Reaper's Lullaby

Nora: Prosecutor

"Everything we judge in others is something within ourselves we don't want to face."
- unknown

From her upstairs bedroom window that night, Nora watched Lucas leave with his father, Eric. She was worried. The man looked so sick. When she and Lucas had both seen him last they could tell he'd lost weight, but it wasn't this shocking.

She pulled her phone from her back pocket and texted Lucas.

"Hes much worse."

Lucas texted back, "i no."

"Wutll happen?"

"Rehab 2morrow in cali. After that no clue."

Nora sighed. Since this all started five years ago, she had watched Eric's (and subsequently Lucas's) life fall apart like a crumbling building.

It all started with a car accident that left Eric's back broken. He had been put on strong painkillers for months while his vertebrae healed. When the doctors took him off the pain pills, they never bothered to taper them or talk about addiction. They just stopped the prescriptions.

Needless to say, the narcotics left Eric hopelessly addicted and looking for relief wherever he could find it, which eventually led to heroin. That led to losing his job, which led to losing his savings, which finally led to losing Sarah. After two years of struggling to keep them afloat on her nurse's salary, Sarah simply couldn't do it anymore and kicked him out. Since then he'd been living in a string of apartments, hotels, prisons and homeless shelters all up and down the east coast. A whole life, no, a whole family, destroyed by a pill.

During most of it, Eric had been in and out of Lucas's life, sometimes not seeing or even contacting him for months at a time. But Lucas still hoped. He still believed his dad's promises, every single time. It was like the trail of broken pieces behind every one of those promises didn't even phase him. Like he couldn't see it.

There was nothing Nora could do about any of it now though. It was already eight pm and she needed to prepare for her speech tomorrow. It was just a school wide debate, but her teacher had encouraged her to sign up. Her speech, which happened to be inspired by Eric, was a scathing critique of the pharmaceutical industry that had deliberately misled doctors and profited off the addictions of millions with Oxycontin and other pain pills. She was facing off with another classmate who also had close ties to the subject: Julie Childers' father worked for one of the pharmaceutical companies Nora was accusing.

With her phone set up on the bookshelf to record herself, Nora practiced the words in the mirror, paying close attention to her posture, her breathing and her facial expressions. Any of these little details might sway the judges in favor of Julie's argument.

Everyone told Nora she should be a lawyer, and she thought so too. But she didn't just want to be any lawyer. She wanted to be a prosecutor, someone who helped put the bad guys away.

"But what if you have to put someone away who isn't guilty?" Lucas once asked her.

"It's not my job to decide that. It's my job to prove my case," she'd replied.

"So you'd just put my dad in jail like the asshole who did, huh?"

Nora had rolled her eyes. "Lucas, he had heroin."

"Yeah like a tiny little bag the size of a pencil eraser! Why didn't they put away the motherfucker who gave it to him!"

Nora hadn't answered. She had never told Lucas what she really thought: that drug dealers and drug addicts were basically the same. Both did something wrong. Both deserved consequences. She did not believe addiction was a disease at all, and though she felt pity for Eric and the thousands like him and knew the pharmaceutical companies and doctors had screwed him over, in the end he was still making the choice to use. He made the choice to lose everything including his wife, and if he had any sense he would make the choice to get better and hold onto Lucas before he lost him too.