“Do you remember all this?” Antoine asked as the car climbed the broad curve of the bridge. On their right, along the mainland, rows of gigantic rotating silver windmills.

“No,” she said. “Just sitting in the car and waiting for the tide. And riding in along the Gois passage. It was fun. And our father getting so impatient because Grand-père got the tide schedule wrong again.”

He too remembered waiting for the tide. Waiting for hours for the Gois causeway to appear beneath the slowly receding waves. And there it was at last, cobbles glistening with seawater, a four-kilometer amphibian road dotted with high rescue poles with little platforms for unfortunate drivers and pedestrians stranded by the upcoming flood.

She put a quick hand on his knee.

“Antoine, can we go back to the Gois? I really want to see it again.”

“Of course!”

He felt elated that she had at last remembered something. And something as important and mysterious as the Passage du Gois. Gois. Even the word fascinated him. Pronounced like Boa. It was an old name for an old road.

Grand-père never took the new bridge. He grumbled about the excessive toll and how the concrete structure’s gigantic sweep scarred the landscape. So he stuck to the Gois passage despite his son’s jeering at him and the long wait.

As they drove onto the island, Antoine realized that his memories of the Gois causeway were intact. He could play them back in his mind like a movie. He wondered if Mélanie felt the same. The large austere cross at the beginning of the causeway came back to him. To protect and cherish, Clarisse used to whisper, holding his hand tight. He remembered sitting on the island shore and watching the waves dwindle into nothingness until the vast gray bank appeared like magic. Once the sea hissed away, the bank crowded over with shell searchers wielding shrimp nets. He recalled Mélanie’s little legs rushing along the sand and Clarisse’s plastic bucket soon overflowing with cockles, clams, and periwinkles.