The First Rule of Swimming (23 page)

Adding her grandparents’ telephone number had been an afterthought, but once she did it she realized that the intention had been there all along, from the moment she had stepped into Marin’s Brooklyn restaurant.

“This much I can do for you,” she muttered to herself, though even she did not know to whom she was speaking.

She walked into town to mail the canvas. After a week alone, it was strange to see people on the streets of Shelter Island Heights, shopping for antiques and licking ice cream cones. She felt at a great distance from them.

“No return address?” The clerk in the post office asked, regarding the painting, which she had packed in brown paper and twine.

“No,” she told him.

“Anything hazardous, fragile, liquid?”

She hesitated, and his watery blue eyes searched her face.

She shook her head.

A collection of postcards stood by the post office’s front door. As she paid postage for the canvas, she briefly considered writing to her sister.

Magdalena would be done with school by now. She would be painting their grandfather’s boat and making repairs to the house, doing all the things she never had time for while she was teaching. Jadranka wondered whether their grandfather had finally slipped loose of this world, and for a terrible moment she pictured their grandmother draped in black. Most of all, though, she wondered what her sister knew.

For several years after her own discovery that she and Magdalena were half sisters, island children had made a game of guessing her father’s identity. It was as if they sensed this knowledge the moment she herself attained it, and they had taunted her by naming all the island’s drunks and village idiots. “Some German tourist!” they snickered within earshot. And their mother was a whore.
Kurva.
A word both soft and harsh, like an axe splitting wet wood.

Magdalena had bloodied a boy’s nose once. Jadranka didn’t remember precisely what he said, but she remembered the rage that surged through her sister’s body as she bent and hoisted a rock.

Later, at home, Jadranka had crawled beneath the bed they shared. “Does it mean that we’re not really sisters?” she asked between sobs.

“Of course it doesn’t,” Magdalena had responded, fiercely wedging herself next to Jadranka. “You can’t listen to stupid people.”

In the Shelter Island post office, Jadranka turned away from the selection of postcards. How would her sister answer that question, she wondered, if she knew that Jadranka’s father was responsible for her own father’s death?

She was at loose ends after mailing the painting. She was not ready to abandon the greenhouse and, anyway, did not know where to go next. She needed time to figure these things out, to figure herself out, as if her very anatomy had changed. She felt like an alien life-form who, despite years of thinking she is human, suddenly learns the opposite.

She was dimly aware that her hair had grown wild and that her lips were badly chapped. But she was glad that she did not own a compact and that the surface of the ocean was too rough to show her reflection. Otherwise she might have spent all of the second week staring at her face. She had always looked so different from Magdalena.

When the heart is heavy, the hands crave work.
This had always been her grandmother’s motto, and she followed it now, taking to the forest during daylight hours. There, she became an architect of sorts, building anything that took her fancy: a flimsy wooden bridge between stones, a pattern of green leaves on the dark earth. When she was a child, an island visitor—from Switzerland perhaps?—had shown her how to build fairy houses, tiny structures of stone and bark, and now she built an entire settlement around the twining roots of a massive oak. Rain would eventually demolish it, but she did not mind.

It was only at night that she missed her sister. She had never gone so long without hearing Magdalena’s voice. Most of all, she missed her practicality, the way she rolled her eyes at old wives’ tales and scoffed at dreams. If Magdalena were lying in the greenhouse, the tree branch that brushed the glass would be just a tree branch.

For Magdalena only two things were sacred: Rosmarina and Goran Babi
ć
. As a child, the mention of her dead father gave her a dreamy look. She hoped to grow tall like him, she had confided to Jadranka long ago, a desire that did not in the end translate into reality. She did not drink coffee for several years when she learned that he had avoided it.

During their time in Split, Magdalena once found a piece of paper with his handwriting among their mother’s things. Goran Babi
ć
had been making a list of supplies he needed to buy for his boat, and his daughter took this list making as proof that he had not killed himself as they said on Rosmarina.

“See?” she told Jadranka triumphantly. “It isn’t true.”

The piece of paper was one of the last objects he had touched that she, too, could touch. Their mother had sold most of his things and given away anything that she judged of little value. When asked, Ana would say that she wanted to make a fresh start with Nikola, who did not like the idea of her dead husband’s possessions lying about.

Magdalena carried the piece of paper around in her pocket for months. It grew soft as tissue, and the writing began to fade. That year for her birthday, Ana gave her a large, square locket, and she folded the paper tightly and placed it inside.

Just weeks later, after their foiled escape to Rosmarina, their mother ripped the locket from her neck. “Stop living in the past!” she had screamed, and flung it through the Split apartment window. It traveled five floors down to the courtyard, and Magdalena wailed as she tore down each flight of stairs, Jadranka at her heels. They spent hours searching but never found it among the broken glass and cigarette butts.

At the end of the second week, Jadranka ventured into town again, no longer satisfied with crackers and peanut butter. Her money was running out. She had less than two hundred dollars left—the remainder of her earnings from working in the restaurant—and that would not last much longer.

She spent some time walking the streets of Shelter Island Heights. Comparing the menus in several restaurants, she picked the least expensive, an Italian restaurant with scuffed wooden floors and plastic tablecloths.

She knew already what she wanted, and ordered a breaded chicken cutlet with a glass of water.

“That comes with potatoes or pasta,” the waitress told her.

“Pasta,” she said, hunger thrashing its tail in her stomach.

“And a side vegetable.”

It was as the waitress reeled off the list of possibilities that Jadranka saw the man with the shaved head walk in, his sunglasses on top of his head, his shoulders straining the fabric of his black T-shirt. She knew that he was Croatian, although she could not place him in that moment.

The waitress was looking at her expectantly.

“Broccoli,” Jadranka told her.

He owned the Croatian bar in Queens, she realized then. He had been rude to Theo, and a short time later Jadranka had made a flourish of leaving with her friend, letting the door slam shut behind them. But now Jadranka sank into her booth, pretending to study the paper placemat with interest. It had a map of Shelter Island on it, and she traced the shoreline with one absentminded finger.

He passed right by her table, and for a moment she thought that he would not notice her, but then she felt him stop. “I thought it was you,
mila,
” he told her in Croatian. “Where’s your friend?”

She looked up at him, feigning surprise. “Around,” she told him with a small smile.

“May I join you?”

“Sure,” she said after a split second of hesitation. “Why not?”

He slid into the booth across from her, smiling as though they were old friends. “What are you doing so far from home?”

She did not know if he meant from Croatia or from New York, and so she told him, “This and that.”

“Mysterious lady” was his response.

“That’s me.”

For a moment they simply stared at each other across the table. Then he chuckled and picked up the menu that the waitress had brought over. “What are you drinking?” he asked, eyeing her glass.

“Water,” she told him.

“Wine it is.”

She had known plenty of men like him in Split. Macho men who were equal parts charm and swagger, they called her names like
ljepotica
—beauty—and
princeza.
They bore tattoos of sharks and leopards and spent their spare time in dark gyms lifting weights. Many worked regular jobs, but some aspired to gangster status. Jadranka was adept at dealing with either type, flirting with them in cafés but letting them down easy at the end of an evening. She had a talent for keeping things light, so that no matter how single-mindedly they pursued her, she always parted with them on friendly terms.
Little
sister,
she had been called more than once, and the truth was that she had a soft spot for their streetwise wit.

“None for me,” she told him when the waitress brought a bottle of wine over, but he was already motioning for another glass.

“Jadranka,” he told her, and she was surprised that he remembered her name.

“Yes.”

“You’ve forgotten my name.”

She smiled in spite of herself. When she didn’t answer, he held out his hand across the table. “Darko,” he said. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

“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.

I
t 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 zna
ć
i
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 Babi
ć
’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 Babi
ć
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 Mori
ć
would remember, and for a moment Magdalena imagined peeling the dish towel back to reveal the Ana Babi
ć
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 Mori
ć
carrying his sister everywhere on his back.

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

But Ana Babi
ć
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 Mori
ć
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.