“Sir?” she said, staring at him expectantly.
Tom wondered how long he’d been staring at her.
“Oh, sorry! Yes,” he stammered, still trying to place the girl in his mind.
“Paper or plastic?” she asked as she scanned the milk.
“Um, neither, really. I’ll just carry them.”
“That will be $13.79, sir.”
Tom fumbled for his wallet and got out his credit card. He swiped it through the machine. Erin handed him a receipt and he signed it then returned it to her.
“Thanks, have a nice day,” Erin told him as she handed him another receipt.
“Uh, thank you. Can I ask you something, Erin?”
“Sure.”
“Have we ever met?”
She smiled sweetly. “No. But I think I’ve seen you here before. In fact, I believe I waited on you yesterday afternoon.”
Tom thought back to the day before, gazed at Erin and recalled that she had indeed been the one who had waited on him.
“Oh, yeah, you did! Well, thanks for waiting on me again,” he said stupidly.
Erin giggled. “No problem.”
“Goodbye, Erin.”
“Bye.”
Tom placed the beer and milk back into his grocery cart and headed for the exit. Once he reached Peg’s car, he opened the trunk and unloaded the cart, his thoughts still on the checkout girl.
He knew the girl better than that, he thought. In fact, he knew her quite well…
But how? When?
Slamming the trunk lid, Tom walked around the car and got in, his mind lost in thought. He started the car, threw it into reverse and backed out of the spot. He felt like he was moving in slow motion as he headed for the street.
Her name was Erin. Why did that name seem just as familiar to him as her face did? He knew that girl, somehow.
But she apparently didn’t know him. She had basically denied knowing him beyond having waited on him the day before. She had not shown the slightest shred of recognition while he had been standing there before her all that time.
So he must be wrong, he decided. He must be confusing her with someone else.
Trying desperately to dismiss it from his mind, Tom turned on the radio just as the Beatle’s Hey Jude was beginning to fade out. The song helped him put Erin out of his mind, but not for long.
He recalled driving on a snow-laden highway in total darkness, a young girl sitting in the passenger seat. She was telling him her life story-how she had been orphaned and run off to New York with Kyle “Jesus Christ!” he cried aloud.
Erin was Erin Myers. The girl he had rescued from those delinquents at the Waldorf Astoria!
Tom nearly drove over the curb as the events came back to him in jumbled bits and pieces: The drive to New York in search of Erin and Kyle. The total desolation of New York City. Being assaulted and manhandled out of his Jeep in front of Macy’s by those lowlife assholes, Chappy, Hoops, and what the hell was his name? Bummer! That was it.
His heart pounded furiously as Tom tried to negotiate a turn along Hartford Road. He realized that he was going to have to pull over before he had an accident. He made a right onto the next street and parked halfway down the block.
Heaving a huge sigh, Tom killed the engine.
What in the holy hell had he just been thinking about?
Where were these memories coming from? Why did they seem as real as this street he was now parked on?
Have to think this through, he resolved.
He had been awakened in his Jeep by those three hoodlums in front of Macy’s, he recalled. One of them, the Brit, was going to shoot him. He’d made a break for it and ran like hell-could barely see a thing, it was so dark. He’d ducked into a store that had been looted and hid, but they found him. They had led him back to Macy’s and forced him into a goddamn hearse of all things!
The subsequent events raced through his mind. Being locked in a room at the Waldorf where the maimed and tortured body of Erin’s old boyfriend Kyle was hanging from the ceiling, his escape to the elevator, his confrontation with Bummer (had he actually killed someone?), finding Erin in the room tied to the bed, their escape…
Tom’s head was swimming. Why did these events seem so real-as though they had actually taken place the day before? How could they seem so real when in fact he knew they couldn’t be. He hadn’t gone anywhere yesterday but to the supermarket Then it hit him.
Like a ton of bricks.
Of course none of this had really happened. He had been dreaming it had happened He must have dreamed all of this shit while he’d been under the influence of raw gasoline and carbon monoxide!
Tom drew in a deep breath and stared straight ahead.
More accurately, he had probably been hallucinating, as well. The doctor had said that hallucinations were a possibility…
Whatever it was, it hadn’t been real, thank god. It had just been the worse nightmare he’d ever had.
And the longest one by far, he suddenly realized.
But why was he recalling it only now?
Of course, it had to be from seeing Erin and recognizing her. Seeing her at the checkout line had triggered his memory and made it all come back to him.
He wondered now how much of the dream he could recall. He knew there had been more to it. Much more. What had happened leading him up to his being in New York in the first place? He knew he had been looking for Erin, who had been abducted by Kyle from his home, of all places. Why had she been in his house?
Of course-the power outage! He had come home from the supermarket to discover that the power was out everywhere and that his family and friends had totally disappeared. In fact, everybody everywhere had mysteriously disappeared!
Tom recalled the beginning of the dream now, from the moment he’d discovered his family was missing to the wild chase in pursuit of Erin in his stolen Jeep on I-270 to the sudden unwanted appearance of Kyle at his home the next morning. As he recalled the events, he sat in utter fascination of the clarity of everything, how real and vivid it all seemed now instead of being some sort of vague, random recollection.
Somethi ng special in those lethal gas fumes? he thought dryly.
But the ten thousand dollar question was why? Why had he dreamt this absurd dream in the first place? Did it have some purpose? Was it some kind of spiritual sign from the heavens? Or had it simply been a random gas fume-induced, hallucinatory trip from hell?
And why would he even sport the notion that it could have some real purpose in the first place? Dreams basically had no purpose, other than to help relieve stress. That was a scientifically proven fact, wasn’t it?
Tom sat back in his seat and recollected the entire dream from beginning to end, astonished at the fact that he could actually do it. He recalled the drive back from New York to Columbus with Erin and what he had learned about her past: her being an orphan, the foster father who had molested her as a child, her troubled teen life at school and her running off with Kyle to New York City. Tom grew increasingly angry recalling how Kyle had not only emotionally and physically abused the girl but pimped her into doing kiddie porn movies so that he could sell them on the internet. Then he recalled how she had managed her escape from the lowlife prick down the fire escape and made it back to Ohio by the skin of her teeth.
When Tom reached the part when he and Erin had returned to Columbus and discovered a suspicious car parked in his driveway, his heart began to race Donnie Shortridge! Now what in the hell had that been all about?
Tom recalled how he had entered his home and found this strange hillbilly redneck sitting at the kitchen table with a gun pointed at him. Like a blast from the past, this character claimed to have been married to a girl Tom had knocked up and now blamed Tom for his being sent to prison for assaulting his poor wife in a blind rage.