Free A Dual Inheritance by Joanna Hershon Page A

appeal—he was no great fan of the Beats—Ed briefly wished that they were setting out to drive across the whole country. He would drive and shut the hell up for once. But when they reached the turnoff into the woods—the one he’d heard about from a girl he’d taken out a few times—he made a sharp right, and they bumped along over rocks and branches until the trees thinned out and there was the silvery pond— the Big Deep , the girl had called it. She’d skated there when she was a kid.
    It was a relief to get out of the car, to stop hearing the wind. Though he’d done nothing but drive, the air had made him feel as if he’d played hard in some outdoor sport. He’d make sure to put the top up on theway back. There were only two other parked cars, and one looked as if it hadn’t been started in months. Ed scanned the pond for signs of happy shrieking kids, but there weren’t any kids, only a stooped figure standing far enough away that Ed couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman, and this felt like a bad sign somehow.
    Hugh jumped up and grabbed a thick branch, hung there momentarily before launching into chin-ups; he was short of breath by the time he let go. And of course Ed had to give it a try. As Ed pulled up on his fourth chin-up (Hugh had done five), Hugh said, “My father’s mentioned that my mother would let me out and run me—you know, like a dog.” He said it as if no time had passed between Ed’s original question and now, and this was one of Hugh’s best qualities as Ed saw it—the ability to pick up on lost queries, to not care if the moment was over, and to thereby create a sense of extended, even luxurious, time.
    As Ed pulled up on that branch with every ounce of his strength, he watched how Hugh hoisted himself up onto the hood of Ed’s new car, which should not have mattered, but Ed wanted him off the green paint.
    “Whatever the weather,” said Hugh, “if it was snowing or raining, she’d open the door and out I’d bolt.”
    “Huh,” said Ed, after letting go of the branch. He’d done five chin-ups. His arms were shaking.
    “He’d probably instructed her to train me,” Hugh said. “Probably wanted me disciplined for athletics early. What a false start that was.”
    Ed recalled the previous month when they had gone to The Game. Hugh wouldn’t pry the goddamn movie camera from his face, and Ed knew that Hugh wasn’t capturing it for any sentimental reasons. Hugh cared less about football—and whether Harvard beat Yale—than about capturing the naïve hysteria of this game that Ed knew Hugh had grown up watching with his father and brothers each fall and that Ed, incidentally, wholeheartedly enjoyed. With his giant camera (which held by anyone else would have been awkward), Hugh was making some kind of avant-garde short film—at least that was what Ed deduced from Hugh’s grudging description. All Ed understood was that the game inits entirety—when put forth by Hugh—would be rendered in fast motion and thus (Ed supposed) would seem suitably ridiculous.
    “Hey, listen,” said Ed, attempting his best impersonation of nonchalance. “Would you mind getting off my new car?”
    Hugh did so without hesitating, and they walked toward the pond. “So that’s all you remember?” Ed asked. “Running?” He was suddenly nervous about sliding out on the ice. There was likely a reason for the absence of the kids. And how could he know that the girl who’d told him about this place wasn’t trying to exact some kind of revenge? He wasn’t always terribly polite, especially when it was clear that a date wasn’t going well. His social unease quickly became physical, and he often started to twitch. He couldn’t remember if she’d told him about the pond before or after he’d suggested they call it quits.
    “I think I remember this one window,” Hugh ventured. “I have an image in my head of this small window—a picture window. Seeing it from outside. Seeing my