Triple Word Score

It is almost ten o’clock at night when my mother offers a game of Scrabble. The last hint of twilight is disappearing from the late summer sky, and I am spent from a weekend investigating the death of my brother Steven. I wasn’t aware of his existence until I was in the sixth grade, and this unknowing has permeated my life. Sleep sounds preferable at this late hour but I remind myself that at ninety, my mother may not have many games left in her. The light in the dining room where we play is sharp—almost fluorescent, and yet not bright enough. There’s a weight to it, and I hear the ballasts humming above my head. 

My eight-year-old brother Steven died on Good Friday, April 4, 1969 and I was born a year later, on Easter Sunday. Despite the Jesus resurrection connection, we were not a religious family. Back then in the Boston suburbs, Catholicism was something you were born into, like being a Red Sox fan. My parents handled the tragedy of losing a child typically for that time—my father went back to work, my siblings went back to school, and the neighbors dropped by with casseroles. Two months later they conceived me. “Babies are a blessing,” my mother said, after I asked her what it was like to have an infant only a year after losing a child. This platitude, along with others I heard growing up like, “If it doesn’t kill you, it will make you stronger,” and “It has to get worse before it gets better,” was part survival mechanism, part magical thinking.

My mother uses a special edition Scrabble game now—the kind that has plastic borders for each tile and operates on a spinner so you can swing the board in any player’s direction. I don’t like this new development as I am stuck in the past. I want the old-school Scrabble experience, the visceral reminder of trying to move the flimsy board without jostling the letters lest minutes are added to an already interminable game. As a child, I hated this aspect, but now I crave the act of straightening each tile perfectly, so the words are seamless even in their vertical direction.

Scrabble is our family’s game and my grandmother Mémé, my Mom’s mom, never seemed to lose. She was from a farming family in Prince Edward Island and maintained an incessantly content disposition over her one hundred years. My mother has since taken over my grandmother’s role, both as matriarch of our family and current Scrabble queen, though her disposition toward me has not historically been one of contentment. As the last of five children, and born after the death of her son, my need for attention from my mother was ceaseless and I see now, unlikely to ever be fulfilled.

My parents were high school sweethearts and married at twenty. By the time Steven died, they were thirty-seven and thirty-eight, had four children and a nice home with a picket fence in a wooded neighborhood of Billerica, Massachusetts. After a brutal childhood at the hands of his abusive father, my own dad seemed to have achieved an ideal life—a steady job, a company car in the driveway, and a family who loved him. My mother grew up a 1950’s woman—raising kids and being a homemaker. She was friends with the neighbors, borrowing sugar and planning summer barbecues. The community was caring, and my family made friends there for life. So when the unimaginable happened, their support system saved them from enduring it alone.

The first few rounds of the game, we are moving along, the words come easily, the tiles and possibilities seem endless. My mother leans on the table, using her forearms and wide bosom as support, to study the board. I used to feel anxious before my turn—the imagined pressure of my opponents wondering why I was taking so long. My tactic was to get rid of tiles as quickly as possible and end the game. My mother, though, has always been interested in acquiring points. She isn’t competitive by nature; she simply wants to see what is possible on the board—how to add a vowel to an already crowded collection and come away with a triple word score. She doesn’t want to beat me, at least not consciously, but she wants to get the most points per play, which is winning, which is beating me. This is how it always went, and I have never won a game against her.

One night after a high school dance, I sat down with my Dad as he watched the movie North by Northwest. He’d had a couple of beers, so I took the opportunity to ask him what my brother Steven was like.

“You’re a lot like him. He was a happy kid, always smiling. But a little rascal, you know? A little shit. He got away with it, though, because he could flash his baby blue eyes.” At this my dad blinked a few times, tilted his head, and grinned at me. He had a fantastic smile—even before he got gleaming white dentures that he’d pop in and out at the dinner table. “Yeah, Steven was a sweet kid,” he said. I wanted to know more but I didn’t want to spook him, so I sat still, waiting for a morsel about this person who had been a part of my family’s life. A person eating birthday cake in his highchair. A person building a snowman. A person whom no one mentioned. Yes, there was that school photo I’d seen in the living room of the little boy with the buzz cut in the red blazer wearing a serious expression. It was amongst other extended family photos in Billerica but perhaps in the move to New Hampshire, I didn’t notice its relocation. I hadn’t wanted to know that boy, not until I’d stumbled upon a box of old photos in the garage closet when I was researching a middle school project. There was a photo of my siblings holding up their gifts on Christmas morning with a boy I did not recognize so I waved it in front of my mother as she was cooking, demanding to know—who was this interloper? “That was your brother Steven. He died. Go set the table for dinner.” How did that little boy die? How was I like him—because I, too, was a troublemaker? My mother often said to me, “You step in shit and come out smelling like roses.” But just as seamlessly as my father had begun talking about Steven, he changed the subject to Cary Grant and that he’d like to go in a plane again one day.

I used to think my brother died of a brain tumor. That was the story that had been passed down to me when I began asking questions. Mémé heard that he had this ‘brain thing’ in his head since birth and possibly a jolt or a hit had triggered the tumor. My oldest sister, Kathy, remembers that when she was thirteen, perhaps a week before Steven died, she was pushing him in a shopping cart and he fell over, head-first into the pavement. My older brother, Michael, remembers Steven falling out of a tree in the backyard before he died. My Aunt Eleanor said that Steven used to sleepwalk and one night he came into my parent’s room and told them that he had a headache. He said this a few nights in a row before my parents realized that he wasn’t just articulating a nightmare. Eleanor said that by the time they took him to the hospital, it was too late. That he spent weeks there, sick with a tumor, somewhere in the center of his brain. She recalled, “There were always people at the house during those weeks, all the relatives were waiting around. One time, your father heard the phone ring and sprang out of his seat to answer. Turns out it was from the television. Someone had a soap opera on, and he thought it was real. Can you imagine?” I couldn’t. They all had different perspectives and memories, yet no one else seemed to be bothered by the lack of clarity around his death. And the more time that passed, the further that cloud of vagueness cemented. 

After I found out that Steven existed, I spent my teenage years and early twenties convinced that I would die young. My free-floating anxiety spiked, and I developed the kind of panic attacks that led me to the ER. I exhibited OCD symptoms like avoiding cracks when I walked and counting while water ran from the faucet. As time passed, I understood why my mother and I had never been close, and why I continued to seek out people who would pay me attention. Because my mother couldn’t. Not eleven months after losing her son, and not in the following murky years of her grief. 

It is getting late but my mother hasn’t lost any steam or inclination to win this game. I’m tired and have to drive back to New Jersey in the morning but I see her concentrating on what she can put down, and I stay. “I have all vowels!” I groan. There are only about a dozen tiles left in the bag and words are difficult to come by. She knows almost every two-letter word there is, so I know what I’m up against. Eventually she senses my waning drive and says, “Let me see, what have you got there?” and I turn my rack toward her. She starts reorganizing my letters and tries to find a word for me, not thinking of how it will benefit her, only how to create something from nothing. I used to wonder if Scrabble was what helped my grandmother learn English after arriving from Canada, but I discovered that it wasn’t marketed to the United States until 1952, when my parents were married. Maybe this was always my mother’s game, after all.

The year after my father died, my mother came to visit me in San Francisco for Thanksgiving. At the time, I was considering applying to grad school for filmmaking and she agreed to an on-camera interview. I took the chance to ask her all the questions I’d been asking myself for twenty years, since I found out I had a brother I never knew. While I thought I was being distanced in my questioning, like a documentary filmmaker, I realize now that I was cold in my attempt to extract the truth from her. Still, she was cagey.

Interviewer: “In 1969, you had four children and then you had a son that passed away. What did he die from?”

Mother: “A brain tumor.”
Interviewer: “Did you know for a long time that he was sick or did it happen suddenly?”

Mother: “It was sudden. Inoperable.”

After twenty more minutes of me asking questions ranging from what her childhood was like (“Fine”) to how she felt about being married to my Dad (“Fine”), I circled back to the timing of Steven’s death. “Well,” she said, “it was after he fell out of the tree. Like six months later, or more. Must have been six months later because it was after the summer. He just felt like he wanted to sleep all the time, so we took him to the doctor, who put him in the hospital. They took all kinds of tests. He died a week later. Or six days. I don’t remember.” She kept a tight smile on her face while holding back tears and snapped at me to turn the camera off. But I kept rolling. Maybe I wanted her to break. She’s stronger than I am, though, and walked away.

Scrabble’s rules seem to have changed over the years—but when I was growing up, you needed to challenge someone if you doubted a word. I used to look up two-letter words in the dictionary, thinking my grandmother and mother were making them up, only to set myself farther back on the score sheet. Tonight, though, I am close to winning. I don’t know how, but my mother is the scorekeeper and I trust her math and suddenly, I feel competitive. “Mom, lemme see the score,” and we discover that she has skipped adding points from one of my words two plays back and when we re-tally, I am crushing her. It’s temporary, though. She comes back in the next round with another word I’ve never heard of and then I am awake. I want to win. 

The night before our Scrabble game, I was in the kitchen with my mom, trying to muster the courage to ask her about Steven’s death certificate. It was the missing piece, the last bit of evidence I needed to understand these incompatible memories. Not looking at me, she replied curtly, “It’s in the filing cabinet in my closet.” I was a girl again, having annoyed my mother, and began walking away but she nudged me with her cane to keep going. My mother is also the queen of acting as if things are fine when they are clearly not. She followed me into her room, shuffling quickly behind and watched me open the bottom drawer. I pulled out the brown accordion-style envelope, thick and heavy like my anticipation. I sat down, legs in a wide v, and spread the paperwork out while my mother opened a caramel from her candy bowl. I saw quickly that it was not simply paperwork around Steven’s death, but a secondary, thicker ream of my father’s health records, as well. I set that aside for another day. Popping the treat into her mouth, she said, “Well, I hope you get something from this. I don’t want to look at it,” and left me with my pile of potential.

It was in chronological order—first the death certificate for Steven, four days shy of his eighth birthday. 

Cause of death: Demyelinating disease of the brain

Not cancer or inoperable tumor or traumatic brain injury. There were condolence cards from friends and neighbors. Documents about the gravestone design and spelling of his name—“Steven with a v, please, not a ph.” There was a cemetery receipt for the purchase of four plots. They were a family of six then—five now that Steven had died. I thought of my parents, thirty-eight years old and burying their little boy. Would any number of burial plots have made sense? There are no medical records or doctor’s notes from hospital stays. This and a handful of photos are all the physical evidence left of my brother. My mother had said, “It’s different with children. The life was too short. There’s nothing much to remember.” And so perhaps this slight folder suits him, yet I can’t help thinking of my own son at eight years old—full of curiosity and personality—and wondered why we abbreviate a life this way. As I sat in the remnants of my family’s past, I was compulsive in documenting, capturing information before it disappeared back into the cavity of my mother’s filing cabinet. As if when she dies, this will die with her. 

Early in the exploratory process around my brother’s death, I wanted to know exactly what happened and ultimately, why someone didn’t do something to prevent it. And why didn’t they talk about him? It was as if he ceased to exist in memory, as well as body. I even imagined a different outcome which might have included a decision to stop at four children, leaving me to never exist. 

According to the Mayo Clinic, demyelinating diseases are “any condition that cause damage to the protective covering (myelin sheath) that surrounds nerve fibers in your brain. When the sheath is damaged, nerve impulses slow or even stop, causing neurological problems.” Maybe this is why he was falling out of trees. He must have been symptomatic for a doctor to have made a clinical diagnosis, or was it only during an autopsy that they identified the cause of death? This is a question I can’t bring myself to ask my mother. There were the events that transpired—a fall out of a tree here, sleepwalking there, a headache or change in behavior perhaps? When I first interviewed my mother twenty years ago, she’d said it was at least six months between an initial doctor’s visit, discovering a tumor, and his death. Yet during a visit last year, when she seemed amenable to questioning, I gently asked, “How did Steven die again?” And this is where she shook my already loose foundation of the truth as she announced with confidence, “He fell out of a tree. I took him to the hospital, and he was fine, no concussion or anything like that. Being a boy, a couple days later, up the same tree, fell out of the same tree. And that time he hit something on the way down and went into a coma. It took his life right away.” My mother has never fully explained these discrepancies or his illness in any detail, and I see now that this may be the trauma of having a child who died. Full stop. And so, I am beginning to accept the unknown, and the unknowable.

We are down to the final tiles and it is almost midnight. I’m tired from sitting still and thinking hard and the oppressive near-fluorescent lights over the board. When I look at the score sheet, I am down by ten points. My mother is still surveying the board for the best location, reminding me, “Try to use the triple word or double letter score when you can!” But I am still learning to think this way and I want the tiles off my rack and no more left in the bag. Why am I rushing for my time with her to be over? At one point she tries to use the word ‘DA’ for Dad and I fight this—D.A. is an abbreviation for district attorney, clearly. I even text my sister Jeanne who replies, “Maybe Dumb Ass, but Dad? No.” I let her have it, though, the hour is late and no tile will rest on a bonus square. And she helped me earlier with a two-letter word that gave me the points advantage. But now we are even again and there are no tiles left in the bag, and she has her cup of lukewarm herbal tea and tissue stuffed up her sleeve, leaning on the table, studying. We are both determined to use every tile on our rack, and we put down our last two-letter words and tally the score and I have won. 

I have won, fair and square. 

So I scream, “Fuck yeah!” and bang the table, the tiny wooden letters popping out of their casings, and then we laugh—because it is a win for us both.