That’s what he would always say to me when I woke up in the middle of the night, gasping in fear. My dad would sing to me. He sang whatever came to mind. Sometimes he put to music a poem he had recently read in one of the forgotten books in the lighthouses he oversaw. Or he would sing straight from the gut, composing one-off melodies without lyrics.

He would cradle me as softly as one would a petrified bird in a warm hand, while I, resting against his chest, listened to the sounds, which next to his beating heart were released into the world.

“You mustn’t think,” he told me once when I asked him how he managed to sing wordless lullabies that were never written down and never would be. “Don’t think. Follow the image you see inside you and slowly re-create it with your voice. Don’t search for words to capture your pain and your consolation. Seek out a place and sing it.”

Henri

“We’re nearly there,” my father says reassuringly. He’s sitting behind me, the way we always sit, and he’s rowing. There are lobster pots between my feet.

The often raging Iroise Sea is smooth and has taken on the metallic-blue, almost translucent glitter that the Atlantic usually only gives off shortly before sundown. I feel the warm rays of the sun on my back. As warm and bright as just now in that room . . .

Just now? How come? What room?

A bridge. A whiff of tar. A falling sensation, down and down, and a glass lid closing over me. A hand letting go of me as I drown. These frightening memories dissipate and disperse like smoke. I must have dozed off and been dreaming. That sometimes happens when we go out in the small blue rowboat, which is usually propped on its side against the garden wall of Ty Kerk, Malo’s house near Melon, and which Grandpa Malo and my father, Yvan, caulk on windless winter days. It spends the rest of the year in the water.

I can feel the warm light on my hands and legs, all over my skin, making me drowsy but also filling me with an enormous sense of well-being. It’s as if a shadow slides off me into the water with a sigh and quietly floats away into the distance. The whole scene is relaxed and peaceful, like the first day of the holidays when two months without school lie before you, as infinite as the great blue sky.

I half turn. My father smiles at me. I look ahead again. It’s so quiet. Where’s the wind? Where’s the grating of the waves on the sand and rocks? Why is the sky so still? Everything’s wrong.