Model Home

Ezri, a gender-fluid, neurodivergent person and the eldest of three siblings, lives in a decaying Victorian house in England with their fourteen-year-old daughter, Elijah. Ezri has dissociative episodes and a fraught relationship with their mother, known as Mama, a fiercely intelligent Black woman who raised her children in a palatial home in the Oak Creek Estates, a predominantly white gated community near Dallas, Texas. Ezri's parenting oscillates between attentive caretaking and total emotional absence; Elijah has learned to fend for herself during Ezri's dissociative states, reaching into Ezri's wallet to buy food.

One night, Ezri receives a text from Mama's phone number: "Children, I miss your screams. Come play" (6). Ezri attributes the message to "Nightmare Mother," a spectral figure from childhood, and shares it with their two younger sisters, Eve and Emmanuelle. More threatening texts follow. Eve books flights home, and Ezri and Elijah travel to Dallas, where Emmanuelle meets them at the airport, insisting she can feel Mama is still alive. Ezri privately dismisses this intuition, citing a host of clinical diagnoses, including borderline personality disorder, complex PTSD, and dissociative disorder, that leave them skeptical of the supernatural.

Ezri arrives alone at 677 Acacia Drive, the family home. The neighborhood triggers memories of the homeowners' association's racially coded rules, which targeted Ezri's family as the only Black residents. Inside, the kitchen holds leftovers from an anniversary dinner. Then Ezri discovers their father, Pop, dead in a backyard lounger and, diving into the pool, finds Mama's body weighted with bricks.

Flashbacks piece together the family's history. Mama and Pop moved from Brooklyn to the Oak Creek Estates when Ezri was four, choosing the development's model home over a modest New York apartment. Their neighbor Laurie Mackleson arrived the first night with petits fours and a Black Barbie, commenting on how "articulate" Ezri was. Mama regarded Laurie with suspicion from the start. Over the years, the HOA targeted the family with violation notices, and Mama was labeled combative for pushing back.

Detective Ben Harvey interviews the siblings. The scene suggests a murder-suicide. Emmanuelle insists the house itself killed their parents, but Eve shuts down the conversation, invoking lawyers. Ezri refuses to show the detective the threatening texts, knowing they would only deepen suspicion against Mama.

The siblings regroup at Eve's bungalow in South Dallas. Eve raises her twins, Eden and Echo, without assigned gender. The three sisters sleep tangled in Eve's bed, their only easy intimacy, until Emmanuelle erupts in grief, accusing Eve and Ezri of abandoning their parents. Ezri follows her outside, coaxes her back in, and washes her in the shower, massaging the burn scars covering Emmanuelle's body from belly to feet, the result of a childhood bath tainted with what Ezri believed to be sulfuric acid from the tap.

Interspersed flashbacks reveal Ezri's childhood: attending WeightWatchers at age eleven to become small enough to escape trouble, waking inside the oven at age six, writing a poem at thirteen in ink made from a dead dog's blood. Mama's love was fierce but conditional, yet she could also be tender. After the blood-poem incident, she took the family shopping, to dinner at Dallas's Reunion Tower, and ice-skating, declaring her children survivors connected to millions of years of history.

In sessions with their therapist, Max, Ezri describes their inner world through the suffering child in Ursula K. Le Guin's short story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," in which a child is kept in torment so that a city may prosper. Ezri carries this figure, the Omelas child, as a symbol of their deepest wound. Max challenges Ezri's belief that they are fundamentally broken, suggesting that Ezri's many selves are evidence of a creative, resilient mind.

Unable to sleep one night, Ezri drives back to the Estates and encounters Keith, a neighbor's stepfather, who drunkenly brandishes a pistol and offers a mutual suicide pact. The confrontation shifts into a sexual encounter. Afterward, Ezri enters 677 alone, climbs to their childhood bedroom, and collapses into bed weeping.

Meanwhile, Elijah has been secretly corresponding with Lily, a professional violinist who contacted her after seeing a school concert video online. Lily flies to Dallas to meet Elijah, buying her gifts and encouraging a new look. Elijah begins sneaking out to see Lily, who eventually takes her to a restaurant and back to her hotel room.

At a meeting with their parents' lawyer, the siblings learn Mama and Pop left behind roughly three million dollars in real estate and one million in investments. Ezri struggles to accept that the family could have left 677 at any time. Emmanuelle wants to speak publicly about the house. Eve, Ezri, and Aunt Jacqueline, Mama's aunt, resist, fearing disbelief and danger. Emmanuelle counters that silence is complicity.

At the funeral, Elijah plays piano and sings with the choir. Emmanuelle's eulogy goes off script: she lifts her blouse to reveal her burn scars, tells the audience that sulfuric acid came from the tap at 677, and declares the house haunted. Days later, on a nationally syndicated interview, the host suggests the likelier explanation is Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a condition in which a caregiver fabricates or induces illness in someone under their care. Emmanuelle is shaken. Ezri, watching from Eve's house, has a severe dissociative episode. Eve and Ezri tentatively discuss the possibility that the truth involves many overlapping causes rather than a single explanation.

After the interview, Emmanuelle returns to 677 to perform a rootwork cleansing, a ritual drawn from African American folk spirituality. Eve and Ezri follow. Inside, the dining table is set with Mama's bone china and her favorite tea. In Ezri's old bedroom, Emmanuelle pulls back the covers to reveal Laurie Mackleson, drunk and disheveled, sleeping in Ezri's childhood bed. Eve positions herself between Laurie and Ezri. Emmanuelle identifies Laurie as "the woman without a face," a figure from the siblings' childhood.

Laurie confesses that the haunting began as a coordinated campaign among neighbors to drive the Black family out, staging incidents like killing the family's fish and faking a child's disappearance. The campaign escalated into personal predation. A flashback reveals that four-year-old Ezri innocently let Laurie into the house; Laurie copied Mama's keys and began visiting at night, initiating years of sexual abuse. Laurie shows a hidden-camera recording proving the deaths were a joint suicide. Mama had recently discovered Laurie's abuse of Ezri and, Ezri realizes, likely died from guilt over having blamed Ezri for years for horrors Laurie orchestrated. Emmanuelle reveals she broadcast the entire confrontation on Instagram Live. Ezri is devastated that their abuse is now public.

The family realizes Elijah called Emmanuelle for a ride earlier that evening and was turned away. From Elijah's cousin Magi, they learn about Lily. They race to the Sheraton, where Elijah is sitting alone in the lobby reading Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, having stolen Lily's phone while Lily slept. Elijah asks only that the photos on the phone be deleted.

Ezri tells Elijah they want to stay in Dallas, near family. In a final therapy session, Ezri imagines a new life with Eve and the children in Arlington. Ezri addresses the Omelas child, their metaphor for an inner suffering self, who rages that Ezri is worthless, and promises to care for him, for Elijah, and for themselves. The novel closes with Ezri on a beach, tasting sand and salt, affirming their aliveness and echoing Mama's belief that to be called an animal and to answer yes is a form of radical power: "Mother is God, and I am an animal, made of blood and longing" (280).