The swirling dust of the small California farm town filled him as he stepped off the Greyhound. He was glad to be wearing a mask, pandemic or not. He rubbed the old wedding ring in his pocket absently, barely aware he was touching it. A shimmer approached and then faded. Another ghost. He was relieved not to see any others in the small bus depot, certainly fewer ghosts in a small town. Cities were full of the things, the shimmering blurs of the dead. Standing on street corners or walking to work or shopping. Waiting for something that had already happened. Occasionally reaching for him as if there was something he could do for them.

“You Calvin, amigo?” a voice interrupted.

He turned. A tall farmhand with silvering temples visible under the brim of a well-worn cowboy hat grinned at him. “Yep, you Ignacio?”

“Iggy. Everyone here calls me Iggy.” His smile broadened and he gave Calvin a once over. “You sure you’re up for this, citadino?”

“You know it.” He tried to sound confident.

“What you running from?” Iggy asked. His grin transformed to a knowing smile. “No one comes out here to work the vineyards that isn’t hiding from something. Especially this year.” Iggy didn’t wait for a response, “Truck’s over here, throw your stuff in the back.”

“You don’t wear a mask?” he asked.

Iggy shrugged and raised an eyebrow. “We all wear masks, amigo. Maybe a few. Especially when running.” The farmhand turned and began walking toward the old pick-up.

Another shimmer passed through the dusty parking lot. Its eyes turned to Calvin, its form momentarily solidified and it cried out in longing. Calvin waited until the ghost faded, then picked up his bags and followed Iggy. “Not runnin’ from anything. Just looking for something different.”

“OK, citadino, whatever you say.” A low chuckle wafted over Iggy’s shoulder.

Calvin tossed his bags into the bed of the pick-up and slid into the front seat next to Iggy. “Vamanos, amigo,” he tried out his halting Spanish.

Iggy laughed, “Close enough.”

The truck pulled out of the Greyhound station and turned toward the vast vineyards that covered the rolling hills of San Ramos, California. Calvin felt relief with each mile the old pick-up put behind them. And hoped things would work out.

*     *     *
She turns from her dressing table and watches her husband slide the pearled links into the cuffs of his starched shirt. Another evening out at some fundraiser or another. She doesn’t care, not like when they were first married and she mistook the excitement of going to political events and rubbing elbows with famous people for love.

“I think we will take the Rolls tonight, Theresa,” her husband says, “think I’m in the mood to drive. Give the help the night off.”

“You can’t call them ‘the help,’ Clark,” she admonishes, “it’s 1970. You might be a little more respectful.” Earlier in their marriage her tone might have been sweeter, lighter, flirtatious even. Now she is tired of his snobbery. “And the Rolls? Seriously Clark, that car reminds me of a hearse.”

She turns back to her mirror and runs the brush through her red hair, watches it fall in even strands to her shoulders and fade into the dark burgundy gown she’d picked up in San Francisco the weekend before.

Clark snorts from across the room. “The help is the help. And we are taking the Rolls.”

Theresa watches his reflection in the mirror, debates responding, instead returns to brushing her hair.

“Twenty minutes, Theresa.” He pulls on his jacket and approaches her. “Let’s not be late tonight.” He absently rubs her shoulders and bends to touch his lips to the top of her head.

“Yes, congressman,” she replies.

He ignores the sarcasm, straightens his tie, and strides out.

Theresa sets the brush on the table and pulls a strand from the bristles. She stares at it for a long time and wonders.

*     *     *
Calvin had been able to see them for as long as he could remember. When he was nine or ten his mother took him to the movies and they watched a film about a kid that could see dead people. The audience in the theatre was rapt, many gasped and oohed. He laughed. Out loud several times. People in the theatre turned and stared, some shushed. Others gave his mother disapproving looks, questioning why a child might be at that kind of movie in the first place and have the audacity to laugh at such frightening things. He never told his mother why he laughed at the movie, nor would he ever tell anyone about what he could see.

He planned to stay the summer in San Ramos working at the vineyard near the Sacramento River. Fewer people and decidedly fewer shimmers out in the sticks. Sometimes he would go two or three days without seeing the blur of some long dead farmer or migrant worker. In Los Angeles the ghosts had exhausted him, reminded him of his family. And his own mortality even though he was not yet thirty. In the country the ghosts were almost charming. Almost.

“One of these days you will tell me, citadino,” Iggy broke the silence as the two bumped along the back road of the vineyard.

“Tell you what?” Calvin responded.

“You’ve been here for three months, si. You work hard, keep to yourself, stay in your little apartment, don’t go into town. Which means you are hiding. I know, I’ve been here for thirty years. Every summer a couple of you show up. From San Francisco or L.A. Running from something and thinking that hiding out in San Ramos will make everything better. No worries, compa, in good time, things always get better.”

Calvin had grown to like Iggy in short order. But some things weren’t for sharing. “I like the solitude.”

“Sure, sure.” Followed by the low laugh that Calvin had come to appreciate. “Soledad is a hundred miles from here.”

The old pick-up rolled to a stop and Calvin hopped out.

“You sure you don’t want me to come pick you up?” Iggy asked.

“No, I’ll be fine, the walk back will do me good.” Calvin responded.

Iggy laughed again, “Si, soledad.”

“That’s right, Iggy, Solitude.”

The truck pulled back onto the thin blacktop road and rumbled away. Calvin turned from the road and trotted to the nearby work shed. He found the equipment he was looking for and began his day.

*     *     *
“Where are we going tonight?” Theresa asks, the lights of Sacramento already fading in the rear window of the enormous car. “There is nothing out here.”

“Another fundraiser, Theresa, how many times do I need to remind you? It’s a new winery out in San Ramos, only been around for a couple of years. I need you to be sharp tonight.” Clark doesn’t turn his head; he speaks at her with the same disinterest he uses with his staff. “Speaker Unruh is going to be there and he needs our help to get that phony actor Reagan out of the governor’s office. These last two months are all we have left.”

“Phony?” she laughs quietly to herself. “We are driving through farms in a Rolls Royce, Clark.” She turns her head and gazes out the window. Her reflection stares back at her in muted judgment.

*     *     *
Calvin worked a little longer than intended, lost in thought and the good feeling of not having to deal with a single shimmer. The sun dropped into the Pacific and late summer fog was already creeping across the farmland, encouraged by whatever water remained in the Sacramento River. He debated calling Iggy, telling him that he’d changed his mind about that ride. Instead he embraced the soledad. He heard himself laugh, surprised at his unwitting effort to mimic Iggy.

His boots clopped loudly at the transition from gravel to the asphalt that would be his three-mile walk back to the vineyard’s main compound. A small spider was making its way across the road and he instinctively squashed it, horrible creatures. He debated popping his earbuds in and decided that the silence of the night would be better company.

The evening grew cooler, to the point he began to wish for a jacket of some kind. The sweat that had cooled him during the heat of the day now chilled him. He’d been walking for almost twenty minutes when he saw the headlights. Moving toward him at a rate that indicated indifference toward safety. He stepped off the asphalt of the little back road and onto the shoulder. “Iggy,” Calvin smiled. “Coming to check on me. Better slow down, amigo.”

The evening chill increased and what had been mildly uncomfortable now caused him to shiver. The cool air crept across the Sacramento and thickened the fog.

It took him a moment to realize that the car seemed to be making no noise. There was no familiar thrumming that should have preceded Iggy’s old truck. The owner of the vineyard had a Tesla, but why would she be out here sneaking silently through the back roads? “No,” he whispered, “tires would still be humming on the road.”

The lights pushed through the fog with no worldly sound to support the movement. And there it was, the familiar shimmer that surrounded the dead. But instead of emanating from the memory of a person, this shimmer seemed to come from the headlights of the approaching car.

He stepped closer to the road, unsure of what he was about to see.

The car appeared, moving at a speed he couldn’t comprehend. Without any noise it simply glided on the fog. It looked to be an old car, and large, although he had no idea what it might be. Its shimmer lessened as it closed on him, the blur faded. Until it was on him. Passing within ten feet of where he stood, and as it passed it slowed. Well, it didn’t slow, he thought later, the world slowed. The car, the fog, his movements, all became dreamlike. Swimming through cement, his mother used to call it.

The woman seated on the driver’s side was unlike anyone he’d ever seen. Living or dead. She stared out the side window, her eyes not on the road, and he momentarily wondered how she could be driving so straight without paying any attention. But that thought was gone as quickly as it arrived. Instead he could see flowing red hair framing her face, pale and haunted, like she bore the weight of the world. Her green eyes burned through the darkness, brighter than the ghost car’s headlights. Those eyes filled him. The shimmer he’d seen as the car approached, any of the usual blur, was nowhere. It was as if he was peering through the clearest of crystals. A crystal that amplified the woman’s beauty. If that was possible.

The ghost car couldn’t have been visible to him for more than five or six seconds. But it felt a lifetime. He stood and watched it sail past, unable to take his gaze from the woman. Then the shimmer returned, the car blurred and vanished. He was once again alone on the road.

He stood for several minutes, breathed in and out, and when he walked again he wondered if he’d ever leave San Ramos.

*     *     *
She is certain they are lost.

“Clark,” she offers without much hope of being heard, “I think you should stop at the next farm and ask directions.”

She doesn’t expect a response and doesn’t get one.

She turns and stares out the window again, finding it strange to be on the driver’s side of the car and not driving. She wants to enjoy the ride, the quiet. Instead, her thoughts race. She decides that once the election is over, once the campaign season is done, so is she.

There had been a time when she had dreams and hopes. Not even that long ago. Somehow they had vanished. Like the farmland they now drove past, being swallowed by the fog.

*     *     *
He waited on the side of the road the next night. Convinced Iggy with some made-up story about amateur astronomy. Iggy had agreed with a look that indicated he didn’t believe the stargazing bullshit any more than Calvin did.

He’d never actively sought out a shimmer before. He spent so many years trying to avoid them that the act of seeking one felt odd. He continuously fumbled with his phone, checking the time, fairly certain that he knew what time he’d been there the night before, but not positive. The evening was much warmer, no fog rolled in.

He wished he’d paid more attention to all of the shimmering dead. Learned how they moved, when they appeared, the way they disappeared. How to find one. He waited for over an hour before admitting that it wasn’t going to happen again and headed back to the vineyard’s apartments.

He couldn’t imagine not ever seeing her again.

*     *     *
Theresa smiles the practiced smile of a politician’s wife. Making nice with the other wives. She wonders if her expression gives away what is swirling in her mind. The plans that dance there.

“Theresa,” Clark calls from across a room filled with self-important people in tuxedos, “come on over here. You’ve met Speaker Unruh before. Our next Governor.”

She smiles and nods. “Of course, Mr. Unruh,” her voice smooth as she approaches the man standing with her husband. “It is so nice to see you again. We are looking forward to your victory over Governor Reagan in a few months.”

Clark beams, “I was just telling the Speaker about our troubles getting here tonight, how hard it is for women to get ready on time these days ...” his eyes move expectantly back to hers.

“Yes, Mr. Speaker, I’m very sorry. Clark always tries to get me to be on time, but putting myself together takes time.” Theresa smiles.

Clark laughs and the Speaker laughs. Theresa joins them and wonders if they can hear the falsity in her mirth.

*     *     *
He asked Iggy for the day off and a quick ride into San Ramos. From there he caught the half-hour bus ride into Sacramento. It took two more hours of research at the library to figure out it was a Rolls Royce, which explained why she was sitting on the driver’s side of the car. It took another four hours of scrolling through the old newspapers, microfilm, and databases at the library to find the first article. And there she was. On the front page of the Sacramento Bee, Saturday, September 5th, 1970. The wife of a State Congressman. Both died tragically returning home from a political rally for Democratic Gubernatorial candidate Jesse Unruh.

He read the article three times. The car swerved off the road and the pair were killed. No evidence of anything other than bad luck, dark roads, and late summer fog. A single car accident with no survivors. Pictures of the smashed Rolls Royce Phantom VI, the crash site, and a wedding photo of the newly deceased couple. Theresa and Clark Williams.

September 5th, only a few days away. He swallowed hard and held back the urge to cry out in the silence of the cavernous library.

The decades of yellowing and the grainy newsprint were of no consequence. He knew it was her, as beautiful in pictures as she had appeared on the back country road.

Calvin spent another hour researching all there was to learn about her. Theresa Hitzke. From San Diego. Burgeoning artist, west coast debutante, USF grad, humanitarian efforts. Married the Congressman in 1967, no children. All he could see is her face, peering from the old Rolls Royce. And he wasn’t sure if he’d be able to ever see anything else.

*     *     *
Theresa planned to ride home quietly, stay silent for a few more months, and then leave in January. But she cannot hold it any longer.

“I’m done, Clark.” She stares straight ahead, through the front windshield at the wisps of farmland visible through the remaining fog and highlighted by the Rolls’s beams. “I thought I could do it ... I’m done with this marriage.”

There is no response. Faded yellow lane lines flash by. She isn’t sure he heard and she isn’t sure if she can repeat it. She opens her mouth, unsure if words will come out, when he interrupts her.

“You will not leave me,” his voice is low.

“Clark, I ...”

She is unable to finish.

“YOU WILL NOT LEAVE ME!” he erupts, his left hand slapping down on the leather bench, and he turns to face her and release his anger. “You will stay with me, you will appear next to me, and you will do as I say. I have too much left to do.” His hand slaps the seat in rhythm with every other word he speaks. Spits. “I do not have time for your petty discomfort or whatever might be troubling you this week. Do you understand me, you will stay.”

Through his entire rant he has not taken his eyes from her. His stare blazes with an anger surpassing his words.

“CLARK!” she screams, reaching toward the dashboard and glove compartment. An instinct to protect herself.

Clark hears the fear in her voice and understands it is not him that has created it. His head snaps forward too late. The headlights of the massive car shine into nothing. The road has curved and the speeding Rolls has not. He wrenches the wheel as hard as he can, which only succeeds in skidding the huge car sideways as it flies into the fields. It rolls over at top speed. Five times. Six. And comes to a jarring halt when the roof collapses into a tree, only a few feet from the Sacramento River.

Their bodies are found, still inside the car, later that night.

*     *     *
“Okay, compa,” Iggy starts, “if you are going to spend your nights on the back roads, that’s your business. But it’s time to tell me what you are running from. When the boss lady asks about you, I want to tell her the truth, entiendes? I want to tell her you’re a good kid and should stay through the rest of September and into the winter.” The old pick-up bounces down the back road. “Four nights in a row?”

Calvin had worried about what he’d tell Iggy when the time came. He knew that if he got started he might not stop. And he thought Iggy could handle a lot, but the shimmers might be too much for the old farmhand. Could he tell Iggy about the car? There had been nothing for two nights after the first sighting. Then, the third evening, he’d seen it again. The fog trickled in, lighter than before, a chill filled the late summer air, and the headlights appeared. It could have been another car, lost on the back roads, until he heard nothing. No engine, no whine of rubber on asphalt. And he knew it had come back. She had come back.

He had stepped from the shoulder, still not sure as to what he could do. The thin veil of fog shifted, the old Rolls-Royce burst through and he could see her again. Seated on the side of the car nearest him, the driver’s side if it were an American car. He froze. He tried to speak, call out, wave, signal the car and its beautiful passenger somehow. But the car glided past and Theresa’s beautiful face shimmered and was gone.

Last night he’d seen it again, there was not much fog, and when the car appeared it came and went so fast he barely caught a glimpse of her. A shimmer that disappeared before it arrived.

Calvin rubbed his eyes at the memory of the two previous nights, still not sure what he was doing. “Iggy,” he finally offered, “you are absolutely right. I’ve been running. More like hiding.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out the old wedding ring. “This was my mother’s. Not a great mom, but a mom. My father killed her about ten years ago. Killed my two little sisters, too. Carried them out front, put them on the lawn. Then killed himself. I was on a date. When I came home, I found it.”

“Dios mio,” Iggy muttered, trying to keep his eyes on the road but finding it difficult to not look at Calvin.

“Yep. That’s my family.” Calvin spoke with the detached practice of someone that spent years having to repeat the story to any number of disbelieving people. “Pretty fucked up, huh? So, I dealt with it the only way I knew how. By living with it. I lived with an uncle for a few years, tried college, tried working, tried drinking. Failed at all of it. So, after ten years of living with it, I decided to get away. Don’t know why I didn’t think of it sooner. Seems pretty basic, just get out of L.A. right? Leave it all behind. Took me a while to figure that out.” Calvin paused and stared out the window at the rows of grapes. “Nothing here reminds me of that. Nothing here makes me feel better than being out here in the middle of nothing.”

“You aren’t thinking of doing something stupid, compa?”

Calvin laughed, a genuine sound. “No! No, not for a long time have I thought about suicide, Iggy. No.”

Iggy stopped the pick-up and looked at Calvin. Assessed him. Calvin smiled and opened the door. “I’m good, Iggy.” He stepped out.

“I think there’s more to your story than you are letting on and leaving you out here is no bueno, Calvin. That story about your family, I’m sure it’s true, compa, but it’s the kind of thing you tell someone when you don’t want them to know the whole story.”

“Just need some time to think, man.”

“You call me if you need anything.”

“I will, Iggy.”

“You’ll tell me if you need something?” Iggy asked.

“Absolutely.” Calvin nodded and closed the door. Patted the side of the old truck twice, watched it pull away, and marveled at how observant Iggy was. “You are right, friend, that’s not everything.”

Calvin turned and looked back up the deserted road and contemplated everything he hadn’t told Iggy about how the shimmers had been very active before that night, how there had been more than usual leading up to the night his father killed the family. He wondered what he’d missed, what they’d been trying to tell him. He wondered if he could have stopped everything that happened. He hadn’t told Iggy about the shimmers that came after. Shimmers of his mother and the twins. And unlike most, they were not blurry or ill-defined. They were clear. And loud. He would see them at the store, or the park, or walking down the street. Like every other shimmer. Until they started screaming.

Calvin hadn’t told Iggy about that. About having to continue shopping or brushing his teeth while the ghostly shadow of his mother stood behind him wailing in anger and rage. About being too ashamed to try and talk with them, communicate with them. Soothe them. He turned his back on them while alive and then again when they were dead. He hadn’t told Iggy that after nine years he was certain that they were blaming him. That even worse than that was when his father would materialize. As if to blame Calvin for surviving, for not being there to stop it all. He hadn’t told Iggy anything about the things he saw or heard. Because in the time he’d spent at the winery he hadn’t seen a shimmer of his family once. It was glorious and horrible all at the same time. The guilt weighed so heavy.

He decided, also, that it was finally time to do something about it. Free his family. Tonight he was going to warn Theresa Williams. Let her shimmer go in peace. Then he would return to L.A. and release his family. And himself.

He moved to the middle of the lane as the fog arrived. He spun his mother’s gold band on his finger with no idea what would happen.

The headlights appeared.

*     *     *
“CLARK!” She screams, but it is far too late. The figure in the middle of the road appears in the fog, seemingly out of nowhere.

The tires of the Rolls scream in protest and she feels the car shudder with the impact. The figure that appeared tumbles backward, away from the skidding car. Never leaving the light of the beams. The car comes to a stop.

“Jesus Christ!” Clark yells. “Where the Hell did he come from?”

But she is already out of the car, running toward the figure lying in the road. Miraculously, he is breathing, his eyes open. Lying on his back staring up into the night.

*     *     *
Calvin could not believe how much it hurt; he had expected the apparition to simply pass through him. Giving him an opportunity to speak to her. Instead he was hit and launched. He wasn’t sure how long he would have; every breath screamed with pain from a cage of broken ribs. But his eyes worked, and without turning his head he saw her approach. She ran through the night toward him in a red dress that looked like it had been poured from a bottle. She spoke but he couldn’t hear. He watched her lips move and caught a faint whiff of her perfume.

He whispered her name with lungs that no longer wished to participate. He was glad to see that he could still move his left hand.

*     *     *
“Theresa,” the figure on the roadway whispers to her and she recoils. But something in his eyes give her pause.

Then she hears Clark from behind. “Jesus, Theresa, get away from him!”

She is not paying any attention to her husband because the eyes of the man lying in the street are looking at her in a way that she’s never been looked at before. The eyes are full of adoration and hope. And satisfaction. She bends closer, no longer worried as to how this person knows her name. “Are you alright?” she asks, not knowing what else to say.

He smiles and his eyes never leave hers and a whispered breath replies, “I am now.”

Again from behind, far, far, away, she hears Clark, or what may once have been Clark, “Theresa, leave him alone, we need to go. Now.”

The man on the ground moves his arm. She is amazed that he can move anything. She realizes he is reaching for her. She has no fear of his touch.

“Take this,” he wheezes and places his hand in hers; she can feel something cold and smooth there. He is gasping for air now and tries to continue speaking. “Do ... not ... get back in the car ... with him ... tonight.”

She can’t take her eyes from his and for a moment wonders if anyone will ever look at her again the way this dying man is.

Incredibly, he reaches for her face, and his hand grazes her cheek. She does not try and stop him.

“Even more ...” he says, his words now carrying no more substance than the swirling fog, “... beautiful in person.”

His hand falls away from her face and the adoration that danced in his eyes extinguishes. She sees his chest heave one final time and then it stills.

A hand falls on her shoulder.

“Jesus Christ, Theresa, what are you doing? Get in the car now before anyone comes along. Did you touch him? Is he dead?”

Clark continues to rant and demand she return to the car. She stands and looks at the item in her hand. A simple gold band. Scratched and dulled with age.

*     *     *
Anyone standing on the side of the old back road would have seen him standing alone. Then fly through the foggy night like an invisible creature had thrown him. Anyone standing on the side of the old back road would have seen his labored breathing and puffs of air coming from his mouth, as if he was speaking to someone. They would have seen his arm move upward and a finger move in a delicate circle, like he was conducting some unseen orchestra. Then they would have seen his arm crumple back to his side and the puffs of air coming from his mouth subside.

But no one was standing on the side of the road and no one saw the man that could see the glimmers of the dead become a shimmer himself.

Three hours later, the driver of an old pickup truck would find Calvin in the middle of the road. The apparent victim of a hit and run, but there’d be no evidence of skid marks, tire tracks, or a car ever having been there. And Iggy would wonder how much of the story the citadino did not tell him.

*     *     *
She stands on the balcony looking out over San Francisco. As she does every year on September 5th. She pours herself a glass of wine and thinks about that night and the words spoken to her by someone she never met. She is almost eighty now and her thumb absently rubs the gold band on her third finger.

It’s been some kind of year with pandemics and politics driving most people to the edge. But she knows they might be missing the bigger picture. All of those other things are secondary to being alive.

She’d scoured the papers for weeks after that evening. Nothing was ever said, nothing was ever reported about a young man found dead on a back road near San Ramos. As if it had never happened. Her husband, on the other hand, made the papers the next morning after the Rolls skidded off the road and killed him. She had refused to get back in the car with him that night, like the stranger warned. But she knew her decision had been made long before that.

She sips her wine and thinks about the stranger from that night and imagines if he were alive today what he might be doing tonight.

A shimmer of melancholy washes over her and she wonders.