I'm here, it's here with me.

My mother bought me a white basket for my bike. We assembled it on the handlebars.

“Why do you have that doll?”

I found a porcelain doll of a woman that was clown and cat-like. It was in the one of the boxes of the mountain of things stored in the garage for a yard sale that will never happen. The doll wound up and moved its torso when her music-box song played.

“I dunno. It’s odd.”

“My brother gave it to me for Christmas one year after I saw Cats on Broadway. I don’t know why he did that. I didn’t even like the play.”

I kept the doll in the basket and wound it up before I left. I rode my bike to the river in Three Bridges and waded into the water. There are a thousand white shells that dot the shallow end by the bridge like pearls. I wanted to collect them all, but I took a mussel shell that looked stained with oil, a broken piece of a ceramic plate and a piece of wood that was smoothed over from the water.

I started back to my house but stopped at the place I'd seen the dead turtle a few weeks before and turned around. I veered off down a dirt road to the stone wall that overlooks the water. There was a pile of broken wood in the forest. The posts were painted white, and the heap looked just like the fragments of the house I built for my mother’s wedding dress. It's stored in pieces with the toys and shoes in the garage. Mine had no door, but this house had one. The paint was peeling from the wooden door and it was warped perfectly in two places so that it laid over the pile like a blanket.

I thought I was meant to find it. I walked closer and found a deer skeleton in the broken house. The ribs were mangled with the wood and the skull was resting on a piece behind a veil of leaves, and it was looking at me.