To the woman I’ve called Mother all my life, I now ask a question so painful it leaves me trembling. “You’re not my birth mother, are you?”

At this, she throws her head back with a cruel bark of laughter.

“Ha! You really thought such an ugly, graceless child could be the daughter of Marcella Porter?!”

Her words sting, but I don’t buckle beneath them.

“Who was she? The woman Father had an affair with?”

“If I knew I would have killed her years ago!” she shrieks, throwing her glass at me. It whizzes at my head and I barely manage to avoid having it break against my face. Instead it crashes into the wall, shattering with a loud noise.

A mangled sob leaves Mother’s lips. Like some boneless creature, she sinks from the window seat to the floor, her whole body shuddering with the violence of her weeping. I approach her cautiously, half expecting another projectile to be hurled at me, and I sink down to reach a hand out to her frail back.

“He said he loved me,” she sobs, her chest heaving, a string of spittle dangling from her cracked lips. “In what way was I lacking? Am I not beautiful? Am I not lovely? How dare he look at another woman? How dare he get some bitch pregnant, and force me to raise her child?!”

What can I say to her? I never asked for this, that my existence would be a scar upon my own mother’s mind, the cause, the very root of her brokenness. I never asked to be born…

Slowly, still shaking, she looks to me with wild, blood-shot eyes.

“You. You have always wanted my love.”

I wince at her words, and something inside me squeezes painfully.

“Yes, Mother.”

“Take the gun. Kill that wench Edith Appletree. If you do this for me, I will love you, and claim you as my true daughter. That’s what you want, isn’t it? What you’ve always wanted?”

She smiles at me with manic eagerness, a bad attempt at pretending she could ever care for me, the child of her husband’s mistress.

It doesn’t fool me for a moment.

“I’m sorry, Mother,” I say, rising from my position beside her on the floor.

“Where are you going?”

“You’re not well. I’ll get Susan to put you to bed.”

“Don’t you turn your back on me! Get back here, Frances!”

“Oh. I’m keeping the gun.”

“I said come back!”

I walk first from that room, then from the house. Then, I run.

I run, blinded by my tears, straight for the annex. That fortress of solitude where I spent so much of my childhood. That place where no one could ever hurt me.

Growing up, the piano was my only friend. I return to it now, seeking its comfort.

My tears blind me. I cannot see the keys. But that doesn’t stop me from playing. Violently, madly, it’s a cacophony in fortissimo, a clash of one hideous chord after another. Just a glimpse at the turmoil in my soul.

I play and I weep and I scream into the darkness. Howling like a lunatic to be comforted. But there is no comfort for me. Not for Cowbird.

Suddenly I become aware of a hand on my back. My playing stops and I look up through my tears. It’s dark; I did not light the lamp. And yet, somehow, I am certain.

It’s him.

I cling to the middle of him, heaving with sobs. His arms close protectively around my head, pulling me safely against his torso. Sheltering me.

“Who am I, Sam? Who am I?”

His fingers tighten lightly against the side of my scalp.

“No one knows, no one wants me. No one’s ever wanted me. The Cowbird…”

“I know you. I want you.”

“No, you don’t.”

“I do,” his hold on me tightens even more as I continue to squeeze his torso with all of my strength. “I do, Frances…”

I’m comforted by his words, encouraged even to bare just a little more of myself to this man who seems so willing to understand and accept every part of me.

“It’s my fault. It’s because of me Mother’s like that. An addict.”

“Her decisions are not your fault.” 

“But if I didn’t exist. If I’d never been born...”

“That’s foolishness and you know it,” Sam’s voice isn’t angry, but patient even as he scolds me. “You have as much right to live as anyone else. And you have a right to be happy.” 

“How can I be happy? I’ve never been happy in all my life, not once.” 

“Is that really true?”

I sniff. 

“You’re happy when you play the piano, aren’t you?”

“Maybe. Sometimes...”

“When else are you happy?” 

“I guess when I’m reading a good novel. Looking at my collection. Studying mummies and hieroglyphics...”

“See? You know how to be happy.”

I sniff again, tears drying and face growing warm the longer he holds me like this.

“I’m even happier… when I’m with you.”

Sam stiffens at my shy confession, then he releases his hold and squats down before me. He lays a hand on my knee a little tentatively. 

“Professionally, I don’t know how I’m supposed to answer that…” he admits softly.

“And personally?” 

His thumb moves slightly as though in the faintest caress. It makes all my skin come afire, lighting up my whole body. I hold my breath in anticipation of his next move, but that’s as far as he goes. 

“Would you... like some coffee, Frances?”

A big whirlwind of butterflies chase themselves round and round in my gut at his invitation. 

“Yes, please.”

I don’t know how, but time passes very quickly in Sam’s little room. We sit up for hours, talking and drinking coffee. He seems a little different around me, laughing more than usual, asking me all kinds of questions about myself and my hobbies. I regale him a long time with trivia from ancient Egypt, I write his name on a napkin in hieroglyphics. 

“You really know a lot about this stuff,” he remarks.

I shrug. “It’s fun for me. A hobby.” 

“Have you ever considered studying it professionally? Maybe becoming an Egyptologist?” 

“But how could I do that? I’d have to move to Egypt.”

“Why not? Your life was made for living. Not for locking yourself away in a joyless place like the Porter estate.” 

I look down at my empty coffee cup, turn it slightly so the handle is facing away from me. Then I adjust my glasses.

“Till now… I think I’ve been afraid to live… Going out on my own, pursuing happiness, those were things other people did. Not me. I know,” I say before he can answer. “I know I’m ridiculous. The most pathetic kind of human being. Uncertain of which is the next step to take, I made my camp at the crossroads. An unhappy home, but ultimately, a familiar one.”

Sam sits back in his chair with one leg crossed over his knee and his arms folded across the chest. He looks at me with a lazy sort of familiarity, a kind of intimacy I’m fast becoming addicted to. I don’t ever want to leave this room, I think, when he looks at me like that. I don’t ever want to leave his side.

“You know,” he says, “when I was young, I was a huge crybaby…”