The 6:17 to Split
The first time Ivo Kovač ever wanted to punch a seagull, he was seven years old and the bird had stolen his sardine right off the grill. The second time was this morning, and the bird hadn’t stolen anything—it was just standing on the hood of his bus, staring at him with the smug entitlement of a creature that had never once been asked for a ticket.
“Move,” Ivo growled.
The seagull blinked.
“Move, you feathered bastard.”
The seagull tilted its head, then slowly, deliberately, shit on the windshield.
Ivo closed his eyes. Breathed. Counted to three in Croatian, then German for the tourists, then Italian for good measure because God knew the cruise ship crowds would be here any minute. When he opened his eyes, the seagull was gone. The evidence remained, a white smear across his view of the Adriatic.
Welcome to Baška Voda. Population: 2,700. Tourist population from June to September: approximately seven million, give or take a few thousand Germans in socks and sandals who had somehow never learned what a roundabout was.
Ivo Kovač was thirty-five years old, six feet two inches of lean muscle and permanent frown, with dark hair that curled at the collar despite his best efforts to keep it short, and a jaw that local pensioners liked to say could cut glass. He had been driving buses along the Dalmatian coast for twelve years, ever since he’d come home from a brief and unsuccessful attempt at a life in Zagreb that had ended with a broken engagement, a broken lease, and a broken heart he’d since welded shut with spite and routine.
He did not smile. He did not make small talk. He did not help tourists with their luggage unless they were elderly, disabled, or carrying something that looked like it might contain prosciutto. His bus, a blue-and-white Promet cruiser that had seen better decades, was the cleanest vehicle on the coast—not because he loved it, but because a dirty bus was a sign of a sloppy mind, and Ivo Kovač was not sloppy.
He was, however, running late.
The seagull incident had cost him two minutes. Two minutes meant the old ladies at the stop by the Konzum supermarket would be clicking their tongues and checking their watches. Two minutes meant the Austrian couple with the matching fanny packs would be fanning themselves and asking each other, loudly, if this was really the right bus. Two minutes meant—
He saw her.
She was sitting on the wooden bench outside the Baška Voda post office, the one with the cracked slat that had never been fixed because the mayor’s cousin owned the hardware store and the mayor’s cousin was an idiot. The bench faced the sea, which meant she had her back to the road, but Ivo didn’t need to see her face to know it was her.
He always knew.
She was small—not short exactly, but compact, the kind of woman who folded into herself when she sat, elbows tucked, knees together, as if she were trying to take up as little space as possible. Her hair was dark brown, almost black, and she wore it loose in the mornings, falling over her shoulders like someone had poured coffee down a white curtain. She had on the same thing she always wore: a light sundress in some faded floral pattern, sandals that weren’t hideous (he’d noted that immediately), and a silver bracelet that caught the sun and threw tiny knives of light against the bus’s windshield.
And she was reading.
That was the thing about her. That was the thing that had caught his attention the first morning, three weeks ago, when he’d pulled up to the stop and she hadn’t even looked up. The bus doors had hissed open. The tourists had shuffled aboard. The old ladies had elbowed each other for the window seats. And she had just sat there, nose buried in a book with a cover so pink it could have been a traffic warning, turning pages with the slow, deliberate concentration of someone reading a text message from God.
He’d waited. Five seconds. Ten. The schedule said depart at 6:17. He was a man who respected schedules the way other men respected their mothers.
“Are you getting on?” he’d called out the window.
She’d looked up then, and Ivo had forgotten how to breathe.
Her eyes were green. Not hazel, not blue-green, not whatever color people said when they couldn’t commit. Green. Like the sea on a cloudy day, like the pine forests above Makarska, like the bottle of absinthe his uncle had brought back from France and that Ivo had never opened because it seemed like too much trouble.
“No,” she’d said, and gone back to her book.
Ivo had stared at her for another five seconds—an eternity for a man who measured his life in departure times—before closing the doors and driving away.
That had been twenty-one days ago. Twenty-one mornings. Twenty-one times she’d sat on that bench, reading a romance novel—different ones, he’d noticed, because the covers changed, but always romance, always tattered, always with that same look of intense, almost angry concentration, as if the happy endings personally offended her.
She never got on the bus. Never even pretended to. She just sat there, reading, and when the bus pulled away, she stayed.
Ivo had theories. He hated having theories. Theories meant thinking about her when he should have been thinking about the brake pressure and the tourist who’d just stepped into traffic without looking and the fact that his left rear tire was three PSI low and that was going to bother him all day.
Theory one: She was waiting for someone else. A lover, a friend, a bus that never came. But she was always alone, and she never checked her phone, and she never looked toward the road except when his bus arrived.
Theory two: She was a writer. Observing people. Gathering material. But her books were too worn for that, spines cracked, pages soft with rereading. She wasn’t studying humanity; she was escaping it.
Theory three: She was lonely. The way he was lonely. The way everyone on the coast was lonely, surrounded by crowds of strangers who would leave in a week and never remember your name.
He hated theory three the most.
This morning, the seagull’s parting gift was still drying on the windshield as Ivo pulled up to the stop. He killed the engine—too hard, the bus shuddered in protest—and reached for the windshield wipers. The fluid reservoir was empty. Of course it was empty. He’d meant to fill it yesterday. He’d meant to do a lot of things yesterday.
The doors hissed open. The old ladies—Marija, Ruža, and Nada, who had been sitting on this bench since Tito was alive and would probably still be sitting here when the sea swallowed the coast—scrambled aboard without a word. They’d learned not to speak to Ivo in the morning. He’d taught them with a year of grunted monosyllables and a face like a thundercloud.
The Austrian couple followed, arguing in German about whether they’d left the coffee maker on. (They had. Ivo knew this because they’d left it on every morning for the past two weeks. The man always said no. The woman always said yes. They were both wrong about everything, including love.)
Two teenage backpackers, hungover and silent, dragged themselves up the steps and collapsed into seats by the back door. A young father with a screaming toddler. An old man with a fishing pole and a smell that suggested he’d already caught something. The usual suspects. The usual chaos.
Ivo watched them all in the rearview mirror, a god of a very small and very grumpy universe.
And then he looked to the left, out the window, toward the bench.
She was there.
Of course she was there.
She was wearing a yellow sundress today, the color of lemon gelato, and her hair was pulled back with a clip that had a small plastic flower on it. Her legs were crossed at the ankle—not at the knee, which would have been casual, but at the ankle, like a schoolgirl being photographed. Her sandals were brown leather, simple straps, the kind of sandals that cost too much and would last forever. Ivo knew this because he’d spent an embarrassing amount of time looking at her feet over the past three weeks, and he was starting to recognize her shoe rotation.
She was reading. The book today had a cover showing a man with his shirt open to the navel, a woman with her hair blowing sideways, and a castle in the background that was probably in Scotland but could have been a slightly confused drawing of Hvar. The title, in gold foil letters, was The Duke’s Forbidden Desire.
Ivo snorted.
The sound was loud enough that Marija, the smallest and meanest of the old ladies, looked up from her seat behind the driver’s cabin. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“You snorted.”
“I have allergies.”
“Since when?”
“Since now. Sit down, Marija, we’re leaving.”
But he didn’t put the bus in gear.
The engine idled. The tourists fidgeted. The toddler stopped screaming long enough to take a breath, then started again. The old man with the fishing pole began humming a song about the Partisans that Ivo was pretty sure wasn’t legal anymore.
And she kept reading.
She was maybe fifteen feet away. He could see the way her lips moved slightly when she read, forming the words without sound, as if she were tasting them. He could see the furrow between her eyebrows, the way she squinted at something on the page, then smiled—a small, private smile, the kind you give a book when no one’s watching.
He wondered what the Duke had done. Forbidden desire, apparently. Probably took his shirt off. Romance novels were always having men take their shirts off. Ivo had never read one, but he’d seen the covers, and the covers suggested that dukes in romance novels spent very little time doing actual duke things and a great deal of time standing near bodies of water with their pectorals on display.
The thought should have annoyed him. It did annoy him. But it also made him want to know what she saw in those books, what kept her coming back to this bench every morning, what made her choose a cracked piece of wood and a view of the Adriatic over a bed or a café or any of the other thousand places she could be reading.
“You’re staring,” Ruža said from the third row.
“I’m checking my mirrors.”
“Your mirrors are in the front. You’re turned all the way around.”
Ivo turned back. Grabbed the steering wheel. Flexed his fingers until the knuckles popped.
“She’s not getting on, you know,” Nada added. Nada was the kindest of the three, which meant she only said cruel things when she meant them. “She never gets on. You’ve been watching her for weeks. We’ve been watching you watch her. The pot is up to four hundred kuna.”
“What pot?”
“The betting pot. Marija’s idea. I have you getting her number by the end of the month. Ruža says you’ll choke. Marija says she’s a ghost and doesn’t exist.”
“I’m not betting on my own—” Ivo stopped. Took a breath. Counted again. “There is no pot. There is no watching. There is a bus that needs to leave at 6:17, and it is currently 6:19, and you three are the reason I’m going to have a heart attack before I’m forty.”
Marija cackled. It was the sound of a woman who had outlived three husbands and was looking forward to a fourth.
Ivo put the bus in gear.
And then he didn’t move.
The engine growled. The tourists looked at each other. The toddler, sensing weakness, screamed louder. The old man’s Partisan song shifted into a hymn about the Virgin Mary, which was somehow worse.
Ivo stared at the road ahead. The road was empty. The sun was rising over Biokovo Mountain, painting the limestone cliffs in shades of pink and gold. The sea was calm, the color of postcards, the kind of view that made tourists cry and locals yawn.
He should go. He should drive. He had a schedule to keep, a route to run, a hundred and twelve kilometers of coastal highway between here and Split, with stops in Promajna, Bratuš, Tučepi, Makarska, and a dozen other towns where people would be waiting for a bus that was now two minutes late and counting.
Two minutes. That was nothing. That was a rounding error. That was the time it took to sneeze twice and curse once.
But it was also a crack. A fissure in the armor of routine he’d spent twelve years building. If he let two minutes become three, three would become four, and four would become the kind of man who stopped his bus to talk to a woman reading a romance novel on a bench by the sea.
He wasn’t that man.
He was Ivo Kovač. He was grumpy. He was efficient. He was the best bus driver on the Dalmatian coast, not because he was friendly but because he was reliable. You could set your watch to his departure times. You could plan your life around his arrival. He was a fixed point in a chaotic world, and fixed points did not make small talk with beautiful women who read trashy books at six in the morning.
He released the brake.
The bus rolled forward one inch.
He slammed the brake again.
“Ivo,” Ruža said, in the tone of a woman who had raised four children and was not afraid to use that experience on a grown man, “either drive or go talk to her. This in-between business is bad for my blood pressure.”
“She’s just a woman,” Ivo said, though he didn’t believe it for a second.
“She’s been sitting at that stop for three weeks. She doesn’t take the bus. She just watches you drive away. What does that tell you?”
Ivo knew what it told him. It told him everything and nothing. It told him she was interested, or maybe just bored. It told him she was brave, or maybe just lonely. It told him that something was happening, something that didn’t fit into his tidy schedule of grumpiness and routine, and that terrified him more than any amount of tourist sandals ever could.
He looked at her one more time.
She turned a page. The sun caught her hair, and for a moment, just a moment, she looked up—not at him, not at the bus, but at the sea, as if checking that it was still there.
And Ivo Kovač, who had not done anything impulsive since he was twenty-three years old and proposing to a woman who would leave him six months later, made a decision.
He killed the engine.
The bus went silent.
The tourists gasped. The toddler stopped screaming, startled by the absence of vibration. The old man’s hymn faltered. Even the seagulls seemed to pause.
“What are you doing?” Marija demanded.
Ivo stood up. He was tall in the cabin, his head nearly touching the ceiling, and the morning light through the windshield turned his face into something carved from the same stone as the mountain behind them.
“I’m stopping,” he said.
“For what?”
“For a pedestrian.”
“There’s no pedestrian.”
“There’s always a pedestrian,” Ivo said, and he stepped off the bus.
The air hit him first—salt and rosemary and the faint smell of diesel from his own exhaust. The sun was warm on his neck. The sea sparkled like broken glass. And she was right there, fifteen feet away, looking up from her book with an expression of mild confusion that was rapidly turning into something else.
Recognition. She recognized him. Of course she did. He drove past her face every morning.
The book slipped from her fingers. She caught it before it hit the ground, and the motion was so quick, so graceful, that Ivo forgot what he was going to say.
Which was a problem, because he hadn’t planned what he was going to say.
He’d planned nothing. He’d just stopped. The man who planned everything, who scheduled his life down to the minute, who knew exactly when he would wake and when he would sleep and when he would eat his goddamn lunch, had walked off his bus without a single word prepared.
So he said the first thing that came to mind.
“You’re blocking my stop.”
Her eyebrows went up. “I’m sitting on a bench.”
“The bench is part of the stop. You’re supposed to be waiting for the bus.”
“I’m not waiting for the bus.”
“Then what are you waiting for?”
She looked at him for a long moment. The green of her eyes was even brighter up close, and he could see a tiny scar on her chin, a constellation of freckles across her nose, and the faintest hint of a smile playing at the corner of her lips.
“I’m not waiting for anything,” she said. “I’m just sitting.”
“That’s worse.”
“How is that worse?”
“Because if you’re waiting for something, there’s an end in sight. You get on the bus, you go somewhere, you stop sitting. But if you’re just sitting—” He stopped himself. He was rambling. He didn’t ramble. “Never mind.”
“No, go on. You were making a point. A terrible point, but a point.”
Ivo crossed his arms. He was aware that the entire bus was watching him through the windows. He was aware that the old ladies were probably updating their betting pot. He was aware that he was making a fool of himself.
And for the first time in twelve years, he didn’t care.
“I’m Ivo,” he said.
“I know.”
“How do you know my name?”
“It’s on the side of the bus.” She pointed. “Ivo Kovač, authorized driver. Unless that’s someone else.”
“It’s me.”
“I assumed.”
There was a pause. The sea sighed against the shore. A tourist in truly unforgivable sandals—white socks, black Velcro, the kind of crime against humanity that made Ivo want to close the borders—walked past them and boarded the waiting bus.
“So,” Ivo said, “are you going to tell me your name, or are we going to stand here all morning?”
She closed her book. Ran her thumb along the spine. Looked up at him with those impossible green eyes and said, “Lana.”
“Lana what?”
“Just Lana. For now.”
“For now?”
“For now.” She stood up, and he realized she was shorter than he’d thought—the top of her head barely reached his shoulder. She tucked the book under her arm and smiled, a real smile this time, wide and bright and completely unfair. “You’re late, by the way. The 6:17 to Split left at 6:17. It’s now 6:23.”
“I know.”
“So why are you still here?”
Ivo looked at her. Looked at the bus. Looked at the sea. Looked at the tourists piling aboard his immaculate vehicle, tracking sand and chaos and bad decisions onto his clean floors.
“I don’t know,” he said.
And for the first time in a very long time, that was the truth.
