In the front seat, Bee and Jane are curled up together. They look like a pair of pristine debutantes, the two of them in Bee’s best dresses, Jane in blue satin and Bee in red silk. I sprawl out in the back, still wearing the same thing from two days ago, the scent of Dracula’s ashes, the scent of roses leeched into the seams.

Over at the next screen, the family-friendly one that’s playing Mad Monster Party, a mother and father are sitting on the hood of their station wagon. Next to them, their little girl in pigtails keeps turning around, her eyes wide and eager. She wants to get a peek at the gore on our screen.

Jane glances up at her. “Do you still remember being that young?”

I sit back, shaking my head. “Not really.”

“Me neither,” Bee says. “I barely remember my own mother anymore.”

Sorrow seeps marrow-deep into me. Bee hasn’t told me much about her past, but she’s told me that much. Her mother, packed away to a sanitarium in Spanish Town where the family left her to die. And then Bee, packed away to England with Rochester, where she was left to die in a different way.

“You know, he hated my mother.” Bee’s nervous hands smooth a wrinkle in her silk dress. “They never met, but he hated her anyway. He would always call her my ‘infamous mother’ or ‘the Creole.’ He never said her name.”

I gaze at her. “What was her name?”

Bee hesitates, as though she never expected anyone to ask her again. “Antoinetta,” she says. “The same as my middle name. It’s the only thing of hers I carry with me.”

My heart clenched, I want to ask her more, but Jane reaches out and takes Bee’s trembling hand, the two of them so close now, so content, and that’s my cue to leave.

I’m crossing the lot when the little girl breaks away from her family and skips toward me. She flashes me a gap-toothed grin, her pigtails wagging in the breeze. Then she passes by, arcing back to the station wagon. I don’t listen for her heartbeat. I can’t even hear it. I might be hungry, but there are things I’d do, and then there are things I’d never do.