There's a basement door in my mother's house that's not on the original blueprints.

I was clearing the attic when I found the originals in a brass tube — drawn by my grandfather in 1962, when he built it for my mother and her brother Tommy. The basement on the page is one open rectangle: concrete, oil furnace, no door.

I told myself it was a utility wall the architect skipped — old plans do that. I almost believed it.

But I went down to check, because that door had been there my whole life. The third step still creaks. The frame around the door is darker oak, finger-jointed the way they stopped doing in the fifties.

I figured he'd used scrap from an older job, because he kept everything. Then I knocked, and it sounded hollow. When I pushed, it weighed sixty pounds, and the air smelled like old woodsmoke.

My uncle Tommy walked out of this house in August 1979 and never came back. The police said he ran.

There are tally marks gouged into the inside face of the door, in clusters of seven, column after column. At the bottom, in the blocky capitals from every page of his old Scout field book, one carved word.

Tommy.

I don't want to count how many clusters of seven there are.