Before the Fall

I keep his old soccer cleats in my closet, the ones with grass stains that never came out, and laces he double-knotted because he said it brought him luck. They still smell like the field—dirt and sweat and that particular scent of Saturday mornings when everything felt possible.

Dad played in the over-40 league every weekend until I was fifteen. I'd sit in the aluminum bleachers with Mom, watching him sprint down the sideline with more enthusiasm than skill, his receding hairline glistening with sweat. He wasn't the best player, but he was the loudest—always encouraging his teammates, always the first to help someone up after a hard tackle.

"That's your dad," Mom would say when he'd throw his arms up celebrating a goal that wasn't even his. "No filter between his heart and his mouth."

After games, he'd drive me home with the windows down, rehashing every play, asking what I thought about his corner kick or whether I saw him steal the ball from that kid half his age. His enthusiasm was infectious. Even when they lost, he'd find something to celebrate—a good pass, a near miss, the fact that old Martinez finally showed up sober.

The injury happened on a Tuesday night scrimmage. A nothing play, really. Dad was going for a header when another player's knee caught him just above the left temple. He went down and didn't get up. I wasn't there—I had AP chemistry—but Mom called from the hospital, her voice thin and scared in a way I'd never heard before.

The doctors said he was lucky. Traumatic brain injury, but he'd recover. He'd walk, talk, and remember our names. They used words like "personality changes," "impulse control," and "emotional regulation," but they said it so clinically that it didn't sink in. Not until Dad came home.

The man who walked through our front door looked like my father, but moved through the world differently. The warmth in his eyes had been replaced by something harder, more suspicious. He'd snap at the grocery store clerk for bagging things wrong. He'd mutter under his breath about neighbors who parked too close to our driveway. The filter Mom had joked about—the one between his heart and his mouth—was gone, but instead of joy spilling out, it was irritation, impatience, anger.

"He's still adjusting," the neurologist explained when we brought up the mood swings. "The frontal lobe controls personality, empathy, and social behavior. These things take time to heal, if they heal at all."

If they heal at all. The words hung in the air between us.

I'd catch myself watching him, searching for glimpses of who he used to be. Sometimes, when he was reading the newspaper or working in the garden, his face would relax into something familiar. But then the delivery truck would idle too long in front of our house, or Mom would ask him to take out the trash, and the old Dad would disappear again behind this stranger's scowl.

The worst part was how he looked at me now, not with the easy affection I'd grown up with, but like I was some puzzle he couldn't solve, some obligation he'd forgotten why he'd taken on. When I'd try to tell him about school or friends, his attention would drift. When I'd ask about soccer or whether he missed playing, he'd shrug like it was someone else's life I was asking about.

Mom suggested family therapy. Dad sat through exactly one session before declaring it "touchy-feely bullshit" and refusing to return. She tried organizing game nights, hoping to recreate some of our old routines, but Dad would get frustrated with the rules or accuse us of ganging up on him. Everything that used to bring us together now seemed to drive us further apart.

I started staying at friends' houses more, finding excuses to be anywhere but home. It felt like betrayal, but I couldn't handle the grief of watching this man wear my father's face while acting like a stranger. Mom understood. She was grieving too, though she tried to hide it behind forced cheerfulness and endless research into brain injury support groups.

"He's still in there," she'd whisper to me sometimes, after he'd had a particularly bad day. "Your real dad, he's still in there somewhere."

But I wasn't sure I believed her anymore. The dad who used to sing off-key in the car, who'd let me paint his nails when I was eight, who'd cry at movies even when he tried to hide it—that man felt as gone as if he'd died in that hospital bed. Maybe more gone, because his body was still here, walking around, forcing us to confront the loss every single day.

Sometimes I wondered if he remembered being happy. If somewhere inside his changed brain, the old Dad was trapped, watching this stranger use his voice to hurt the people he used to love. The thought was almost too terrible to bear.

But I kept the cleats anyway, just in case.

Three years after the accident, I was packing for college when I heard yelling from the backyard. Dad was standing over Mom's vegetable garden, furious about something. I almost didn't go outside—these episodes were becoming more frequent, and I'd learned it was better to let them burn out on their own.

But then I heard Mom crying.

I found her kneeling in the dirt, trying to salvage the tomato plants Dad had apparently ripped from the ground in a rage about "weeds everywhere" and "this whole yard going to hell." Her hands were shaking as she pressed soil around the damaged roots.

"I can't do this anymore," she whispered without looking up. "I can't keep pretending he's coming back."

Dad had already stormed inside, leaving us in the wreckage of her careful garden. I knelt beside her, my hands finding hers in the earth. We worked in silence, trying to save what we could, both of us crying now.

Later that night, I made a decision that felt like stepping off a cliff. I knocked on Dad's bedroom door—he and Mom had been sleeping separately for over a year—and let myself in without waiting for permission.

He was sitting on the edge of his bed, staring out the window at the garden we'd tried to repair. In the lamplight, he looked older, smaller somehow.

"Dad," I said, my voice barely above a whisper. "Do you remember teaching me to tie my shoes?"

He turned to look at me, and for a moment, his face was blank. Then something flickered in his eyes.

"You kept making bunny ears," he said slowly. "But they were always lopsided."

My heart stopped. It was the first time in three years he'd voluntarily shared a memory with warmth instead of irritation.

"You said it didn't matter if they were perfect," I continued, hardly daring to breathe. "You said what mattered was that I could run without tripping."

He was quiet for a long time. When he spoke again, his voice was different—rougher, like it was fighting its way up from somewhere deep.

"I don't know who I am anymore," he said. "I look in the mirror and I see your dad, but I feel like someone else. Someone angry all the time. Someone who hurts people."

I sat down beside him on the bed, close enough to smell his familiar aftershave beneath the unfamiliarity of everything else.

"You hurt Mom today," I said gently. "You hurt her garden."

He nodded, his hands clenching into fists in his lap. "I know. I always know, after. But in the moment, it's like I'm watching someone else do it. Someone using my hands, my voice." He turned to me, and his eyes were clearer than I'd seen them in years. "I'm sorry. I'm so goddamn sorry for what I've done to you and your mother."

"Dad—"

"No, let me say this." His voice broke. "I know I'm not the same. I know I've lost pieces of myself that might never come back. But I need you to know that the love is still there. It's buried under all this anger and confusion, but it's there. It's always been there."

I started crying then, the kind of deep, shaking sobs I'd been holding back for three years. He pulled me against his chest, and his arms felt like they remembered how to hold me, even if his brain had forgotten how to be gentle.

"I kept your soccer cleats," I whispered into his shirt.

He was quiet for so long, I thought he hadn't heard me. Then his hand found the back of my head, fingers tangling in my hair the way they used to when I was small.

"I remember," he said, and his voice was thick with tears. "I remember every game you watched. Every ride home. I remember who I used to be, sweetheart. I just can't find my way back to him."

We sat there in the dark, holding onto each other and onto the fragments of who we used to be. It wasn't healing—not really. Tomorrow he might be angry again, might say cruel things he didn't mean, might forget this moment of clarity. But tonight, for just a few minutes, I had my dad back. The real one, buried beneath the wreckage but still there, still fighting to love us the only way he knew how.

Later, after he'd gone to help Mom replant the garden by moonlight—an apology he couldn't put into words—I went to my closet and pulled out his old cleats. I held them to my chest and understood finally that grief isn't always about letting go.

Sometimes it's about learning to love what remains.