Free Come to the Edge: A Memoir by Christina Haag Page A

and granite, it reached high into the bright sky. I loved the tower, loved walking by it, and always went out of my way to do so. The four green-faced clocks on each of the sides were worn by weather. They no longer kept time, and the bell had been removed, but the tower had a story. At its chipped base, above an iron door, the words LOVE IS STRONG AS DEATH were carved into the stone, a memorial to a woman from her Italian husband after her untimely passing almost a century before. I stopped for a moment and looked up. I wanted to be loved like that.
    When I passed through the main gates onto Prospect Street, I spotted my bike, an old Peugeot that took me everywhere. Relieved, I bent over the wheel and tugged at the lock. Then I heard my name. A voice I knew. I looked up, squinted.
    “Hey, stranger.” Someone wearing white was smiling at me.
    I raised the back of my hand to shade my eyes. The sun glinted off a railing.
    “I was wondering when I’d run into you,” he said.
    John was sitting on the bottom set of steps outside the Rockefeller Library talking with a large, preppy blond guy. “Catch you later,” the blond guy said when he saw me, and took off in the direction of George Street.
    I sat down on the step next to him, tucking the filmy skirt under my knees. I was happy to see him. He was now in his sophomore year, one behind me. He leaned in to hug me. His shoulders were broader. Around his neck, a shark’s tooth on a string.
    “It’s been a while,” I said, and we began to try and place when we’d last seen each other—a Little Feat concert where he’d teased me mercilessly about the Harvard guy I was with, a party in New York, his performance in Volpone the previous spring.
    What had I done over the summer, he wanted to know. I didn’t mention the French Canadian. I told him about Ireland, the double rainbow in Donegal, the pubs in Dublin, and a castle I stumbled upon near Galway Bay that turned out to have belonged to my clan hundreds of years back. Before that, six weeks of summer theater at Brown. His face lit up, and he wanted to know more. “That’s cool. You seem into it,” he said, adding that he wouldn’t be doing any plays for a while. Something cryptic about needing to stay focused, as if the words of Shakespeare and Shaw were a sweet drug that he needed to pace himself around. He’d been in Ireland, too. Also Africa, and helping out on his uncle Teddy’s presidential campaign. And Martha’s Vineyard. “My mother’s building a house there. You should come up sometime.”
    As we spoke, I searched his face. Something about him was different. In a summer, he had changed. Taller, more handsome; I couldn’t put a finger on it. Maybe he was in love. Maybe it was the white garb. But he seemed at ease with himself in a way he hadn’t before.
    “I can’t bear to be inside on a day like this.” He exhaled deeply and cocked his head to the library, a rectangle of cement and glass whose revolving doors whirred behind us. He leaned back, propping his elbows against a step, and stretched his legs. His linen pants were rumpled. I saw that he was wearing sandals, the woven kind, and that his feet were still brown.
    “Where are you living?” I asked.
    “Phi Psi. I pledged.”
    “Oh.” I tried not to wrinkle my nose.
    “And you?”
    “Waterman Co-op.”
    “Huh. Tofu.”
    The first bell rang, and I moved toward my bike. The lock came off easily.
    “I’ll walk you,” he said, following. “I’ve got time.”
    I crouched down and slipped the U-shaped metal bar neatly in its holder on the bottom bar of the bike. His feet. I’ve never seen them before , I thought, and threw my knapsack in the front basket. They were elegant, and that surprised me.
    I steadied the bike, and we began to walk up the uneven street, past the Van Wickle Gates, past the Carrie Tower, to the rise at the top of Prospect and Waterman.
    The second bell rang, and people began darting around us.
    “Well, stranger,