Song Read No. 1 — Round Here, a short story inspired by the Counting Crows song

The fog came in from the ocean the night Maria stopped eating. Not that the two things were connected — or maybe they were, the way everything in that October seemed connected, strung together on a wire so thin you couldn’t see it until you walked into it and it caught you across the throat.

Joel stood on the front porch in his socks and watched the street disappear. White on white. The neighbour’s fence, then the neighbour’s house, then the streetlight itself swallowed to a pale smear. He felt, briefly, like he might not exist — like if he stepped off the porch he’d dissolve into it, a ghost walking into something that was already ghost. He found the idea more comforting than it probably should have been.

Through the wall behind him, he could hear Maria. Not words. Just the sound that came before words, or instead of them. He’d heard it four times this week. He still didn’t know what it meant, and she still couldn’t tell him, and so they were here: him outside in the fog, her inside in the dark, both of them in the same house and nowhere near each other.

She had come from Nashville in August with a suitcase the size of a small country and a very specific idea about California. She wanted, she told him at the party where they met, to meet someone who looked like Elvis. Not the late Elvis — the early one. The hungry one. She said it completely seriously, holding a beer she hadn’t drunk, and he had laughed until he realised she meant it, and then he’d stopped laughing and paid attention.

She didn’t look like someone who needed saving. That was the thing nobody understood about Maria, the thing that made her more than just a little misunderstood. She was funny. She was sharp. She walked into rooms like she’d designed them. It was only at the edges of things — at the end of nights, at the shoreline — that you could see what was underneath.

He’d watched her once, at the beach near his house, walk the exact line where the rock shelf met the water. Her arms loose, her eyes fixed on some middle distance, toe after toe along the wire of it. She didn’t wobble. She didn’t look down. He’d stood twenty feet back with his heart doing something he couldn’t name, watching her calibrate herself against the edge the way other people calibrate themselves against solid ground.

Why do you do that? he’d asked when she came back.

She’d looked at him with that expression — the one that meant she was deciding whether he could handle the answer. Because it’s the only place I feel the right size, she’d said.

The neighbourhood they lived in had a personality that was difficult to describe to people who hadn’t grown up in it. It was the kind of place that had mottos rather than histories. Round here we stand up straight. Round here we carve out our names. His mother said these things. His friends’ mothers said these things. A whole chorus of standing-up-straight, as if posture were the thing standing between them and catastrophe.

Joel had believed it once. Had done everything in the correct order: school, job, apartment, the whole architecture of a life that was supposed to add up to something. And it did add up — it added up to a number he didn’t recognise as himself. Round here, everybody talked like they had a plan. Like lions. And then round here, when the plan arrived, they went quiet and lay down and let it happen to them anyway. Like lambs. He had only recently understood that these were the same people.

Maria had not grown up round here and it showed. She had not been trained to stand up straight in that particular way. She leaned. She wandered. She parked her car at angles that suggested parking had not been her primary concern. She said things at dinner parties that were true but that nobody had arranged to say out loud. She was nervous in crowds and she knew she was nervous and the knowing of it made her worse, and she would come home furious at herself, running through every wrong moment in the car like a film she had to watch to the end whether she wanted to or not.

I did it again, she’d say.

You were fine, he’d say.

Don’t, she’d say. Not unkindly. Just: don’t pretend. Don’t smooth it over. Let it be the thing it is.

He was learning. Slowly. He was learning that some people need you to stay in the room with the truth rather than help them out of it.

The night that changed things — or clarified them, which is sometimes the same — was a Wednesday in late October. He came out of the grocery store at ten o’clock and found her sitting on the hood of her car in the parking lot, jacket off despite the cold, head tilted back at the building above her. It was six storeys. Nothing dramatic. She was just looking at it the way you look at something you’re measuring.

Hey, he said.

Hey.

He put the bags in the car and came round and leaned beside her on the hood. What are we looking at?

Do you ever think the walls are crumbling? she said. Like, structurally. Like everything we build is just — slowly losing the argument.

He looked at the building. It looked fine. It looked like a building. I think that one’s probably okay, he said carefully.

I’m not talking about the building.

I know.

She was quiet for a moment. Then: I’m tired, Joel. I don’t know what of. That’s the stupid part. I can’t even tell you what I’m tired of because it’s not a thing, it’s just — all of it. Just everything at once, all the time, and I can’t find a way to put it down.

He didn’t say anything. He’d learned that too: the value of not filling the silence with reassurance, of letting the thing she said sit there and be heard rather than immediately tidied away.

After a while she said: It’s only in my head. I know that. I know it’s only in my head.

Knowing doesn’t always help, he said.

She looked at him. No, she said. It really doesn’t.

They stayed up very late that night. They did that a lot — the neighbourhood encouraged it, or at least permitted it, in the way that some places have an ambient permission to exist outside of schedules. Nobody sent them to bed. Nobody was waiting. The night just went on and on, and they sat in the kitchen with the light on and talked around the things they were actually talking about, circling them the way you circle a fire: close enough to feel it, careful enough not to burn.

He told her about his mother’s mottos. She laughed. He told her about the version of himself he’d built to match the neighbourhood’s expectations and the way it fit like a coat that was almost his size. She said, I know that coat.

And then — he didn’t plan it, it came out sideways — he said: I think I’m falling.

She looked at him. Falling how?

He thought about it. Like I’ve been standing at the edge of something for so long that I’ve stopped noticing the edge. And now I look down and I’m already— He stopped. I don’t know. Maybe the same thing you are. The walls thing.

Maria was quiet for a long time. Then she reached across the table and put her hand over his, briefly, the way you touch something to make sure it’s real. Will you catch me? she said. If I go?

Yes, he said. Without hesitation. And then: Will you catch me?

She didn’t answer straight away. She looked at him with those measuring eyes, the ones she used at the shoreline, calibrating distance, gauging what was possible. Then she said: Round here, we stay up very, very late. A joke that wasn’t a joke. An answer that wasn’t an answer. An answer that was, maybe, the only honest one.

Outside the fog held the street. The neighbourhood slept and didn’t sleep. The wire ran along the edge of everything and they were both on it, arms out, looking forward, going slow.

Not falling yet. Or falling together, which is sometimes the only kind of standing up that counts.