I opened the folder and took out more maps. They covered every part of the same coastline, with some overlapping, from Bordeaux via La Rochelle to Brest. Large portions of the maps were white. Ocean, the Bay of Biscay.

“Are there more?” Marguerite asked.

I took out the other plastic folders containing charts, opened the first one, took out four more sheets of paper, and tried spreading them out, but they were too large for the tiny saloon table.

“Let’s take them outside,” Marguerite said.

Lou helped spread them across the dry grass in the garden. Marguerite laid overlapping charts on top of each other, showing Lou how they could be fitted together like a puzzle.

There was a slight breeze, fluttering the maps. Lou and Marguerite found stones to hold them down.

I stood there watching the two bowed heads, Marguerite explaining calmly, Lou talking loudly and eagerly, while the entire western coast of Europe slowly appeared before our eyes on the ground.

“From the north,” Marguerite said finally. “She came from the north. Far north.”

“She?”

“That’s what you call a boat. She’s a woman.”

“But it’s a boat,” Lou said.

Marguerite laughed. I felt a stabbing inside of me. How rusty it sounded, that laughter. As if she weren’t used to laughing.

“From the north?” I asked.

From the water countries.

I gazed at the maps, following them upward, the English Channel, Le Havre, Calais, Ostend, Vlissingen, Den Helder, Cuxhaven, Sylt, Esbjerg, Hirtshals, Egersund, Stavanger, Haugesund . . .

I walked over to the maps of Norway, stopping by the one farthest north. What a coastline, so different from France. The landscape at home was a straight line facing the ocean compared to this. The Norwegian coast was crooked, choppy, divided into thousands of islands. And by long, dramatic fjords that continued inland for miles.

“We’re here,” Marguerite said, pointing to a place in the grass, off the charts.

“Where is the ocean?” Lou asked, looking around her.

“Far, far away,” Marguerite replied.

“But how did the boat end up here,” I asked, “in the middle of the countryside?”

“Come.”

Marguerite walked away between the trees. She stopped for a moment, sunshine and shadows flickering across her face. Then she seemed to discover something through the trees behind the house.

“Here.”

She nodded at us, encouraging us to come along. And we followed her into the tangled underbrush, where she pointed out an almost overgrown cart road. It followed a dried-up brook, with smoothly polished stones where the bed of the river had once been.

Soon the riverbed sloped downward. We walked down a gentle incline, reaching a dilapidated construction beside the riverbed. Marguerite stopped at the sight of weathered planks and rotting, wooden boards.

“What was it?” she asked.

I was puzzled. “Didn’t you ever build a dam as a child?”

“No,” she said. “I never built anything.”