Excerpt from Model Home by Rivers Solomon, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

ONE.

Maybe my mother is God, and that's why nothing I do pleases her.

Maybe my mother is God, and that's why even though she's never once saved me, I keep praying that this time she will.

I'm Chava in the garden, freshly aware of my nakedness. Can't let Mother see what lowly thing I've become.

* * *

One day soon, I'll be a failed deity, too. My daughter is learning not to believe in me.

Tonight, she can't sleep. She wants me to strap her fourteen-year-old body to my chest with a sling, the way I did when she was a baby. Her need is heavy, like a secret.

"Yoyo?" she calls quietly. "You awake?"

I conjure up a fake snore, but when she turns to leave, I flick on the bedside lamp. At least Mama owned up to her cruelty, would say it straight: I don't want nothing to do with you right now.

"What's up?" I ask Elijah, and she shrugs. "Want some company?" She shrugs again, her hands obscured in the sleeves of her too-big sweatshirt.

My ability to dredge up love from the paltry reserves is one that comes and goes. Let tonight be enough to undo all my sins.

I give Elijah a scalp massage. I warm her up a mug of oat milk steeped with lavender. I run her a bath. I make her a snack. I make her another snack when she doesn't eat the first one because it's too wet, which means I put too much sugar-free blueberry jam on it. If I'd put on less, she might have accused it of being too dry, and once it's too dry, it's impossible to add more jam later, because "that's just wrong." In the end, I make her a bowl of ramen with crispy chopped mushrooms and kimchi.

A mother from shul says I do too much for Elijah, that if I keep coddling her she'll never learn to stand on her own. My mother made me pack my own lunch from the age of four—and any time I woke in the night to ask her for a cup of water, she'd say, Ezri, you know where the tap is. Teddy bear in tow, I'd army-crawl to the kitchen, low to the ground so the ghost wouldn't find me. She always did.

Despite all the coddling denied me as a child, I never became the independent island of my mother's dreams. I'm a baby bird, chirping for anyone at all to spit food into my mouth.

If I make Elijah too many snacks, it's because food-making is effortless compared to the real task of child-rearing: emotional presence. I don't give my daughter too much because I have nothing to give.

I'm not even her parent, some days. Too many times Elijah has squeezed my shoulder, shaken me, and said, Yoyo, I need some money to get food from the shops. I ignore her, no longer her yoyo in those moments, but instead a vessel of ghosts.

Used to my dissociative episodes, Elijah knows when to reach into my wallet and get my debit card herself.

After midnight, when Elijah still can't sleep, I watch TV with her in her bed. True crime. Something grisly about a dead teenager or several. We both find solace in the inevitability of broken girls. Something to count on.

My youngest sister, Emmanuelle, asks how my daughter and I can stomach such ugliness. I tell her we watch the sensationalized breakdowns of people's lives in the same spirit we do puzzles. By the end, we hope to piece it all together. We cling to the promise inherent in the genre's title, that we will find something true here.

Not that any of these series ever deliver. This isn't because they lack in true things to say but because we already know the true things they have to say. What we are actually hoping for is a different truth, a different answer to the question: Why did he do it? How did the wife not know? Why did the mother allow this? Why weren't they watching more closely? How, in such a crowded café, did no one see, did no one stop this untethering of blood from body?

The answer to all these questions, of course, is that human beings are not very good. I say this not misanthropically but with the realization that we, through apparent dominance over other animals, have crowned ourselves kings, when in reality we are ill equipped to handle the basic demands of life on this scale. We are forest creatures who've wandered into the man-made road, eyes frozen and wide.

Excerpted from Model Home by Rivers Solomon. Copyright © 2024 by Rivers Solomon. Excerpted by permission of MCD. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.