All my life, one door in our Pennsylvania home was forbidden. The cellar door sat at the end of a narrow hallway, its paint peeling, its handle always cold. My mother, Lorraine, guarded it without raising her voice, yet with absolute certainty. If I lingered too long, she would appear and quietly tell me to step away. My father never questioned it. I stopped asking. Years passed—college, marriage, divorce, distance—but every Christmas visit brought me past that hallway and back to the same unanswered pull.
When I was forty-one, my mother became gravely ill. Two days before she died, she pressed a small brass key into my palm and whispered that only I could open the cellar now. She said it was time. The next morning, after my father left, I unlocked the door. The air inside felt preserved.
