Baby Doe isn't her real name, but it's what l call her so nobody gets to think she was a real person, even though she very much was and nobody gets all bothered about confidentiality.

She was born to a young mom with more problems than most people have hair on their heads, not the least of which were mental health “issues” and addictions to just about any sort of street drug you can imagine, as long as they were really bad for you and even worse for a baby you never expected to get from whoring for drugs even though you were not using any sort of birth control because what the hell, a girl needs to work and birth control costs money and you get more money from bareback and nobody wants to use a condom anyway. You know?

Baby Doe's dad on the birth certificate wasn't really her biological father, just a Vietnam vet with a big white moustache stained yellow by cigarettes who favored Baby's mom as his best girl for sex if he could find her and she wasn't too strung out or sick like she got sometimes. The sex was satisfying but not procreative. When Mom learned she was pregnant, he let her move in with him because she was his favorite, and he kinda felt bad for her. He never had any kids himself, and she couldn't afford an abortion. The state would take the kid anyway, and maybe he'd visit it sometimes and pretend that it was his real kid because his name was on the paper.

Mom was OK with that because it was November and getting cold, and she needed a place to stay that was warm. She thought it was funny that he was all protective of her, like a father or something, even though he was old enough to be her grandfather and was having sex with her. Life is full of compromises like that.

Baby was born just after Thanksgiving and a tox screen right away showed every drug Mom had used had hopped the placental barrier and messed her up Baby too. As predicted, she never went home with Mom, and actually she never left the hospital. She was placed into custody almost immediately, which was good because she had a genetic problem that, when combined with zero prenatal care by Mom and all the drugs and whatever, pretty much doomed her to a very short life.

Mom visited her only twice during the three weeks she lived. A lady from State visited her a lot, sitting quietly and feeling her heart and respiration on her chest while she held her and rocked. The warmth of a baby beats a shot of Demerol any day for relaxing you and forgetting the stress of caring for other people's cast-off kids.

When she died, as everyone knew she would, the nurses in the NICU told the State lady about a fund that would pay for a modest funeral, and she and Baby's Dad sat in the room at the funeral home with the cracked vinyl floor, with the boombox playing a skipping CD in the corner and Baby in a Styrofoam cooler that someone had stapled some Christmas paper to so it looked like a present and not a coffin, even though it was really neither. They drove together, following the hearse to the graveyard, where the cooler, which squeaked like the ones you buy for picnics do because they're really cheap and you don't expect them to last, and maybe you got it with the order of Omaha Steaks which may be where the funeral director—who actually said a eulogy, even though it mostly was an ad for his funeral home with the phone number and everything (call 24 hours day or night!)—had gotten it because he received very little for doing these funerals but saw them as a marketing opportunity, and one cooler is as good as another, and one that came all the way from Nebraska full of frozen beef had to be sturdy, right?

And after the squeaking cooler coffin was lowered into the ground, the State lady dropped Dad off at the VFW where they were having a Christmas party and went back to the office to close her file and see if anyone was around while the spirit of Baby Doe drifted away like a tiny little soap bubble. And the next day was Christmas.

This is a work of fiction.

Former Connecticut Chief Disciplinary Counsel Mark Dubois is with Geraghty & Bonnano in New London.