The First Rule of Swimming (26 page)

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,” she 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.

Fairy houses, she remembered suddenly. Her sister had built fairy houses as a child, taught by a German-speaking summer visitor who had shown her how to build the tiny structures with stones and sticks. He had been accompanied by his two children. Little girls, Magdalena seemed to remember. Jadranka had spent the afternoon with them, continuing to construct the houses for years afterwards, decorating their pitched roofs with bougainvillea blossoms, pinecones, and sea glass.

Once, as a joke, Magdalena had brought her the bleached spines of a long-dead sea urchin. “You can build a booby trap to keep intruders out,” she had teased her sister. But Jadranka declined, telling her sister in utter seriousness that she did not wish to booby-trap anybody.

There it was again, and Magdalena stopped. This time a pile of stones in the shape of a long and winding snake.

Up ahead, Ana had also slowed. She was wheezing softly, and Magdalena was about to suggest turning back—not for the first time—when her mother stopped. “Look,” she ordered, staring at something on the ground.

But now Magdalena saw only ferns and leaves and rotting branches.

Her mother dropped stiffly to her knees, crawling forward a few feet. “Look,” she ordered again, so that Magdalena knelt as well, the damp earth soaking the fabric of her jeans.

It was when Magdalena followed the line of her mother’s arm that she saw it, the long sticks heaped in an orderly pile. They were all approximately the same length and beyond them was another pile. And another.

She sat back. The sticks were as straight as arrows, each with a sharpened point.

“It’s her,” Ana said.

They heard her before they saw her, the scraping of stone against wood like something burrowing through dry ground.

Magdalena was on her feet in an instant. Ahead in a clearing, a woman lowered her rock. She looked as if she were building a raft in preparation for a flood. Her back was white, her bra soaked through with sweat and blood. But even in the shadows Magdalena recognized her.

“Jadranka.”

The figure picked up another stick, as if she had not heard her name. “Is he coming?” she asked.

Magdalena covered the ground quickly, pulling her sister to her feet. She placed a hand on Jadranka’s cheek, which was hot to the touch and smeared with dirt. Looking down, Magdalena saw that her sister was shoeless, and that she still held a stick in one hand like a spear.

“What are you doing?” Magdalena asked softly, aware that Jadranka’s hair was matted with blood.

At this question her sister dropped the spear. “Getting ready,” she said, as though it should have been obvious.

“For what?”

“For when he comes back.”

“He isn’t coming back,” Magdalena told her. “And you’re bleeding.”

“Am I?”

Jadranka’s eyes glittered like a madwoman’s, and Magdalena realized then that she was feverish. “We need to find a hospital,” she said.

Magdalena was several inches shorter, but when Jadranka did not respond, she pulled her younger sister forward until her face was buried in Magdalena’s neck, her eyes watering at the burnt and metallic smell of Jadranka’s hair. When she lifted an uncertain hand to Jadranka’s head, she realized that the back was singed all the way to the scalp and that the blood came from a cut in her scalp. “We need—” she began again, but Jadranka cut her off.

“You’re sure he’s gone?”

Magdalena was suddenly afraid to speak, uncertain what it was that her sister was asking. In her mind she was already guiding Jadranka through the woods, her sister’s body like a flame.

And so it was their mother who responded. “They’re all gone,
mila.
”

L
uka is getting ready to walk out, to shed this body that has become a cage. They will have to burn the sheets, he thinks with some regret. They were a part of his wife’s dowry and, in their day, as white as the flakes he had once seen fall during a freak snowstorm upon the sea. But he is certain that his body has discolored them, that it has left an oblong shadow in the shape of a man.

There are a great many footsteps in the house now. They tramp up and down the stairs, and he thinks that he can even hear them up on the roof. They shuffle through the courtyard beneath his window, and in the lane beyond the wall. The gate opens and closes, and he can tell that the latch is rusting because of the scraping sound it makes.

He knows that it is the salt air that corrodes everything. It eats away at bolts and paper clips, the metal parts of engines and the undercarriages of cars.

His daughter had owned a fancy silver mirror once. He remembers that the rust had risen in furrows behind the glass, and that each day she looked in it there was less of her.

What he knows: his son has returned and weeps in the chair beside his bed. He speaks strangely, as if he has forgotten how, but the timbre of his voice is the same.

His daughter worries at her necklace in the corner of the room, where the longest shadows stretch. She twists it until the thing snaps and its beads scatter across the floor.

Lena searches the floor on her hands and knees, retrieving the tiny pieces of perforated glass. She drops them into a tarnished metal dustpan so that each one makes a sound like a fat raindrop hitting a sturdy leaf. She misses a few but comments that she will search for them another time.

He knows by the way her voice tightens that this will happen on a day when he is already gone, but he also knows that they will never find all the beads. That they have slid so far between the wooden floorboards that they will remain there for as long as the house is standing, and he smiles very faintly at this thought. Somewhere, centuries from this day, perhaps, a child will discover one of the beads and roll it around his mouth with his tongue.

He knows that his wife sits at her kitchen table below him. That while she is relieved to have them all surrounding her, she also longs for those days of quiet when she heard only his breathing in the house, when she thought that he could continue like this for as long as they both were living and that when the appointed hour came, she would crawl into the bed as well and walk out with him.

Rosmarina,
he longs to tell her despite her devoutness.
It is my final destination.

The island has a history that stretches back through centuries of settlers and marauders, centuries of people who, like him, have been blessed by chance. Its residents’ bloodlines are so mixed that untangling them would be as impossible as it is pointless. In addition to the happy unions that propagate the human race, he wonders now how many rapes and murders, how many kidnappings, illicit trysts, and unhappy couplings have gone into the making of any one person.

But the island is constant. It existed before the name by which it is now known. There have been Greek names, Illyrian names, names that existed before man became conceited enough to record his own history. Those names are lost in the present. The bays that he has navigated have seen generations of fishermen and sailors, naval battles and deaths at sea. And the bays will remain, he thinks, long after he is gone.

Days collide and the sea becomes the air. There are fish swimming through his room, and the smell of paint rises from the courtyard beneath his window.

He knows that it is Lena, that the others will leave again and she alone will stay. She has whispered something else in his ear, and he imagines that she is carrying a little girl, dark and strong, who will learn to fish the channel between Rosmarina and its neighbors like her mother. Perhaps it is the grandchild of this girl’s grandchild who will one day find the bead, but he knows that these things are by no means predetermined.

He imagines that Marin stands behind Magdalena in the courtyard, that he is watching her prepare the boat, at last, for the sea. He imagines her small hands sanding the wood and applying the varnish, just as he has shown her.

His daughter sits on the stone bench, smoking and watching them. She refuses to sing, a little wearily, and tells them that she doesn’t bother to remember any of the old songs anymore. Her brother tells her that this would be a mean trick: to forget exactly the things she chooses.

And it is Magdalena who begins to sing, her voice out of tune and missing some of the notes altogether, so that her mother laughs and tells her that it’s a good thing she likes her job because she should not hope for a career in music. And so Ana gives in at last.

It is an old song that she sings. It was popular in his youth, but he cannot remember it being sung in years, decades perhaps. It is like finding something he has not realized is missing.

When she has finished, his wife’s voice calls out that it is time for dinner, and he hears them filing into the house below him, and their voices disappear from the garden the same way that stars fade one by one at dawn.

He picks the same track he has walked a thousand times, the one that leads upward through the town and to the olive groves beneath the Peak. When he arrives, the light is thin and he must feel his way from trunk to trunk. He finds the sturdiest among them, and as he buries his face at its base, he hears his sisters laughing from the ground.