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

them to the island.
      
    Today, Jadranka continued to sketch constantly. She drew on napkins and paper tablecloths. She carried a small sketchbook with her and always kept a larger one at home, and it puzzled Magdalena not to find any of them among her sister’s things.
    Ana had returned to the room and was standing in front of a floor-length mirror, drying her hair with a towel. “I burned them when she left,” she explained calmly. “I didn’t want her coming back here.”
    The women regarded each other for a long moment through the reflection, and then it was her mother who broke the silence, her eyes sliding away from Magdalena’s. “I wanted her to go. To be rid of us.”
    At first Magdalena did not believe her. She watched the rigid line of her mother’s shoulders, a pose that managed to be both resigned and challenging.
    “Why?” she asked after a stunned moment. “Why would you burn them?”
    “I needed to be certain that she would stay away,” Ana said, applying powder to the bridge of her nose. “That’s what they did in the war. When they wanted to make sure nobody returned to the villages, they would burn them down and kill all the animals. They’d make sure there was no reason to come back.”
    Magdalena felt the old fury rise.
    “She’s making a new beginning—” Ana started to say.
    Magdalena stopped only long enough in the kitchen to yank her purse from the back of a chair, upending it with a crash. But even as she plunged down the stairs, she could hear her mother calling after her, down the building’s stairwell. “If you were smart, you’d leave, too,” she was shouting.

Chapter 4
    T he courtyard gate creaks open, and for a brief moment Luka picks up the sounds of Rosmarina’s port: women hawking their lavender oil from stands and the laughter of boys who are fishing from the pier. He thinks he can even hear one man slap another on the back and say something about the previous evening. But as he waits for a response, the gate slams as if the wind has blown it back on its hinges, or as if someone has leaned against it with all their weight.
    He can hear a woman’s steps through the courtyard, the way they falter outside the kitchen door. But when she enters the rooms below him, her voice is artificially bright. His daughter’s voice, perhaps, or one of his granddaughters. He cannot be sure.
    Ružica’s response is low and worried. Drowned, he thinks she is saying.
      
    He was six on the day a ferry from the mainland capsized. The sea was perfectly calm, a bonaca turning its surface into a single sheet of glass, but the ship had overturned regardless. By the time the alarm was raised in the town, most passengers had swum to the Devil’s Stones or awaited rescue by hanging on to the ship’s debris. But two women, both from Rosmarina, had not even known how to float.
    He was on the riva when their bodies were brought in. He had slipped between adults who spoke in low, anxious voices and shaded their eyes to watch the horizon where the survivors treaded water, too far away to identify. When the fishing boat conveyed the drowned women to shore, a collective silence fell over the waterfront, and it was the boat’s owner who noticed him standing where he meant to tie up. He shouted for the boy to move away, but it was too late, and all the way home Luka was pursued by the sight of the wet and twisted dresses at the bottom of the boat.
    He could not fathom what it meant to drown, nor why women of his mother’s generation considered swimming an indecent act, preferring the stifling drapery of their long skirts. He had been secretly teaching his sister Vinka to swim in deserted coves where they stripped down to their underwear and then allowed the sun to dry all evidence of this transgression.
    The first rule of swimming, he had told her, was to stay afloat. He had demonstrated by lying back in the water, buoyed by the warm currents on the surface.
    The first time he let go, she