Detoured by Love

by David Horne

  “Coach?” Brett asked.

  “Am I boring you, Evans?” Coach Darwin asked through gritted teeth. “Do you mind paying attention during my half-time talk? Is that okay?”

  “Of course, boss,” Brett said smoothly.

  Coach Darwin, however, gave Brett a glare that let Brett know that he wasn’t pleased with him in particular.

  When the teams finally came out for the second half, Javier Academy were beginning to look like the stronger side. They’d obviously switched to a new game plan during half time, and they were playing it absolutely flawlessly - their strategy was based on passing. Quickly and sharply, to keep the focus off of any one player.

  As the clock ticked on, the strategy begun to work. Slowly but surely, St Francis’ possession went down from 50% to 35%. They had begun to lose control of the game. At the home end, the goalkeeper Million Ahmed had been tested time and again as Javier Academy’s forwards continually asked questions with ranged shots from outside the penalty area and counter attacks seemingly out of the blue. Then, just as the game hit the seventy-minute mark, the inevitable happened. Javier Academy scored.

  Specter and Ojunsiji darted forward simultaneously as Thomas McCullough dummied a long cross and instead of sending it far and wide, threaded the ball to his midfield. Quicker and faster than McCullough by a mile, they took advantage of the distraction to hit the ball to Specter who reflected it into Ojunsiji’s path.

  Lucas Ojunsiji dummied a back-pass and sent half of the defense one way. Brett sprinted back, but it was too late. It was one-on-one, and Million had no chance. Ojunsiji put the ball away, grinning widely as he did so, and the shout went up. One-nil.

  Brett took the ball and ran it back to the spot, trying not to catch Coach Darwin’s eye as he went mad on the sidelines. All they had to do was score to balance out the game. St Francis took the kick-off and immediately started feeding the ball forward. Corey was the only forward who was in any position to do anything with it, but the defense had him on lock kept deflecting his shots from the left.

  Then, Brett noticed that Javier Academy were implementing their strategy again. In his peripheral vision, Brett saw Specter and Ojunsiji rushing forward again as the ball came to McCullough. Rather than challenging him, Brett dropped back just as McCullough’s foot slammed into the ball, sending it long down the pitch. At Brett’s signal, the defenders retreated into the penalty area, and Brett moved in to challenge Specter, who’d collected the ball just shy of the corner flag.

  Jonas Specter and Brett Evans locked eyes, and they both moved at the same time. He dodged one way, Brett went the other, and he tried to slip past. And there it was. The single moment where everything in Brett’s life turned sour.

  In the months and years to come, when Brett would think back to the moment, it would appear, from his perspective, as though time were slowing down. As though something monumental was about to come, which, of course, it was.

  But at the time, it was just another soccer match. Nothing Brett hadn’t done a thousand times.

  It seemed silly, in fact, that something so routine could have such a vast impact on Brett’s life. But the Universe doesn’t care what people think is silly, or impossible, or a coincidence. Its blessings and curses alike fall where they may, and that’s that. As Jonas Specter cut around Brett, preparing to send another cross into the box, Brett jolted his entire body into a sliding tackle, intent on knocking the ball out of play before he could send it in. However, Brett mistimed the tackle. Badly.

  Brett slid along the grass, and knocked the ball away, but he slid too far, right into Specter’s path. Then he kicked Brett in the side of his head, full force. For a second, there was nothing. Brett had stopped, dead still, on the grass. The force of the blow snapped his neck back, but there was nothing else. Then came the pain. Pain beyond anything he’d ever felt in his life before.

  Screaming agony split down the center of Brett’s skull and every part of his body clenched and tensed involuntarily, almost as if he were being struck by lightning. Then he blacked out. The other members of the team would have to explain to Brett about it after the fact because he would have no memory past that point. He didn’t remember being stretchered off the pitch, he didn’t remember the blood. He just remembered the pain.

  Chapter Five

  Present Day…

  “He’s just has a concussion. So, we need to keep him overnight. Nothing to worry about.”

  “It’s not what we first thought. Unfortunately, there has been some lasting damage to the brain.”

  “We think it’s some kind of brain lesion or internal bleeding situated on the frontal lobe. We’ll definitely know more once we’ve run further tests.”

  “We’ve confirmed, it’s cerebral hemorrhaging. There could be some signs of amnesia, headaches, dizzy spells, bouts of confusion. Medically, there’s not much we can do, but we can put you in touch with some support groups if you should need—”

  Twenty-year-old Brett Evans didn’t get dreams. Not anymore. Nightmares, however, were a different story. Brett had them pretty much every night for the most part. Not surprisingly, the nightmares themselves were never about the accident. The accident itself wasn’t what traumatized him. It never had been. Brett could barely remember it.

  The last thing Brett clearly recalled on that day in that place was making that sliding tackle. After that, all he remembered was the pain. The worst pain that he’d ever felt in his life or would probably ever feel again. When Brett had woken up, two days later, the doctors had said that that pain was from the cleat striking his skull. The shockwaves then caused his brain to lurch forward and slam into his skull.

  But Brett had only felt the pain for the briefest of moments before he’d blacked out. Brett thanked God for that every damn day of his life. What had really traumatized Brett was all the meetings with doctors after the fact. At first, they’d thought he was just concussed. But the real problems started almost immediately after that. The headaches, the dizziness, the confusion, the stuttering, all months down the line from the incident.

  At first, Brett had kept it on the down-low. He’d thought he could deal with the problem himself. So, Brett had gone back to school, and was given a hero’s welcome. The game had swung in St Francis’ favor. Corey Maddox had managed to equalize with a diving header and then was taken down in the penalty box by Thomas McCullough in the dying seconds of the game. The penalty that he scored put St Francis ahead by one as the game ended.

  Which meant that Brett had a new rival on the team. Corey had been the one to lead them to victory, not Brett, their Captain. So, for the next few months, Brett proved that none could match his commitment to the team by training harder and more fiercely than ever before. Or, at least, he tried to.

  It was like something had snapped inside Brett’s head. Like he was broken. Before the accident, Brett was fit, and could run for hours. He could think quickly and analyze. He could tell which way someone was about go based on the shifting of their shoulders. It wasn’t hard, it just came to him.

  “Reading the game” is what they called it.

  But after Brett came back from the hospital, he’d found that his power to read the game was gone. As if a piece of him had died in that accident. Brett could still run for hours on end, he could still lift the same amount of weight and his muscles were all still in good condition - for all intents and purposes, Brett Evans was still physically fit.

  But his brain was a different story. Things that he just used to “get” would confuse him. Brett would make bad judgement calls. He would choose to make a run when he had a team mate wide open for a pass, or challenge for possession when he should have stayed in his position, not to mention that physically exerting himself was one of the catalysts that triggered his headaches.

  Brett hadn’t been perfect before the accident, but after it, he was a far cry from what he had been. It was just one mistake after another. Brett began to lose his team’s respect, and then he lost Coach Darwi
n’s.

  Eventually, Brett had to confide in him about the headaches, and the confusion, and the stuttering. At first, Brett convinced Coach Darwin to keep it to himself, promising him that it’d get better. But during the next season, St Francis finished third from the bottom in the league. Not only had Brett become the weak link, but he’d begun to corrupt the whole team. Coach Darwin refused to keep Brett’s injury under wraps any longer, and he’d called his parents.

  So, they’d gone back to the hospital, and the doctors had concocted quite a different story. Brett had thought he could handle anything, but the truth was he could scarcely imagine what awaited him. Years down the line, and Brett still couldn’t put into words what it was like when he got the news.

  Who could imagine that? Talking to a doctor, a strange man in a white lab coat who spends all day telling people that their brains are bleeding inside their skulls, and all you are is the latest in a long line of people to receive that news? That’s the reason for the splitting headaches that you get when you try to concentrate on something too hard, or for too long? Can you imagine being told that someone kicked you in the head with all their strength and that’s the reason why you stutter and stammer at the best of times and have all but lost the ability to use your words?

  What does one even say to that? Where does one even hope to begin?

  One of the worst things about this whole entire situation was that there was no one to blame. Besides the obvious culprit, of course. As far as anyone else was concerned, it was an accident. Of course, if there was anyone at all to blame, it didn’t take a genius to work out that it was Brett himself. Brett had been the one who chose to be on that pitch, Brett was the one who chose to play, Brett was the one who chose to make a sloppy tackle and Brett was the one who was paying the price for that decision. Whether Brett liked it or not, it was justice.

  Brett couldn’t lie, not even to himself, the lack of a Devil’s Advocate, a fall guy to point the finger at, was beginning to drive him crazy, but not nearly as much as the rapid change in his life was. Of course, five years was hardly rapid, and yet, “the great Brett Evans” was so different now than he was back then, that he was hardly recognizable, even to himself.

  Five years ago, Brett had been at the very top of his game, poised to be scouted for LA Galaxy, or maybe even a European club, going toe-to-toe with the big boys like FC Barcelona or Real Madrid. Now, where was he? What was he? A mere shadow of his former self. In the time that had passed since the accident, Brett had been to more support groups than he could count on both hands, he’d had therapy, he’d had psychology, he’d seen specialists and they’d all told him the same thing. That he wasn’t being positive enough. Negative vibes would only stunt his regrowth. In order to get better, he had to really want to get better.

  What Brett had wanted to do in that moment was slap them all for suggesting, even for the briefest of moments, that he didn’t want to get better. Brett was convinced that graduating summa cum laude from Harvard Medical School, a literal graduation ‘of the highest distinction,’ didn’t mean shit if the same person who got that degree could suggest to a sufferer of minor brain damage that they didn’t want to get better. What kind of a stupid deduction was that?

  So, Brett had moved back home. He’d grown up in a little farm town in Missouri. The middle of nowhere, basically. With Brett’s injury, he could just about hold a conversation these days, never mind play soccer at a European level, but the last thing Brett had wanted to do was wait around for Coach Darwin to have to come to him and crush his dreams. He hadn’t waited. He’d packed his bags and left as soon as he could.

  Brett remembered meeting an old lady on the train. He held her cat carrier for her while she looked for her ticket. She’d asked him where he was heading. The truth was, Brett had no idea. He hadn’t wanted to stick around long enough to think it through. Brett hadn’t told anyone where or if he was going, he’d just…left.

  The last thing he’d wanted to do was get caught in the act. Brett had told himself that he’d work out a plan on the way, but when he was asked the question, the words left his lips almost without conscious thought.

  “I’m going home.”

  He’d gone home. Gone back to his roots, you could say. Brett knew that his parents were going to be surprised, if a little disappointed to hear what he’d done, that he’d given up his captaincy along with his place on the team and his scholarship. Given up on his dream. They were parents, it was their job to be disappointed when he threw his life away. But they loved him as much as any parent loves any child.

  “Hey.”

  Brett didn’t recognize that the voice in the back of his head was talking to him the first time they called.

  “Hey, boy.”

  Brett barely registered there was someone talking at all.

  “Hey, you! Kid! Evans!”

  Brett finally looked up, slightly startled, as he realized that Old Man James was looking right at him. Old Man James ran the only shop in town, an establishment he’d inherited from his father, but no one actually remembered the original name for it. So, everyone just called it ‘The Old General Store.’ Brett wasn’t entirely sure that ‘James’ was actually Old Man James’ real name, but he didn’t seem to mind it, so he supposed at the very least, he was okay with it. He wasn’t even that old.

  Brett still held a bottle of carbonated drinking water in his hand. He let the fridge door swing shut, set the soda water down in his basket and approached the front counter. Brett raised his eyebrows as if to say what do you want?

  Old Man James got the message.

  “Kid, you’ve been looking at that bottle for ten straight minutes,” Old Man James said seriously. “What are you doing, waiting for it to go flat? You might need to open it for that.”

  Surprised, Brett checked his watch quickly. Old Man James was right, he must have completely zoned out. Brett frowned. That seemed to be happening to me more and more, almost like chunks of his life were just being removed from his memory with a scalpel. Almost like they never happened at all.

  “Are you going to buy that stuff or not?” Old Man James asked.

  Brow still furrowed, Brett placed the basket on the counter and dug around in his jacket pocket for his wallet. Brett could feel all the eyes in the Old General Store on him. People were waiting for him to speak. Brett fiercely thought to himself that they’d be waiting a while. Brett knew that if he tried to speak now, his words would fail him, and Old Man James wouldn’t be the only person to laugh.

  When Brett had left town ten years ago to go to school, he’d been everyone’s hero. The kid who played ball with the big boys. The only one from the town’s history (in living memory at least) who was all set to go pro. Brett was nothing short of a legend. But after the news of the accident, and Brett leaving the team, it was like he’d gone from hero to zero in as many seconds. No one idolized Brett and he barely got any respect, much less any admiration.

  More than ever before, Brett had begun to realize the harsh reality of the “dog-eat-dog” world that they lived in. If he’d resigned from the team immediately after the accident, maybe Brett would still be loved and respected and revered to this day, not only as a Captain but as a great soccer player. But he hadn’t resigned. He’d stayed. It had proved to be the worst decision he could ever have made.

  It was just like the movies. Instead of dying a hero, Brett had lived long enough to see himself become the villain.

  Brett paid for his groceries in silence and waited patiently as Old Man James stuffed them roughly into shopping bags, glaring at him all the while, and then Brett made a beeline for the door. He had one hand on the handle when he noticed something in the shop window. A flyer stuck up with sellotape. Brett squinted, struggling to read it at first until he noticed that it’d been stuck up from his side. Ergo, it was the wrong way around.

  Face beet red, Brett left the shop and glanced in through the window. He recognized the picture on it immediately. The big farm ov
er the way. The one that that old lady owned. Ms. Taylor had owned the big farm over the way for maybe as long as Brett had been alive, certainly as long as he could remember. Concentrating too hard on reading these days gave Brett splitting headaches, and so instead of reading the fine print, he quickly scanned the two biggest words on the bottom of the poster.

  FARMHAND REQUIRED.

  Brett went back into the shop and tore the flyer down from the shop window. He loudly cleared his throat. Old Man James looked at him. Brett held up the flyer.

  “Oh, didn’t you hear the news?” he asked. “The old bat who owned the big farm over the way died. About a month ago now.”

  Brett’s eyebrows went up in shock. Mrs. Taylor had died? Of course, he’d known that she’d had lung cancer, everyone did, but Brett had had no idea that it was so bad that she was on her deathbed.

  “She left the farm to one of her relatives,” Old Man James went on. “Nice enough guy. He moved in a few weeks ago, so I guess he a little bit of needs help with up-keeping the place? Now that I mention it, he was in here a while back, we started talking about you.”

  Brett raised his eyebrows and pointed to himself.

  “Yeah, you,” Old Man James nodded. “Everyone knows you’re the animal whisperer round these parts, Evans. You could do a lot worse, if I’m honest, when it comes to having a boss. He’s a solid fella, he is.”

  Brett didn’t say a word, he just folded up the flyer into a small corner and then stuck it into the back pocket of his jeans before he left the shop.

  Over the past five years, Brett had come to a realization that, if you’d asked him while he was in high school, he’d never have thought possible. He’d come to the conclusion that perhaps soccer had not been his only calling, as Brett had believed with every fiber of his being. Even though soccer was the only thing Brett ever did in high school that was worthy of any notice.