Read Online The First Rule of Swimming by Courtney Angela Brkic - Free Book Online Page B

that surrounded it. Magdalena disliked it, but she did not have the same sensation of panic every time she crossed its threshold. Inside there were no traces of Nikola, no closets where she had hidden, pushing her sister backward into the gentleness of hanging coats.
    Now, her mother sat on the edge of the bed, her nightgown bunched around her hips. She looked at Magdalena unhappily, as if she had been dreaming something pleasant and found consciousness a disappointment. “I’ll make up a place for you,” she said, but made no move to stand.
    Magdalena shook her head. “I’m not staying,” she said, then rose to open the shades. It felt good to let light into the apartment, to open the window so that fresh air could dislodge the stale smell of cigarettes and cooking oil, but when she turned around, her mother was blinking angrily in the sunlight.
    “ Nona sent you figs,” Magdalena said after a moment. “I left them on the kitchen counter.”
    Her mother did not acknowledge this gift, but she rose, finally, put on a pair of pink slippers that were turning gray around the toes, and walked into the kitchen, where Magdalena could hear her shuffling through papers. A moment later she returned with a postcard. “Here,” she said, tossing it onto the table between the beds. “This is all I have.”
    Picking it up, Magdalena tried to picture her sister among the sunbathing women in a place called Coney Island. She turned the postcard over to discover that Jadranka had scrawled a quick note on the reverse. Everything here is fine. I’ll write more later. The postmark was January, a few weeks after her departure.
    “This is it?” she asked, but her mother only returned her stony look. It’s my younger daughter who takes after me, Ana liked to tell people. If things had been different, who knows how far I would have gotten?
    Back in the kitchen Magdalena threw away the old bread. On the counter an ashtray was overflowing, and she emptied that, as well. She had quit smoking several months before, and the sour smell now turned her stomach.
    Above the trash can a calendar showed a picture of Our Lady of Sinj, her dark face gentle beneath her crown of gold. No one in their family was religious except for her grandmother, and Magdalena assumed that it was a gift from her. It was open to the new year, and someone had filled one of the squares with a perfect star in blue ink. Her sister’s day of departure, Magdalena realized, because the blocks before it had each been marked by a deliberate slash, and she could see by the dust-covered surfaces and newspaper stacks that time in the apartment had ground to a halt on that day.
    Her mother shuffled by in the hallway without a word, and a moment later Magdalena heard water running in the shower.
    She took the calendar from the wall and sat down with it at the kitchen table. There were no marks on any of the other pages, and so she returned to January and the blue star. Above it, the Madonna’s face had turned inscrutable, the soft curve of her lips mocking.
    Because Ana refused to visit the island and because Magdalena went to extraordinary lengths to avoid her mother, they rarely discussed that lost year of her childhood. On the rare occasions that they saw one another, they argued about Rosmarina instead.
    It had never been clear to Magdalena how someone who had taken her first breaths on the island could regard it with such disdain, but Ana only held up an impatient hand whenever her daughter began to talk of the sea, the silence at night, the sound of the cicadas. Magdalena liked to think that her words stabbed at some tender, hidden place, but her mother was always dismissive. “What use are those things to me?” she would ask.
    For her part, Magdalena bristled at her mother’s complaints about the island’s scorching heat, its narrowness, its wine that could anesthetize a horse. “How,” Ana demanded, “can you be satisfied with the smallness of that place?” With