The Littlest Wren

THE BRIDGE between the mainland of Nova Scotia and Cape Breton Island is nearly a mile and a half long. They don’t mark it in miles—all distances are in kilometers, just like most everywhere else in the world—but I had done the conversion in my head somewhere between New Brunswick and the first highway sign for Prince Edward Island.

I spent much of our thirteen-hour drive from western Massachusetts with my fingers pressing into two new red scars, tender and raw. One snaked horizontally over the stretchy ridges and dents of skin just north of my pelvic bone, and the other ran across my belly, perpendicular to the first. I was dreaming about what this bridge to Cape Breton Island would look like. I imagined bougainvillea growing up diamond-laden pillars; I imagined extravagantly painted towers of ornately carved metal; I imagined rainbows at the end of the bridge and the liberation symphonies that would be playing (or, at the very least, a Florence and the Machine song), the music raining down from the sky just loud enough to confirm that this was the beginning of the part of our lives where we might be happy again.

I would have missed the bridge entirely if Jake hadn’t said, “I think we’re driving over water.” Indeed, the two-lane highway seemed to extend without pomp or fuss straight over a stretch of glassy black water, and with only a green sign with Gaelic writing marking the moment, we drove right onto the largest, northeasternmost island of Nova Scotia.

“That was it?” I said. “That was the bridge to Cape Breton Island?”

He nodded. “It’s not a bridge though. It’s a causeway.”

“A causeway? It’s a causeway?”

“Yeah.”

“Fuck that causeway,” I said. “Fuck that nobridge causeway and fuck everybody on Cape Breton Island.”

Jake smiled. He took his hand off the steering wheel and put it over my left hand, which was covering my scars. My scars trembled and burned, and the burn went up through my underwear and pants, up into our hands and out of the car. I watched the burn spread out over the water that filled the space between the mainland and the island, diffuse and colorless, rising up and up and up until it was unrecognizable—until it