Nine Lives(69)

Faye and I were in heaven that summer. The resort was right on the beach, and we were free to roam, just so long as we met our mother for lunch and then for dinner. There were multiple other kids staying for the summer as well, and we soon formed a tight-knit group. I remember that time of my life more for the feelings it evoked than the actual specifics of the day-to-day. I was a twelve-year-old boy who had never had that many friends. Now I had about ten of them.

We were quite the gang. I’d have never remembered their names, of course, not all of them, but as a bookish boy, I had taken to keeping a journal. More of a notebook, really—filled with drawings and lists and blueprints and plans. And that summer I must have brought the notebook with me to the third-floor library at the Windward, where the members of the newly formed Pirate Society would meet after dinner, because it was there that I wrote down all their names under the heading “Windward Resort Pirate Society.”

Jack Grant

Meg Gauthier

Danny Horne

Gary Winslow

Deborah MacReady

Wayne Coates

Art Kruse

Paula Shepherd

Frank Hopkins



Under that list of names I had skipped a line and then written my sister’s name, Faye Grant, followed by the word apprentice. The members of the Pirate Society weren’t quite ready to afford a ten-year-old full membership in our group.

I don’t remember if we named ourselves the Pirate Society before or after someone had pulled out the Peter Pan book to look at. I do remember that we all felt a little old to be calling ourselves pirates, so we added “society” in order to make it sound more sophisticated. And I also remember a bunch of us flipping through that book, Wayne lying and telling us he’d seen the movie the summer before, even though we all knew it hadn’t played in a movie theater for years.

What I don’t remember is who got the idea that we should initiate Faye into our society by tying her up and putting her into the secret cave at the base of the jetty during low tide. Someone must have come up with it while we were looking at the Peter Pan book, because it was the way Captain Hook tried to kill Tiger Lily. I’ll never forget the illustration of Tiger Lily just barely holding her head above the water as Peter Pan and Captain Hook fight with swords. It is an image forever burned into my subconscious.

But someone did come up with the idea.

If Faye could survive the rising tide, as Tiger Lily had, she would become a full-fledged member of the Pirate Society.

And we all, every last one of us, agreed that it was a perfect plan. We told it to her during one of our secret meetings in the library, and she immediately agreed to take the test. I think, or rather I know, that she would have agreed to anything to be made a full member of our group.

In my mind this all happened during the course of a single day, but I can’t be sure of that. What I do know is that Wayne Coates had a tide chart and told us all that there would be a low tide in the middle of the afternoon, when we were all free to be on the beach between lunch and dinner. In my memory it was an overcast day, spitting rain, and we had the beach practically to ourselves. Danny had brought a length of rope that he’d found snarled up in a half-submerged lobster trap, but Faye initially refused to be tied up. One of the girls, and I want to say it was Meg, told Faye that she didn’t have to be tied up but in order to pass the initiation test, she had to stay in the cave until the very last moment, until the water went over her head, and only then would she be allowed to leave.

“If you come out one minute before, we’ll know, and you’ll never get to be a pirate.”

Those are the words I remember, and I also remember all of us saying it again and again to Faye, who stood there in her loose one-piece bathing suit, wide-eyed, stick-limbed, long hair plastered to her frail shoulders, nodding ferociously, desperate to please the older kids.

We formed a circle around her, all chiming in to let her know that if she emerged too early, if she panicked and left the cave before the tide reached her, we wouldn’t even talk to her for the rest of the summer.

Not one of us said something different.

No one told her it was just a game.

No one, in my recollection, even smiled at her, or winked to let her know it wasn’t real.

We all watched her crawl into the cave, the water already starting to fill up the crevices and tidepools at the foot of the wall. She lay down on her back with her hands down by her sides.

And then we forgot about her, running off, laughing. It had started to really rain at that point, so we went to the game room at the resort and played board games all afternoon.

It was only around cocktail hour that my mother asked me if I knew where Faye was. I told her I didn’t, of course, then quickly spread word around to the other Pirates that no one should mention what we had done to my sister. I must have been worried at that point, worried about Faye I mean, but for some reason I thought she’d be just fine, and that maybe she was hiding somewhere else to get us all into trouble.

Word spread fast that Faye was missing, and several of the adults fanned through the resort grounds and the beach to look for her. My group all met together in the half-filled dining room and pledged to never say a word.

It was after dark by the time they found her body, still in that little cave. The tide was already going out again.

That was sixty years ago, and I’ve never forgotten what I and those eight other kids did to her. We might not have tied her hands behind her back, as we’d planned, but our words did the trick just as well.