The First Rule of Swimming (16 page)

J
adranka’s letters from America had described coffee shops that teemed even at three in the morning and dreadlocked artists who filled pavements with chalk drawings. She wrote about the musical buskers who performed on moving subway trains—mariachi bands, earnest folk musicians with beards and baby faces, a mournful accordionist—and Magdalena knew her sister well enough to picture Jadranka digging into her pocket for whatever loose change she could give them.

On her days off, Jadranka liked to wander the city, and she had spent one spring afternoon watching grizzled men play chess in Washington Square Park. She sketched the concentration on their faces and the hands that hovered birdlike above the pieces, and she included a few of these drawings in a letter to Magdalena.
This guy told me that the world is my oyster,
she had written beneath the sketch of a man whose broad smile revealed a missing tooth.

But to Magdalena the city brimmed more with pandemonium than opportunity, and from the moment she stepped outside the airport terminal, New York assaulted her with its noise, with its smell of gasoline, its chipped concrete and litter-covered streets. Traffic snarled, and a barely contained chaos rumbled upward from the subway tunnels, so that the pavement trembled beneath her feet.

Jadranka’s letters had also contained lively accounts of her duties in their cousin’s household. Each day, she dropped the children off at school—a place where limousines vied for position in the street—then picked them up again. In the afternoons she accompanied them to Central Park, where bench after bench of foreign nannies rocked babies to sleep. In the evenings, she helped Tabitha with her homework and made sure that Christopher brushed his teeth instead of merely running his toothbrush under the tap, an old trick with which she was well acquainted from her own childhood.

In her spare time, she had been helping Katarina prepare for an autumn exhibit at her gallery, though she had mentioned this only briefly in her letters.

“There’s still so much left to do,” Katarina explained to Magdalena as they looked through photographs on the evening of her arrival. It was a sentiment that hung in the air between them until Katarina suggested, a little too brightly, that Jadranka might yet return in time. “It’s only June.”

Katarina’s outward appearance had changed dramatically since that summer on Rosmarina. The awkward, pudgy girl had been replaced by a slender woman who wore designer sunglasses and appeared on the society page of the
New York Times
. But the eyes that studied Magdalena were the same as she remembered, hungrily taking in every detail.

Looking through the photographs had been Katarina’s idea, and Magdalena studied the way her sister played with the children in Central Park and at the family’s beach house, in a place called Shelter Island. There were pictures from a gallery opening, Jadranka dressed in a green silk dress that still hung in her closet upstairs. It was a striking color that showed off the paleness of her shoulders, but Magdalena had the sensation that the smiling face she gazed upon—the one that resembled Jadranka in every way—was different from the one she remembered from a few short months before.

“She fit right in,” Katarina was telling her. “People in the art world can be biting, but she bit right back, especially as her English got better. She’s a quick study and there’s nothing provincial about her.”

Magdalena tensed.

“I didn’t mean—” Katarina began in dismay.

“Don’t worry about it.”

But Katarina shook her head. “I used to be jealous of you and your sister, of the fact that you lived on the island when I had to live in Pittsburgh.”

“That’s not what you said that summer,” Magdalena reminded her. “You kept telling us all the ways Pittsburgh was better.”

Katarina snorted. “You’ve never seen Pittsburgh.”

Magdalena shrugged, but her cousin placed a hand on her arm. “You have to forgive me, Lena,” she said, squeezing it. “I said a lot of stupid things back then.”

It was the closest they came to discussing what Katarina had revealed that summer so many years ago. In the next few days, she described how Jadranka had learned to make grilled-cheese sandwiches, how she had taught the children a new card game and a trick with vinegar and baking soda, but she did not return to the subject of Rosmarina.

The autumn exhibit Katarina had mentioned was three months away, and so Magdalena suspected that her cousin’s frequent absences had as much to do with discomfort as with any pressing business. During her explanations of deliveries or lighting mishaps, Katarina’s hands moved constantly. They worried at her hair or rubbed invisible spots on her sleeve.

“It’s okay, Katica,” Magdalena finally told her. “Jadranka is a grown woman. It isn’t your fault that she ran off.”

The nickname—which Magdalena’s grandfather had used that summer—won a small smile from Katarina, but she continued to twist her wedding ring.

Magdalena had met Katarina’s husband, Michael, only once. A dark-haired man who wore Clark Kent glasses, he had mixed her a gin and tonic on the afternoon of her arrival, and they had chatted in perfunctory English. But he traveled frequently for work, and Magdalena had not seen him in the days since.

In the end it was Jazmin, the housekeeper, who provided Magdalena with a map of the city, explaining that streets increased numerically from south to north, and avenues from east to west. A friendly, older woman from Bangladesh, she had fallen silent in the middle of these explanations. “I showed your sister, as well,” she said almost apologetically.

According to Jazmin, Jadranka had fallen easily into the rhythm of the household, and Christopher and Tabitha, while a bit spoiled, were still a hundred times better behaved than the children in other families. Her previous employers, she confided, had a little girl of Christopher’s age who would follow her around rooms she had already cleaned, intentionally dropping things behind her. “She emptied an entire carton of apple juice on the kitchen floor once, just after I finished mopping it,” she said indignantly. “She thought it was funny.”

Christopher was a sturdy and amiable boy who enjoyed digging in sandboxes and thrashing high weeds with sticks. He had begun almost immediately to call her
Lena,
following his mother’s lead in a way that astounded her with its confidence.

Tabitha had an oily, moon-shaped face, reminiscent of her mother’s at that age, and she wore baggy clothes to camouflage her growing breasts. The other girls at camp were mean, she told Magdalena, and her younger brother could do anything and not get into trouble for it.

It was clear to Magdalena that both children saw her as an extension of her sister. Tabitha had immediately confessed to hating their mother’s gallery, and Christopher insisted that Magdalena read to him in the evenings as Jadranka had done. “She left before we got to the end,” he said, handing her a copy of
Charlotte’s Web
.

Magdalena did not open it immediately. “Did she say anything before she left?” she asked.

But Jadranka had gone while he was sleeping, without even saying goodbye.

“She told me stories about a magic island,” he added unexpectedly.

“Rosmarina?”

But he did not think it had a name.

It was only in Jadranka’s letters that Magdalena recognized her sister. She had brought the entire half year’s archive with her, clipping the letters together and printing out the e-mails.

It was through one of those missives that she had first learned of her ex-boyfriend’s presence in New York. Jadranka’s casual mention of him, months ago, almost prepared her for the way Damir’s voice sprang to life on radios all across the island as he reported on some session of the United Nations or high-level meetings between heads of state.

I haven’t seen him myself but I’ve heard that he’s almost fully recovered,
Jadranka informed her.

He had been wounded while reporting in Iraq the year before, his mother delivering this news on Rosmarina’s waterfront. The two women rarely did more than exchange a few awkward words, but Magdalena’s face must have betrayed her on that occasion, because the older woman tried immediately to comfort her. “He won’t die, dear,” she said, patting Magdalena’s arm. “If that’s what you’re worried about.”

For several years now, she had secretly followed news of his movements, from exhumations in Bosnia to bombings in Afghanistan. He would disappear from print for months, only to reappear in some distant and usually dangerous place. He was a common subject of island conversation because Rosmarina had never tired of hearing its native son on the radio.

Likewise, the global network of island gossip made it inevitable that he would learn of Jadranka’s disappearance, and on the day before Magdalena’s departure from Rosmarina, he had telephoned, his voice deep and unmistakable.

“They’re saying that you plan to come look for her,” he said.

“Who’s saying?”

“Come on, Lena. Let me help you.”

Her sister and Damir had always gotten along. One summer he had tutored her in mathematics. She amused him because every time he left her with equations to balance, he returned to find that she had left drawings in the margins instead.

But Jadranka had only mentioned him once in her letters. There was no indication that their paths had crossed in New York, and Magdalena convinced herself that curiosity had prompted his call. Perhaps he wanted to see for himself that she had remained in place for all these years, exactly as he had prophesied at their parting. Perhaps he wanted to congratulate himself on his lucky escape.

“I’ll let you know” was all she would tell him before hanging up.

Katarina had already filed a missing-persons report at the local police precinct, but they had been dismissive. “Your cousin is an adult,” they had told her. “She’s free to come and go as she likes, for the duration of her visa.”

And so Magdalena began searching blindly, armed with her sister’s letters. She visited the places Jadranka had named—the coffee shops and parks, even showing her sister’s picture to the chess players in Washington Square Park—but none of them recognized her, and though Magdalena looked for the man with the missing tooth, she did not think he was among them.

It was Katarina who suggested that she focus her search on Astoria and Long Island City, places where Jadranka’s immigration status might not prevent her from finding temporary work. Large numbers of Croatians lived in those neighborhoods, where shops sold Vegeta seasoning, Podravka packaged soups, and
Č
okolino for babies’ bottles. Katarina explained that she had little use for these old-country articles herself, but her mother sometimes pined for them.

“She has a sweet tooth,” she added. “She’d sell her soul for a few Bajadera.”

But it was unclear if
Nona
Vinka would even recognize those chocolates. Since Magdalena’s arrival, the elderly woman had existed in only two states: sleep and exhaustion. She could not seem to keep her eyes open, and when she did manage to utter a few words, she had little grasp of where she was.

Her bedroom could not have helped in these matters of orientation. Unlike the rest of the house, its contents seemed to have been imported, item by item, from a Croatian island. Lace curtains hung at the window, and doilies covered every surface. A crucifix guarded the head of the bed, whose fuzzy acrylic blanket was identical to those that still graced many bedrooms on Rosmarina. A Bible rested atop a bureau, and Magdalena did not have to open its cover to know that the pages were well thumbed. She recognized some of the photographs that stood beside it as copies of the ones in her grandmother’s vitrine.

“My mother has been homesick for thirty years” was Katarina’s only explanation.

And it was homesickness that might have explained the section of western Queens to which Katarina directed her, for it was there that old men stopped and greeted each other in the street, an elaborate ritual of arm slapping that Magdalena had witnessed nowhere else in this American city. Restaurants served grilled fish and
pala
č
inke,
and newsstands carried the same magazines whose stories of scandals and trysts Magdalena’s grandmother read religiously at home.

It was like entering a place where two countries, separated by thousands of miles, oozed together. And while Magdalena’s unease over her sister’s disappearance only grew, she roamed this territory comfortably enough, saying her sister’s name to grocers, to an electrician from whose rearview mirror a Split soccer team ornament swung, to an old man on the street who had sounded as if he might be from Rosmarina but, in the end, turned out to be from the nearby island of Vis. He looked so long and hard at the picture of Jadranka that Magdalena was certain that he recognized her. But he finally apologized that his sight was not what it had once been. “I’m sorry, child,” he told her. “I’ve never seen your sister.”

She repeated the name of the island. “Rosmarina,” she told everyone who asked and some who did not. The elderly man had once visited there. Long ago, he told her, just after the Second World War, when conditions were very difficult.

“Which island did you say?” one of the waitresses in a Croatian soccer bar on Broadway asked, then wanted to know if it was near Kornati.

Magdalena shook her head. “Between Lastovo and Vis,” she said, sketching them on a cocktail napkin.

“In the middle of nowhere” was the waitress’s only reply.

She was sent on wild-goose chases by people who thought they might have heard about a red-haired Croatian girl living or working in such-and-such place, but when she rang the doorbells of houses and apartments, people looked at her suspiciously through the grilles of their doors. There were raspy voices through intercoms or shouts through open windows. Many were not Croatian, and she explained in careful English why she had come. Some thought it was a trick and threatened to call the police, but some of them agreed to look at the photograph.