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Can you help me Mr Francis? You said at orientation to ask for help if we needed it.”
He looked up from his desk at the little girl. She’s probably about seven or eight, one of the younger campers, and spoke so softly his hearing struggled to pick her voice out of the ringing of his tinnitus.
He smiled at her, attempting to not seem gruff and terrifying -Francis, if you keep making that face it’ll get stuck like that and you’ll terrify any young children who see you!-
“What’s your name?” He was certain he had never seen her before, perhaps she’d been hiding in a cupboard since the start of the session. She had a pale rounded face and dark eyes that couldn’t quite seem to meet his.
“Julia” she said, even softer than before. He nearly swore. It was a name he was certain did not belong to any of the other campers and he hadn’t heard it this session. He tried to commit her face to memory, and link the name to it, he tried to remember and know by name all the campers that came to see him.
“And what’s the matter?” She scuffled around for a moment, her arms wrapped around her like a shell. Behind her the front green of the summer camp, with the flag pole and the little copse of trees laying far in the distance and covering the pond in a dark green cloak.
“I lost -“ her voice trailed off, becoming so quiet that he couldn't hear her at all.
“I’m sorry, but I’m very old and will need you to repeat that.”
He knows he sounded gruff, he knows that Julia is speaking so quietly most likely because she’s terrified of him, many of the younger campers are. -I’ve told you before! You have a resting bitch face! It’s only partially your fault, now let’s go back in there and you can smile at Jamie and try to make that poor baby not grow up afraid of his terrifying uncle!-
“I lost one of my bracelets.” She held up a wrist as she said it, displaying a healthy collection of friendship bracelets of varying colors and patterns. The children here trade them around in a way reminiscent of an ancient economy. If one child excels at five colored chevrons, and another struggles with chevrons but makes perfect ladder bracelets with beads tied at each perfectly neat “step,” they can be traded as though they are of the exact same value, while other children might trade a blue bracelet for a red one, or maybe a finished bracelet for a bag of thread to make new bracelets. Sometimes they get handed back and forth simply as their name would imply, as a token of friendship.
It baffled Francis.
“Do you know where?”
She nodded and then he followed her even though he knew he had things he had to do and he ought to just give her some new thread and send her off to the craft cabin to make a new one.
But she’s familiar, somehow, he wasn’t sure exactly why.
She turned back towards him, and told him where she was when she lost it and where she thought it might be, and there’s a glimmer of hope in her dark eyes, and it slapped Francis across the face with a realization.
She reminded him of James. Everything did these days. She wasn’t even jamesian in any easily pinpointable way, other than having brown eyes. She was timid and shy, somehow he hadn’t seen her yet after two weeks of a summer camp he was the director of.
At this rate he wouldn’t be able to look at a single person with dark eyes without his thoughts turning soupy and maudlin.
It starts out with a forgotten birthday. Not even a forgotten birthday, not really, he was telling someone about their oldest niece, who was heading to uni in the fall, and he forgot how old she was exactly. They had ignored it. Then, a month later James forgot James Ross’ name. They had known each other for over a decade, and had the same name, and they’d joked more than once about how Francis felt the need to collect every man named James, and so that rang alarm bells but Francis ignored it because James was young(er than him) and so lively.
James didn’t ignore it, he went to a specialist and got poked and prodded and tested for all manner of things that Francis couldn’t or didn’t want to imagine his lovely husband who was so much younger than him and healthier than him getting.
In the end it was a death sentence. Clear and simple.
“But you’re young!” Francis was ashamed to admit he had shouted.
James just smiled and said “you seem to be horribly prejudiced against the youthful, always going on about how the young can’t do this or that, or have whatever.”
“Please get a second opinion, Alzheimer’s is a disease of my mother’s age demographic.”
“Ah, I suppose you didn’t hear the early onset part. I’m sure you probably can’t recall, I hardly ever talk about it, but my stint in the army? Apparently I got exposed to some nasty chemicals.”
“That’s horrible”
“It’s probably worse for the people who got those chemicals dumped on them.”
In the end there was nothing Francis could do. James’ death was with him long before they met, and it would take him away slowly.
“Mr Francis, are you all right?”
“Yes, I’m alright, now, let’s look for your bracelet.”
Julia led him toward the tree line, then pointed at the higher, mossy branches of a pine, hanging limply from a high bough was a small bright patch of colour Francis could barely see.
“Now why is it there of all places!”
Julia looked scared, and Francis kicked himself for snapping at her. She whispered her reply. “Someone threw it.”
“I don’t think we can get that one back, but I can give you thread to make a new one?”
“I don’t know how.”
“I’ll teach you.”
The summer camp was nestled comfortably around a large pond, and people who came for one summer usually showed up at the next. Because of this continuity, everyone had noticed when Francis had taken a leave of absence that he expected to be long. Then he came back two years later with no James in tow and everyone avoided saying anything about it. The staff and some of the returning campers knew he had been widowed, but they seemed to sense how uncomfortable Francis was with grief. That being said he was uncomfortable with just about everything.
The interim director, Francis’ old friend Thomas, went back to his job as the waterfront director and when Francis reentered his room in the farmhouse he saw that nothing had moved an inch. James’ sketches of the camp were still hanging on the wall and strewn across the desk half finished, dusty but undisturbed. The set of drawers had a single sock laying in them. Francis had wept. Everything about the camp pinched painfully, everything reminded him of James. There was the tree he would sit under while Francis Got Things Done around camp, lazily reading or shading something in, then complaining of his backache when Francis helped him up, the waterfront, which he spent hours at, falling out of kayaks and off of sailboats and the fire pit, now robbed of the stories he told the campers over them.
Francis was worried, the first time he brought James, that he would tell his horrible, inappropriate for children stories from his army days, or not get along with one of the many, many people that he needed to keep happy for the camp to run smoothly, but he was a social butterfly who was discussing different local fungi with the camp nurse Harry within moments of arriving. He even got Silna to warm up to him, though the archery and riflery instructor was known for being quiet, which people often mistook for aloof disdain.
He’d told the children the not so horrible stories, and had made up wild camp fire tales about banshees and witches and all sorts of ghouls who would leave them alone so long as “you all go to bed at a reasonable time and don’t keep up your counselors with chitchatting.” Francis had once kissed him after he told a particularly excellent story and said to him “I love your mind, I’d live there if I could.”
James had laughed and said “you do realize I’m a veteran. And that our minds tend to be the least fun to build a vacation home in.”
When he came back without James he worried that it would be terrible without him, and that every single moment would just remind him of the lack, the husband size hole in his life. But what was he supposed to do? Not come at all? Rot in his empty house alone all summer? Relapse into alcoholism and spend all his days behind a bar day-drinking and hope it did kill him this time? Find a job teaching Physics that was year round and hiring old men?
So he returned and found that it hurt, but that he had missed everyone. Even Sophia, his ex, who he had somehow become friends with, and who had visited him and James monthly to try and help. She was the assistant director and in charge of all the inner workings of camp that Francis didn’t have the time to handle. The summer he returned she had hugged him and whispered into his ear “Thomas is lovely, but I was sure he would drive us to ruin.”
Sophia was one of the staff members who people had very mixed opinions on. Some people thought that she was vain, or a little self possessed, just because she was fifty and looked remarkably well preserved, and damn anyone who decides to get a round or two of Botox to keep their skin from falling clean off. “I smoked when I was younger, and I didn’t think I’d make it this far, so I’ve got to do some maintenance now, or I’ll look like I crawled right out of the tomb” was how she had explained her decision to Francis, who hadn’t asked for an explanation. “Maybe I ought to look into it” James had said. “You want to make me seem even more like a cradle robber? You and Sophia prancing around on perfectly serviceable joints looking like Anne Hathaway while I decompose?” They laughed so buoyantly.
He showed Julia how to make a friendship bracelet with three colors, in a chevron. It was the style he was best at, and Julia started out unsure of herself, but eventually picked up steam, though her first attempt was very wonky.
He still couldn’t shake the feeling that she was familiar. He still couldn’t look at her without seeing little glimpses of something distinctly jamesian.
-look at that! You helped a child today without scaring the daylights out of them. Now our nephew won’t think his uncle is the monster under the bed.-
At the end, the very end, James didn’t know who he was. Could barely recognize the man he had been married to for over a decade. Who he had called a sick owl who shouldn’t be allowed to teach physics because he had broken all the rules of physics by still being alive. Who had called james a preening fop who cared only for himself and his hair.
Eventually, they had loved each other dearly, after Francis no longer reeked of whiskey and wasn’t quite as mean spirited.
After Julia left, new bracelet tied around her wrist, Thomas, a completely different Thomas, called Tommy for simplicity though he apparently hated being called Tommy, emerged seemingly from nowhere. “What did Julia Gambier need?”
“Gambier?”
Thomas looked at him confused, his prim young face creased slightly. Thomas was a good natured young man who’d been coming to camp since he was a secondary school student so desperately short on cash he nearly dropped out, and had wanted to get a more lucrative summer job, but his mother had insisted in a rare lucid moment that he have some fun for once. He was almost uncomfortably honest, in Francis’ opinion, and would have benefited from being slightly more of a bastard, also in Francis’ opinion. For years he’d tried to convince him to grow a spine but it didn’t seem to be happening. All that said, he was a good counselor and the campers adored him. The other counselors adored him as well, a little too much, also in Francis' opinion, who had seen an odd love triangle form around him in his fifth year as a counselor.
Also in Francis' opinion, Tommy ought to be made the camp director if Francis suddenly dropped dead.
“Yes, that’s the campers name?”
“Oh, friendship bracelet. I think a camper might be picking on her, keep an eye on things.”
Gambier. Well, that explained some things.