that she was painting again.” He turned onto another street, this one with shops whose awnings were covered in Arabic. “And naturally you came up.”

  She did not doubt it. But there was something unsettling about knowing she had been discussed. She could just imagine it—You know her, stubborn as a Rosmarina mule, a real island fixture these days—and so she changed the subject, telling him evenly, “I don’t understand her disappearing act. It’s not like her.”

  “She’s disappeared before,” he pointed out.

  “But never from me.”

  He was silent for a moment. “No,” he acknowledged. “And in the beginning you disappeared together.”

  It was true. The first time, they had run away as children to avoid going to live with their mother in Split, a miscalculation that had only stoked their stepfather’s rage. The second time had been later, during the war, and Magdalena knew that this was the disappearance he referred to.

  “Jadranka was looking for her father,” Magdalena told him.

  “And you?”

  She had been looking after Jadranka, who would not be convinced to abandon her harebrained plan, no matter how much Magdalena railed against it. “I’ll tell Dida,” she had threatened her sister in desperation, causing Jadranka to counter with her own threat: “Do it and I’ll never speak to you again.”

  And although Jadranka had been only fourteen at the time, Magdalena did not doubt for a moment that she meant what she said.

  “You didn’t even tell me where you were going,” Damir reminded her now.

  “No,” Magdalena conceded. The subterfuge had been difficult at the time, because that was the period of telling Damir everything. But she had known that Jadranka would go, with or without her. That if Magdalena raised the alarm, her sister would find a way of leaving the island and going in search of her father’s shadow. Jadranka had been so utterly convinced that time, so certain that she knew precisely where to find him, that even today Magdalena remembered the ferocious way she said, “You’re either with me or against me, Lena.”

  Damir sighed. “Who knows why she didn’t tell you this time? People don’t always make sense.”

  This, at least, was something they could agree upon, and as she turned to study his familiar profile, his eyelashes still as black and glossy as the spines of a sea urchin, she felt her resolve waver for the briefest moment.

  She and Jadranka had made it all the way to a military hospital near the front line in Dubrovnik. They had come close to the war without actually stepping inside it. But wandering that hospital, Magdalena had seen all she needed to see of it: the beds of wounded crowding the hallways, the way some of the men—not much older than herself—had reached out their hands to touch the two sisters, as if wanting to make sure they were flesh and blood.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” one, a complete stranger who was missing an arm, had demanded. He had looked from Jadranka to Magdalena, his eyes wild with panic. “I told you a thousand times to stay at home.”

  Two years after that, the draft notice had come for Damir, its blunt lettering returning her to that hospital where all the sheets were stained with blood. They had spent the hours after its arrival curled tightly together on his bed, and she still remembered the way he had promised her that it would change nothing, and that when he came back life would begin again. And she—fool of fools—had believed such a thing possible.

  They had been lying to themselves. After his return from the war, they had driven around like this, in a borrowed car, Damir navigating the dark streets of Zagreb, Magdalena strapped into the passenger side, feeling for all the world like the seatbelt was the only thing pinning her to the earth.

  I can’t go back to Rosmarina, he had said, pulling over to the side of the road so that they could face each other.

  For years afterwards, she believed that he had betrayed her. Of all people, he best understood what the island meant to her. He remembered her returning from that year in Split so quiet and thin that her former classmates had not recognized her, despite their teacher’s insistence. But you must remember, children. This is Magdalena.

  It was only since her grandfather’s illness that she allowed herself to consider a different explanation for his departure: that the war had changed the course of his life the way an earthquake can crack a road and leave it pointing in a different direction. The way the year in Split had changed hers.

  “I mean it, Lena,” he told her now. “I want to help.”

  She studied the fine lines around his eyes, the scar that started at the base of his throat and disappeared under his shirt. It was shiny and red, and she had not noticed it at first. “I know you do,” she told him softly.

  A subway trestle loomed ahead of them, and Magdalena told him to drop her there. For a moment he looked as though he would object, but he pulled over.

  “You never know,” he said as he turned off the car’s engine. “Your sister might decide to come back to see her work on exhibit.”

  Magdalena started at this. “What do you mean?”

  He looked surprised. “Your cousin promised to put one of her paintings in a group show this summer. Didn’t Jadranka tell you?”

  She shook her head.

  Neithe
r her sister nor Katarina had breathed a word of it, and she frowned at the subway track above them, the way the entire apparatus now shook with the approach of a train.

  He took her hand in his and squeezed it, and this time she did not pull away so quickly. “Maybe your sister wanted to surprise you.”

  “Maybe,” she said.

  Before she got out he gave her his card. It had been inside his breast pocket and was the same temperature as his hand. She slid it into the back pocket of her jeans without really looking at it, but all the way into Manhattan she was conscious of its warmth.

  When Magdalena returned to her cousin’s house, there was a note on the kitchen counter explaining that Katarina would be at her gallery all evening. Neither the children nor Jazmin were anywhere in evidence, and for a moment Magdalena stood in the foyer, listening to the barely audible whirring of a washing machine somewhere within the house. Where the washing machine was located, she had not discovered. Her dirty clothes disappeared as if carried away by phantom hands and only reappeared when they had been washed and folded.

  The guest room where she slept was unlike her sister’s, where the only furnishings were a mattress with a pine bed frame and a matching dresser. The curtains in Magdalena’s room were a deep, burnished yellow, and the silk bedspread was edged with a border in the same color. There was a painting in black and white that Magdalena had decided depicted either falling rain or the vertical lines of a bar code, and the rug rested on dark floorboards so shiny that she could see her reflection in their surface.

  Ordinarily she took her shoes off on the bedroom’s threshold, afraid of tracking the city’s dirt across its floor, but today she turned and descended the stairs again.

  She did not know what she was looking for, but as she wandered through the first-floor rooms, she was conscious of seeing things in a different light. She had already searched her sister’s studio several times, surprised to see that Jadranka had not left even a single sketch behind. And so she read the titles of the books in the living room and pored through the extensive notes on a calendar that stood at attention on the kitchen counter. It was a thick book with pictures of paintings from the Museum of Modern Art, and she found a two-month-old entry for Tabitha’s dental appointment in her sister’s hand.

  She did not know why Katarina had not mentioned her plans to exhibit Jadranka’s work. The omission made her uneasy. Briefly she considered the possibility that it was an offer her cousin had retracted. But Jadranka’s mention of it to Damir meant she was fairly sure it would happen.

  Why, then, had she not mentioned it in any of her letters?

  When Magdalena turned the handle to Michael’s office, she was surprised to feel the door move beneath her hands. Her cousin’s husband worked long hours for a firm in the financial district and when he was home spent most of his time here, with the door closed. He traveled on a weekly basis, jetting to places like Geneva and Singapore, and he was in one of those locations now, doing something—Katarina had intimated—that involved lengthy discussions and vast sums of money.

  Magdalena could not tell if Michael’s frequent absences made her cousin lonely. In pictures throughout the house, he and the children smiled from fishing trips and from atop snowcapped mountains, their faces rubbed raw with wind, their ski goggles reflecting other mountains. There were few shots of Katarina herself, and so Magdalena understood that her cousin had been the photographer in most of them. But there was something unsettling about the sheer number of pictures, as if Katarina were trying to take hold of each moment, to pin it like a butterfly in a shadow box.

  “The children are easily bored,” Katarina explained. “That’s why when we go somewhere on vacation we have to pick a place with lots of activities for them.” When Magdalena pointed out that they could come to Rosmarina, her cousin only mumbled something about its inaccessibility from the mainland.

  Her eyes dropped to the documents on Michael’s desk—agreements, fiscal projections, a clipping from the Wall Street Journal in which she saw his name. She contemplated opening the desk’s drawers, but the cat, an alien-looking Siamese that had followed her into the office, was watching her from atop a bookcase with unblinking eyes and an expression that seemed to say, I know what you’re doing.

  “I don’t even know what I’m doing, cat,” she told him in soft Croatian, and decided against any further trespass.

  The cat accompanied her when she left the study, weaving almost urgently around her ankles when she stopped outside her cousin’s studio door. But while the doors to all the other rooms stood open, the studio was locked. And when she lowered her eye to the keyhole, she could make out nothing in the gloom.

  A short time later the children returned, Christopher making the sound of an airplane and Tabitha telling Jazmin—who had been drafted into ferrying the children around since Jadranka’s disappearance—about a computer game she wanted.

  Jadranka’s letters had prepared Magdalena for the children’s packed schedule of art classes and playdates. They were as different from the children Magdalena taught as the earth is from the sky. On Rosmarina, children much younger than Christopher knew the tracks that led to the Peak. They spent hours outdoors, in bands that roamed the island. But Katarina’s son and daughter had milky complexions, even in summer, and were as helpless as baby mice.

  “You have to draw something,” Christopher ordered Magdalena when she passed the open door of their playroom.

  “Like what?”

  He looked at his sister. “Like us.”

  “I don’t really draw,” she told him with a smile.

  She was not used to being ordered about by children, but she missed the way her pupils filled her Rosmarina classroom with their laughter and shouts, disrupting the neat rows of desks and spilling into the aisles. And so she joined them at the table, making an attempt at the children’s profiles, satisfied in the end that she had gotten the proportions of their faces. But when she presented the sketches, she saw immediately the guarded look that they exchanged.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  Tabitha shook her head.

  “Can you keep a secret?” Christopher wanted to know.

  “Of course.”

  He wore a sly expression when he went to one of the easels, as if knowing he was doing something for which he might be punished. Peeling back the empty sheets of paper, he removed one sheet from beneath and delivered it to her at the table.

  Magdalena stared at the multiple studies of the children: Christopher in profile, Tabitha listening to her headphones, both of them sitting at the table where she now sat, working in rapt attention on some project.

  “These aren’t even the best ones,” he told her.

  “No?” she asked.

  “Mom took those.”

  “Chris,” Tabitha said in a warning voice.

  “Why would she take them?” Magdalena asked.

  “She said we couldn’t have them anymore after Jadranka left.”

  Tabitha had returned to her own drawing, shading something a furious shade of red.

  “Don’t tell,” Christopher told her. “Mom would get mad.”

  Magdalena frowned, “Why would she get mad?”

  But Christopher only shrugged.

  It took twenty minutes to pick the lock on her cousin’s studio door. The children were still in their playroom, and Jazmin had mercifully disappeared to some distant corner of the house.

  The metal cocktail stick that Magdalena found in a kitchen drawer broke immediately in the old-fashioned keyhole. Next, she tried a wire hanger. Picking locks had been a prized art among the children in her Split neighborhood, and while she had never been particularly good at it, she had once managed to lock her stepfather into his room with the bent tine of a fork.

  When the lock gave, it made a soft clicking sound beneath the pressure of her fingers. A tight pain between her shoulder blades released simultaneously, as if she had been holding her breath and now, finally, could exhale.


  Katarina had skipped this room when giving her the tour of the house, but even from the threshold Magdalena could see that the studio had been decorated as deliberately as the other rooms. The dark wood of the bookcases matched the large table that stood at the exact center of the room. Plain, almost industrial, lamps hung from the ceiling, and a square of blank canvas stood upon an easel.

  The room was eerily neat, a realization that prompted Magdalena to another: unlike Jadranka’s narrow studio, where the floor was spattered with paint, this one appeared barely used. Dust covered many surfaces, and when Magdalena moved forward to inspect the brushes, it was obvious that the majority had never touched paint. Katarina often spent time in here after returning from her gallery or when the children were asleep. But whatever her cousin did in the room, Magdalena now realized in surprise, seldom included painting.

  The table had several drawers, and she opened one to find an assortment of bills and brochures. In the next, beneath some pads of blank paper, she found news clippings about Katarina’s gallery opening from several years before. One reporter had been enthusiastic about this welcome newcomer to the Chelsea gallery scene, but another was more backhanded in his assessment: With her Park Avenue looks and her husband’s substantial resources, Mrs. Pennington is a former art student who has put away her hobby to turn dealer in the arts.

  It was the word hobby that made Magdalena hesitate. Mildly derisive, it was reminiscent of Katarina’s telephone conversations about artists she considered mere dilettantes. “There’s no courage there,” she said of one exhibit in a rival gallery. “He might as well be painting wallpaper,” she said of another.

  But just as Magdalena began to feel sorry for her cousin, she found a sheaf of sketches in her sister’s hand. They were in a leather-bound folder on a bookshelf, and while there was nothing remarkable about them—they were merely studies of the children, of Katarina and Michael, of church spires and trees in Central Park—they were badly creased and torn in places, as if they had been balled up and then smoothed out again.