Free The First Rule of Swimming by Courtney Angela Brkic Page A

report and a classical music station. She settled finally on the Beatles and began singing along in broken English.
    She had a good voice, and Magdalena listened for a moment, softening slightly when she heard that in her mother’s interpretation, Lucy was in a sky with lions.
      
    Halfway through the year that she and Jadranka spent in Split, her younger sister stopped speaking. It happened without warning. One day she was chattering about the stray cats in the courtyard, and the next she was absolutely silent.
    “Say something,” their mother had insisted on the first morning, kneeling before her seven-year-old daughter on the linoleum of the kitchen floor, shaking Jadranka as if she could make the words fall out of her mouth like apples from a tree.
    But Jadranka only stared at their mother as Nikola muttered in the background that he knew the surest way to restore her speech.
    “Shut up!” their mother had told him for once. “Can’t you see that the girl’s upset?”
    But Jadranka did not look upset. She returned to her breakfast of bread and butter and refused to meet anybody’s eyes. Even later, when she and Magdalena were alone in their room, she refused to say a single word.
    Don’t worry, she wrote on a piece of paper as her sister watched. But when Magdalena insisted that she write more, Jadranka only crumpled it in her fist.
    The silence continued for several weeks, their mother coaxing her to speak, Jadranka resolutely staring back as if she could not be certain as to the nature of these requests, Nikola raging in the background that it was clear the girl wanted nothing more than attention. Even one night when he hit her, the blow landing on the side of her face with such force that she crumpled to the floor, Jadranka refused to make a sound.
    Their mother had been working an evening shift, and Magdalena lowered her head and charged him like a bull. But Nikola had swatted her away, stumbling to the kitchen in search of a bottle.
    “It’s okay,” Magdalena promised her sister in a whisper when they were safely in their room, the door locked, lying face-to-face on the mattress. “I’m going to make him sorry.”
    But Jadranka only regarded her sister somberly and shook her head.
    Children in the neighborhood began to call her names, but she ignored them. Teachers punished her, nonplussed by her willfulness. But still she maintained her obstinate silence. She was taken to see a doctor, an older man with snowy hair who could find nothing wrong with her. He sat her on his examining table and looked into her eyes. “Now, child,” he told her sternly. “Explain this nonsense.”
    But Jadranka merely blinked at him.
    “There’s no physiological reason she isn’t speaking,” Magdalena overheard him explain to their mother. “This degree of stubbornness is rare in such a small child.”
    She drew incessantly. She sketched on napkins and scraps of paper. After school, she drew taunting children’s faces. When Nikola went on benders, she drew pictures of the sisters flying high above the city or huddled together in a room with earthen walls.
    “Like rabbits,” Magdalena had said, because she knew they were Jadranka’s favorite animal.
    “No more drawing!” their mother had screamed, confiscating her pencils and scraps of paper, emptying the drawers in the desk that the girls shared. “No more drawing until you stop this!”
    But Magdalena always managed to smuggle paper to her sister: the back of her math homework, a page torn from the end of a book, pieces of cardboard that she scavenged from the garbage. And in this way they developed a secret language. Slowly at first, Magdalena not always understanding the nature of her sister’s drawings, Jadranka frustrated at not being understood.
    “You could always open your mouth and say something,” Magdalena would remind her.
    But Jadranka’s lips remained steadfastly shut until six months later when their mother admitted defeat and returned