The First Rule of Swimming by Courtney Angela Brkic

“I wasn’t paid well enough to eat” was her only explanation.
    An object in continuous motion, she returned from Rijeka several pounds heavier, but after Dubrovnik her hair was dyed black, and she was thin again. “Your beautiful hair,” Magdalena said, picking up a length that was as dark as her own but with blue undertones.
    “We match,” Jadranka laughed, but by the next summer her dark red hair had grown out again, a shade so uncommon that people often stared and curious children grabbed for it in handfuls.
    Jadranka was not so much irresponsible as a force of nature, difficult to predict and difficult to contain. As a child she used to place her hand over candles and hold it there for as long as she could stand it. Once, her hair caught fire. But instead of frightening her, the singed pieces that landed on the tablecloth made her laugh. She liked their strange patterns and the way they turned to black dust when she tried to pick them up.
    “As long as you don’t disappear from me,” Magdalena had made her promise.
      
    Katarina did not know where Jadranka could have gone. She was unsure if she had made any friends since her arrival, as she preferred to spend most days off in her studio or visiting the city’s galleries.
    “I made a list of what she should see,” Katarina explained absentmindedly. Though the delivery of her words was innocuous enough, they made Magdalena’s eyes narrow. Professor Katarina, Magdalena thought. You always were a know-it-all.
    Magdalena felt the same flare of irritation whenever she read her cousin’s letters: the detailed descriptions of the other woman’s children and her house, her gallery and the holidays she took with her family to exotic locations, though never to Rosmarina. Magdalena’s responses were always terse and controlled, with a minimum of description and little that bordered on the personal.
    Magdalena had denied having an e-mail account, unwilling to face an in-box filled with her cousin’s messages, so that they continued to write to each other the old-fashioned way, Katarina’s parchment stationery now devoid of rainbows, while Magdalena always wrote back to her on the ragged pages she tore from a spiral notebook.
    I feel I hardly know you anymore, Katarina had written when they were in their early twenties, an observation that Magdalena did not bother to address.
    “She’s really pretty good,” Katarina conceded now, and Magdalena knew at once that she was referring to her sister’s painting. “A little rough around the edges maybe, but there’s a lot of promise there.”
    The words were clearly meant as a concession.
    “That’s nice to hear,” Magdalena said, even as she thought: Jadranka was better than you from the beginning.
      
    It was Magdalena who had driven Jadranka to the airport in January, the younger woman waiting on the riva when Magdalena arrived by ferry from Rosmarina. Clad in a coat and scarf, she had placed her suitcase beside her on the pavement, and expectation filled her face. Jadranka was happy, Magdalena realized as she drove their grandfather’s Fiat out of the hull. She looked happier than she had in months.
    “This way you don’t even need to see Mama,” Jadranka told her with a knowing look as they lifted the suitcase between them into the trunk, a job made more difficult by the wind.
    Magdalena ignored her sister’s comment but returned her quick embrace. “What’s the plan?” she asked, because Jadranka’s flight did not leave until the morning.
    Something jumped in her eyes, a light that Magdalena recognized from her wilder youth. “Who needs a plan when the possibilities are endless?”
    It was already late afternoon when they followed the coastal highway southward, through the urban sprawl of Split. They stopped for dinner at a roadside restaurant, Magdalena drinking a single glass of wine, Jadranka laughing as she polished off the first bottle and ordered a second.
    Halfway through their meal, two