Mallory's Melody

Chapter 50

"NICE TO MEET YOU TOO."

Mallory heard her mother's voice for the first time ever. It sounded exactly as she imagined it would. Sweet, weightless, and mellifluous, a bird-like voice that could easily make reality seem like fantasy, that had the potentiality to waft into your head and kill your brain cells one after the other, until you were nothing but a vegetative, drooling, awe-paralysed bundle of flesh and bones.

Mallory and all who inhabited the room were like this for a long stretch of time before reality struck them hard, that this woman who looked and sounded so much like an Angel, was in fact the devil, the worst thing that had and would ever happen to them.

"Jane..." Ava said, again, for the second time in a stretch of 30 seconds. Now that the room was illuminated, she could see Ava in her entirety. She was shaggy, her dishevelled blonde hair bearing an unnatural sandy shade that asserted a ten-year accumulation of a lack of care. There were brown patches on her face. Red-rimmed eyes. Chipped lips. She was not pleasant to look at, and justifiably so, but Mallory couldn't stop staring at her, anyway. There was something about her face that grasped her attention, some ambiguous familiarity.

"Isn't this nice?" Jane said, breaking a silence that begged to be broken. She shrugged her ruthlessly black jacket off her shoulders and stepped forward. William glided to catch the jacket before it touched the floor, a gliding that was too mechanical, so contrived it bespoke of habit.

"Would you look at that? All my favourite people all in one room!" Jane exclaimed, taking a moment to individually meet with everyone's eyes. Mallory was intentional about avoiding hers, as she was scared of what she might find lying in there, reluctant to unravel realities she wasn't ready to face, but there was something about Jane's lingering gaze that forced Mallory's to look into her mother's eyes, and she was struck by it, by how familiar those complex green irises were to her. It was as though this wasn't the first time she was looking into them, as though she'd looked into them all her life. There were like mirrors through which she could see herself, her true unadulterated self, and with that, came a blossoming in her heart, a completeness that brought everything to calm fruition. For the first time in her life, everything made sense. She didn't know why, but it did.

"You're a grown woman, now," Jane said, squatting to meet with Mallory's eyes. She shifted slick strands of hair from Mallory's eyes and stroked her cheek, with a softness that made Mallory's insides melt. So far, she hadn't displayed any murderous qualities. it made her wonder if Cole was right, if everything, if all the things Ava had said about her mother being a cold-blooded murderer, was a lie.

"I remember when you were so small, I could squash you," she said, laughing at her own joke

Dead silence filled the room for a moment.

"You might want to keep your murderous innuendos to yourself, Jane," Ava cut in, smiling wryly. "There are few mothers out there who actually want to squash their daughters. "

Jane met Ava's remark with an icy stare. "I see Ava's told you a lot about me already. Right, Mallory?"

Mallory was mute for a minute before she found her voice. "Y-yes. She did. But is it true, all she said about you killing all those people...you didn't do all that, did you?"

Jane looked at Mallory with pity in her eyes. "There's one thing you need to learn in life, Isabelle, it's not to have your expectations too high. People will disappoint you. I suppose, Coley, has thought you a bit about that?"

Cole just hung his head down low and mumbled something. He too, was evidently struggling with the reality of who Jane was and who he thought she'd been. He too had raised the bar a bit too high.