Pass the Baby
By Therese Eiben, first published in Coolest American Stories 2024
As they prepare to sell off their family’s house, two siblings reckon with the difficulty of their childhoods—and the tragedy of their third sibling.
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Plot Summary
A sister is called by her brother, who tells her that he has finally gotten a buyer on their family’s house. He asks her to come to the family’s house with him to finalize paperwork. She says she’ll think about when she can come, but the brother tells her to come down tomorrow. She hesitates, to which the brother says that family should help family. The woman, who has hepatitis, feels a piercing pain in her groin. She recalls how she has nothing in common with her brother except the tragedy befalling their third brother, though she still can’t separate her life from his.
When the woman drives into Pennsylvania, her antiviral medicine has eased her pain. She meets her brother along the road, but they drive to the house separately. The woman sees that it hasn’t changed much, though her brother has done some work to renovate it for the housing market. For some time, they wander around the house before stumbling upon old photographs which include them and their third sibling.
The woman thinks about how her brother doesn’t believe he’s responsible for what happened to the third sibling, though the woman herself doesn’t agree. She recalls how, as children, the two of them passed him around one day, after which the woman drops him on the concrete floor. The brother consoles her by telling her that their third brother was naturally sick in the head and that dropping him had nothing to do with it. The woman recalls how the third sibling, as an adult, would go on to kill his girlfriend and hide her body behind a wall in the house. Together, the woman and her brother then flip through old newspapers about his trial which their father kept.
The woman and her brother comb through banker’s boxes. She finds a bunch of canceled checks, which makes her recall how her father borrowed money during the third sibling’s trial and eventually sold off his business after the murder soiled its reputation. Together, the woman and her brother talk about when the trial was, when the business closed, and so on. They then talk about the person buying their family’s house. When the brother throws an old doll at the woman as a joke, she gets upset and decides to drive on home. She wonders what she’s really angry about.
The woman drives through the nearby town, passing by the building where her father’s business, a pharmacy, used to be. She recalls how she and the third sibling spent a lot of time there, as well as how they spent time smoking weed. Now, the pharmacy is an elder care facility. The woman heads inside and asks where the pharmacy is. She is directed to a mall where a Rite Aid is.
In the lawyer’s office, the woman and her brother finalize paperwork and sell their family’s house to the buyer for one dollar. Everyone leaves together, and the woman says her goodbyes to her brother, which she considers to be a final one. After the woman drives off, she thinks about how much she hates her brother, though she calms down and realizes she needs to talk to him again.
She drives to the cemetery where he presumably is, at the graves of their parents and third sibling, and talks to him. They talk about how the gravestones don’t have middle names, how they should get new ones for them with middle names, how their family never seemed to help one another in their hardest moments. The woman asks how their third sibling died, and her brother tells her that she shouldn’t have to bear to hear about it. The woman reminisces for a bit, and she apologizes to her brother for not doing much for him back then. He says that it’s alright and to forget about it. She drives off to the setting sun.
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