The First Rule of Swimming (25 page)

He reached her in a few steps, snatching the cigarette from her lips and stomping it out. “Are you fucking crazy?” he asked her.

She stared at him.

“You can’t smoke here.”

Jadranka looked around her at the sagging porch, and the weeds that had driven up between some of the slats like tiny yellow knives. There was nothing remotely flammable, and she frowned. “Why the hell not?” she asked him.

“We use chemicals in the basement,” he hissed. “One spark and we’ll all go up in smoke.”

“For tool and die?”

Something moved in his throat. “Of course for tool and die.”

“Okay,” she told him easily. “Now I know.”

But he only turned on his heel, muttering something about the stupidity of women.

She should have left then. She should have walked calmly away, pretending to make another foray to the strip mall. She had already asked directions to the bus depot and knew that buses departed for points north every hour.

Instead she waited until the two men left for the day, watching their van from the second floor until it disappeared.

There was a locked door in the kitchen that obviously led to the basement. It had an old-fashioned keyhole, but she could tell by looking at the gap between the door and frame that the lock was not engaged, prompting her to conclude that the door was padlocked from the other side.

It was a strange precaution for a tool-and-die business, even one run illegally out of a basement.
Walk away,
said the same voice that had been speaking to her for days.
Just pack your things and go.

She had not ventured behind the house since her arrival, but now she observed that the basement door used by the two men was reinforced steel. She was about to give up and return to the house when she saw it: a small rectangular window at ankle height, almost hidden in the weeds.

Before she could think better of it, she dropped to her stomach and pushed the window inward. She understood that the house—and Darko—were trouble, but she was curious to see what happened in the basement. She suspected that it was used to store stolen property, and anyway, she had always had a talent for extricating herself from difficult situations. If Rottweiler appeared on the scene, she was capable of thinking up some excuse.

The window was barely wide enough for her shoulders. She slid through it up to her waist, bracing herself against the inside wall with her hands so that she felt like the figurehead of a ship, allowing her eyes to adjust to the gloom. When they did, she was able to make out a long table with a jumble of vials and beakers. Rather than flat-screen televisions and piles of jewelry, there were large drums and a profusion of plastic vats. She had been wrong about the stolen property, but whatever went on in the basement had nothing to do with tools, either.

She assumed that the workshop was for drugs or explosives, and she cursed her own stupidity. She would need to leave tonight, after all. She had enough for a bus ticket to Maine and a few meals. Darko could go fuck himself as far as she was concerned. But as she pulled herself back, her elbow caught the open window, sending a shock wave of pain down her arm and leaving a star-shaped fracture in the glass.

“You’re bleeding,” a familiar voice said from behind her.

She went completely still, but he had already wrapped a hand around her ankle and was dragging her back so roughly that both elbows scraped the ground. He did not give her a chance to respond but turned her neatly over with his foot.

The sun was behind him, and she blinked.

“What am I going to do with you,
mila?
” Darko asked her.

He took her to the room where she had been sleeping, propelling her up the stairs so quickly that she twice lost her footing. He stared only for a moment at the picture of a sailboat on the landing.

“It’s nothing to do with me,” she told him when he pointed at the mattress, then pushed her when she did not sit.

He sat on the windowsill across from her, arms crossed. “Why did you have to complicate things?” he asked in a voice so reasonable that only now did she begin to feel afraid. “Haven’t I been fair with you?”

She nodded. “More than fair.”

“Why then?”

She swallowed. In English, she told him nervously, “Curiosity killed the cat?”

He rose at this. “Stupid cat,” he told her, almost gently. But there was nothing gentle about the way he pulled her to her feet again, propelling her towards the open window so that for a moment she thought that he was going to throw her out.

“Look at that drop.”

She took in the two and a half stories that separated them from the ground.

“There’s no way out of this room,” he told her. “Try it and I’ll bury you in the garden.”

A part of her was tempted to laugh. The threat sounded like something from a film about the Russian mob, but when she looked at his face, she found no hint of make-believe.

“If that happens, there’s no chance of your sister finding you.”

For a moment, Jadranka forgot to breathe. “I don’t have a sister.”

But he only smiled at this bluff. “She’s looking for you. She even came into my bar yesterday.”

“My sister is in Croatia.”

“Your sister is in New York.”

When he saw Jadranka’s expression, he gave a bark of laughter. “Don’t worry,
mila.
She’s not my type. Too skinny and I don’t like irritable women—”

Jadranka closed her eyes.

“On the other hand, it wouldn’t hurt her to learn a little respect.”

“Respect,” Jadranka echoed, remembering that word being wielded like a club.

When he closed the door behind him, turning a key in the lock, she sat down hard and faced the windowsill.

Outside, it was growing dark, but from the bedroom window she watched him walk to his car, where he sat for a time with the engine running. He was talking to somebody on his telephone, and as she watched he struck the steering wheel with his open palm. Her elbows burned, and she could feel the stickiness of blood, but she did not take her eyes off that car. If he turned off the engine and walked back towards the house, she knew that she could kiss this life goodbye.

But five minutes later he tossed the telephone onto the seat beside him and drove off.

She had never mentioned a sister to Darko. She was too careful and, in fact, had made up a different family name, inventing an entire history to go with it. But the description—
skinny
and
irritable
—was unmistakable, and for the first few minutes after his departure, she sat on the floor shaking.

Magdalena’s face came to her, white and furious, hatcher of plans and purveyor of rat poison. Of course she had come to America. Of course she had. And so Jadranka dragged herself to her feet again, imagining that dark head nodding.

The door did not budge, even when she kicked it, and so she returned to the window, to that drop which took her breath away, damning herself that she had been too cheap to do more than buy a single sheet for the mattress. Two sheets might have delivered her halfway to the ground, but one sheet would do almost nothing.

The overhang of the front porch was more than five feet away, and she could not imagine completing the Tarzan-like maneuver necessary to reach it. But when she felt around beneath the window, her hands brushed a thick cable or cord affixed to the side of the house. Staples would never support her weight, she knew, but when she leaned forward, she could feel a solid metal bracket. Two feet below that one, she could just make out a second.

She threw her backpack out the window first, watching as it landed in a thorny bush below her, then wrapped the sheet around herself to protect her bare arms. Darko had taken her shoes, but once on the windowsill she flipped onto her stomach and felt gingerly for the bracket with her sock-covered foot. When she at last made painful contact with the metal, she lowered her other foot, finding the next and letting go of the windowsill with one hand. She hung there for a moment, easing her weight slowly onto the brackets and grasping the cord with a shaking hand.

It was as she reached the third bracket that she felt herself peel away from the wall. She fell for most of the first floor, landing in the bush with the cord still clenched in her hands. The sheet did little to protect her from the thorns, and she crawled away from the house on hands and knees, panting.

The house behind her was dark, and it came to her that for once she could not simply walk away, as had been her plan. Not when Darko knew about her sister. She imagined Magdalena coming here. Magdalena who would not give up, who would instead follow her trail like a bloodhound. She imagined Darko intercepting her at the front door, inviting her to come inside, all smiles and false promises. She had misjudged the situation badly, she now realized.

The house’s front door was unlocked, a fact that suggested he would be back soon. But it took only a moment to find an empty glass bottle in the kitchen. Days ago, she had found the rusted tin of Sterno beneath the sink, and she carried these outside again with the leftover twine.

She was still wrapped in the sheet. It billowed behind her like a rogue winding cloth, but she cast it off and seized it in both hands. The fabric would not give, no matter how her knuckles burned, but when she used her teeth she was able to tear off a piece with a satisfying sound.

She hung the larger section on the washing line and, after a moment of deliberation, took off her shirt, which she hung beside it.

Her hands trembled as she used a stick to empty the Sterno onto the smaller scrap of sheet, smearing it on the cloth as best she could without her hands, then stuffing it into the bottle. The can had only been a quarter full, and she decided that it was the most pitiful Molotov cocktail that had ever been made. She carried a plastic lighter in her pocket, and now she flicked it nervously, careful to keep the flame away from the cloth.

Behind the house, she nudged the same small window with her foot, the broken pane of glass shining as it swung inward.

She would have to throw it close to the table, a problem because she could no longer make out anything inside. As she lowered herself to her knees, she half expected to hear Darko’s voice again, to feel his hands around her neck this time, and so she felt something approaching joy when the cloth caught in a burst of blue flame.

She threw it in the general direction of the table, watching its arc light up the beakers, vats, and vials. She had aimed well, and it rolled along the table until stopping beside a container that trailed a piece of rubber tubing. She did not really expect it to work, but the voice inside her head said
Run,
and by the time the bottle shattered she had nearly reached the wood.

The explosion was deafening. At first she thought that Darko had found her, that he had thrown his entire weight against her. It was black and feral, this thing at her back. She could feel its teeth in her neck, and all she could do was cover her face with her arms just before crashing into one of the trees.

The impact stunned her, and she landed on the ground face up. Before losing consciousness, she thought she saw his face above her. Nikola’s, perhaps. Or even her father’s, and she wondered if this had been the face her mother watched as she, Jadranka, had come into being.

He placed a boot in the center of her chest and smiled in the dancing light of the fire.

T
he explosion made the morning newscast in New York City. Katarina was watching the television with half an eye as she buttered toast, and Jazmin readied the children for summer camp in the next room. Ana was asleep upstairs, but Magdalena had not yet stumbled in from wherever she had been spending her nights, a mystery Katarina had so far resisted the urge to ask about.

The volume was turned low, and so she did not hear the newscaster describe the suspected meth lab, nor did she see the man with the shaved head being led out of a Queens apartment building in the early morning hours, turning his face—spectral in the camera light—into the shadow of a squad car. Had she been listening, it might have registered that his name was Croatian, but he meant nothing to her and she would not have recognized his face.

It was Jazmin who saw the wreckage of the house, the charred debris spread across the property as if the grass itself had combusted, beams of wood still smoldering as news helicopters circled overhead. Passing through the kitchen on the trail of a stray shoe, she clucked her tongue at the screen and then exited again, prompting Katarina to look up in time to see a sooty sheet and T-shirt hanging from a laundry line. And while the cameras returned in the next instant to the newscaster’s face, Katarina lowered her knife to the counter as if the blood supply to her hand had run out.

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 Babi
ć
.”

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 photo 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 Radi
ć
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.