Episode 10

The move to Saint Andrews by the Sea, New Brunswick, was a brutal testament to his volatile nature. It wasn't a choice, not for my mother, and certainly not for me. It was a consequence, a ripple effect of his failures, his rage, his desperate need to punish the world for its refusal to acknowledge his perceived greatness. Canada, a land I had once viewed with a naive curiosity, quickly became a place of fear. The whispers started almost immediately, a low hum of suspicion directed at my father, a man who carried his disgrace like a shroud. And from that suspicion, a venomous prejudice seeped, tainting everything. It wasn't long before that hatred, that suffocating disapproval, was redirected, not just at my mother, but at me.

The death threats were a chilling, surreal addition to the daily anxieties. They arrived in crude, scrawled notes, slipped under our door, tucked into the mailbox – whispers from the darkness that promised oblivion. I remember one in particular, a stark, block-lettered message on cheap, lined paper: "Go back where you came from." But where was "from"? Was it the dust of Virginia, the sun-baked plains of Colorado, the humid air of Missouri, the quiet streets of Alexandria, the rolling hills of Kentucky, or the windswept coast of Maine? My childhood was a map of displacement, a series of temporary shelters that offered little warmth.