What Comes Back

Every day of the search is the last day of the search until the next morning when I look again. Of course I go back; it’s not over until he’s found. But even if he’s not, even if I know nothing for a long time, I keep thinking it will end. Everyone will tire and go home. They will tell me that it feels too risky right now, that they have loved ones to care for, that now’s not the time to resurrect the dead. Soon they will forget about him and then me, too. I think we might never be found.

Instead, they continue to search. In this small town to which I’ve only recently arrived, my neighbors don XtraTufs and walk in the woods. They call me with no news, just to say hello. The wife of my boss shares the flyer every night. “That’s wonderful,” my mom tells me on the phone. “All those people. In a time like this.” I think I hear her holding back, not saying the thoughts that run in my mind: So many have lost more. You’re asking for a lot. I read about crowded hospitals and our feckless leadership. I close my computer and then my eyes. And I see him, his dumb face and his waggling butt, approaching a moose like he did last summer or a car at speed or a barbed wire fence. At night I see him and he’s at his worst, trampled or flattened or hung up and hurt. It’s only a dog. It’s true and it doesn’t help. If these were the Hardship Olympics I’m not going to medal. But I’m not competing. I’m just looking for my dog.

When people tell me that he is going to come back I believe them. I must. He’s come home before, my friends remind me. “Picture him returning,” my ex-boyfriend says. “Imagine him getting home before you do. Let him in.” 

I’m trying to manifest. It’s not working. I try anyway.

Orphie ran away in the morning. We’d been there, on a new porch in a new yard, for only a month. We drove up together for my summer gig, leaving the first house he knew. He was doing well in Colorado but he was great in Alaska. We got to be outside all day, me working in the garden and him lolling in dirt and nosing for voles. He figured out the routine and started working as my alarm clock, nuzzling into my neck around sunrise asking for food and fresh air and another full day. I always obliged.

At first, I would stand on the porch while he did his morning business. I had yet to consider Orphie a good dog. I had hope for him but not a whole lot of trust. Soon, though, I found I could go inside while he peed. I could pour my coffee or flip an egg and when I went back to the door he’d be there, waiting. He was getting better. He was becoming good.

The day he left, I turned from the cold lawn to the warmth of my kitchen. Coffee was burbling in the percolator. I put two slices of bread in the toaster and turned the radio on. I went back to the door and opened it, calling his name. Steam rose from the dewy grass. Just beyond, my garden was alight and shimmering. I called his name again. Orphie! 

I saw nothing. I heard nothing. I walked onto the lawn, feeling last night’s chill on my bare feet. Orphie! C’mere! Nothing. Still. It was like his name was a summoning charm that had ceased today to summon. Or worse, it was a spell that made him disappear. By calling his name I made him gone and calling again couldn’t bring him back.

I stood for a few moments, looking around. No creature bounded from the woods. No flash of white appeared around the house. Orphie! I went inside and left the front door open. The coffee was steaming and would be thick enough to chew. The toast was cold. And my dog was missing.

I adopted Orphie in Huston in 2018. He was one of the dogs displaced in the hurricane. He had lived in a shelter for six months, his photo circulating online to see if anyone was looking for him. Apparently, I was the only one. I’d check back every few days but I wasn’t attached. This was something I could do. I had no obligation. Then, eventually, they changed his status from seeking owners to seeking adoption and I called. The lady who answered sounded like she was in the midst of the hurricane, like the disaster had only just begun.

“Is he here?” she asked. “A bunch just got adopted.”

“It says so online, ma’am. Tri-colored, medium size setter. It says his name is Toffee.”

“Oh, Sophie? The Manx?” In the background, I could hear barks and howls bouncing off concrete walls.

“Toffee, ma’am. English setter. A dog. Can you tell me if he’s available and what vaccinations he’s had?”

“One sec,” she said. “My database says he’s microchipped.”

“Oh? That wasn’t online.”

“Yeah, Toffee. Estimated 16 months old, microchipped but. No owner tag. Just the vet. They’re not, they haven’t. Looks like he’s up to date, neutered, and, uh. Yea.”

“Is he there?”

“Where? Here? Yes, I think so. A bunch just got adopted. But not Toffee, I don’t think.” The barking in the background quieted a little. I wondered what it sounded like during the storm.

“Can you check? I’m interested in adopting him.” It was the first time I’d said so aloud.

“Sure, yes. I’m gonna put you on hold.”

“Okay, and—” I began, but there was already music playing in the receiver, a jazzy piano version of “Tomorrow” from Annie. I listened to it repeat three times before I realized she wasn’t coming back to the phone. I listened to it once more, thinking about the sun and tomorrow and a dog named Toffee and whether or not I could.

Two nights later, it was one in the morning somewhere in New Mexico and I was going to bring him home.

He went missing for the first time just a few weeks after I brought him to Colorado. He had a collar and a new name. “As in Orphan?” my mom asked when I told her he wasn’t Toffee anymore.

“Orphie," I said. "Like Orpheus".

“It sounds like Orphan,” she said. “That’s not a very good name.”

But he was a kind of orphan, still. After more than half a year of sleeping on concrete, fenced in chainlink, he wasn’t used to the freedom. We’d walk in the woods and he would prance, leaping away and running back to me like he couldn’t believe it, like he’d never seen so much world before. Maybe he hadn’t. The shelter didn’t know where he’d grown up, if it had been with a family or not. I fed him and he ate like he was used to earning it, inhaling kibble so he choked. I got him a bowl molded with plastic swirls, a maze for food so he wouldn’t eat so fast. It helped a little.

He was an orphan even though I’d adopted him. He would always be an orphan in the way Orpheus would have always crossed the river and always played his music, would always know that he lost his lover upon looking back. We have always made mistakes. Some names will always be true.

The first time he didn’t come back I was working late. A friend came over to walk him. He said they were up on the railroad tracks when Orphie just took off. He ignored the shocks on his training collar or the batteries were dead and next thing he was gone. My friend searched until it got dark, his canvas shoes soaked from post-holing in the woods. I told him to go home. I called the police, the pound, a few neighbors. Everyone would keep their eyes out. I left a bowl of his food on the tracks and some more on my front step. I went to bed but didn’t sleep.

He came home after four days. I’d been jogging in the woods, scrying new snow for tracks or shit or tufts of his fur. My voice was hoarse. His name was no longer his name. It had become two syllables that I sang as I ran, as I drove, as I went to sleep. 

Or! Phie! Or! Fie! Oar! Fee! Ore! Phie! Or! Phie! Or!!

I was yodeling and incanting and almost hopeless. And then he was there on my porch, looking at the door like he knew it would open if he stared hard enough. He was there, no longer just syllables but all the life and breath in between, not a streak in pine forest but my dog at my feet, spinning and mewing and hungry and cold. He was there, not lost or dead or bones or bait. He was home.

I opened the door and fed him his dinner.

But now he is lost again so I read Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “One Art”. Did she mean the line, really, when she wrote, So many things seem filled with the intent / to be lost that their loss is no disaster? It’s a poem about wasted hours and her mother’s watch. The glossing over makes sense: minimizing as survival. But it’s also about losses larger, more profound: homes and purpose and a partner to suicide. It’s our job, she says, to search. Moreover, we must mourn. If it’s disaster then it’s by our creation. Write it, she says.

I’m not ready to write Orphie so. I might be in ten years. I can once I find a corpse. Until then he’s still possible, a maybe being, living apart from me, in spite of me. I hope so. It has been three weeks.

“I’m keeping my eyes out,” says my friend Greg. He and everyone else have been looking while out fishing and riding and tracking the caribou run. “I’d offer to fly ya,” he says, referring to his little Cessna that he rents out for expeditions, “but you can’t see much more from up there.” I had thought about it already. The terrain around my house is undulating, swampy lowlands blanketed with birch and poplar and greening alder and willow. The vegetation cracks a little around small lakes and streams but it's never open enough to see him, my muddy little dog amid hundreds of acres and thousands of trees. I can only do what I’ve been doing: returning to where we were together, running the trails and riding the streets and sitting on the porch as the sun goes down. I call his name and leave out food and mourn and search some more.

I thank Greg. I give him back the pan that he delivered a few days before full of shepherd’s pie under a cracking crust. “That was delicious,” I say. “I washed it. Thank you again.” He nods and we fist bump and I drive home, imagining Orphie at the door, Orphie on the porch, Orphie with four legs and two eyes and one tail and all that vim, too much joy. 

I sleep and I dream he is back. In the morning I run and sing those syllables. I refill the bowl of kibbles, though I know I am only feeding other dogs, the ones smart enough to find their way home each night. I leave my steaming shoes outside. I call my mom and go to work.

“Think of all you do have,” she says. “Thirty million without a job. At least you’ve got that.” She’s never liked dogs very much. She is trying to be assuring. “You’ll find out one day. He was wearing his collar, right? That’ll turn up, at least. Practice gratitude. It’s a muscle.” 

I think of Elizabeth Bishop again, Lose something every day. Gratitude is the light and loss is the shade. I am living in the dark. It has been a month.

I eat the summer’s first radishes. I eat young arugula and spinach. I move the peppers and tomatoes outside every morning. They come inside at night. I put Orphie’s bowl on top of the refrigerator. I’m tired of stepping over it. I hang his leash in the back of the closet. I find poop bags in the pockets of my jacket and I take them out.

I see a grizzly sow and her cubs near the river. I poke at scat with sticks. I don’t know what I think I’ll find. Fur? Teeth? His rabies tag? I run to the beat of Or! Phie! Or! Phie! and I start sleeping better. I go to work. I call my mom. “Maybe if you’d named him Boomerang,” she says. We talk about other things. 

I take the posters down. Sharon, who runs the market, thinks it’s good news. She waves at me, smiling under her mask. “Oh, he made it home!” she says.

“Not yet,” I reply. “I just don’t want to keep taking up space on the board.”

“I think you can leave it,” she says, “It’s only been a couple weeks.”

“Almost six.” I swallow.

“Well,” she says, her voice muffled. “Miracles happen every day.” Sharon’s mom, I know, is in isolation at a nursing home in Wasilla. She has three teenage girls at home. She's there late every night mopping the floors and disinfecting high touch surfaces. “I’ll hold on to that, just in case.”

“Thanks, Sharon,” I say, handing her the poster.

I go for a run and call his name.

I start riding my bike to work. It makes me nervous, for what if Greg sees him way out in the range and I need to be there quickly? I would have to bike home to get my truck. I would lose precious time. The window could close. It makes me irrational, for the window is already closed. An extra twenty minutes won’t make a difference for a pile of animal bones. Then practice losing farther, losing faster. I am training myself to think about other things. I am getting better.

Which is why I suppress the flutter when I get a call from an unknown Alaska number. I let it ring a few times before I answer.

“Are you looking for a dog?” It’s a man’s voice. “Sophie, maybe?”

“Orphie,” I say. I keep my breath steady. “Did you find his tag?”

“Yeah,” he says. “And the rest of the dog, too. He’s very happy to be here. Does he get out a lot?”

I drive my boss’s truck to the address Colin gave me. It's about five miles from my house, as the crow flies or as Orphie runs. I haven't cried since he left. Elizabeth Bishop doesn’t say that I should. In fact, she implies that I shouldn’t. Accept, she says. Practice. Master. But when I come around the corner and see Colin’s house I start to cry, hiccupping and gulping for air, tears falling from my eyes unbidden. Colin is sitting on the front step with his son, Otis. Otis holds a leash in his little fist, leaning against the strain of the pulling dog, my dog, Orphie. Orphie is here. I park and slide out of my truck and Colin tells Otis it’s okay because Orphie is here, the leash dragging behind him, Orphie my dog, all of him, Orphie four legs and two eyes and one tail and one tongue on my face, Orphie spinning around me, Orphie with his paws on my shoulders, Orphie in my arms, Orphie alive, Orphie whole, Orphie back.

“He was very thirsty,” Otis is saying, petting the backside of my frantic, lunging dog. “We gave him water and some peanut butter.”

“Thank you,” is all I can manage. Orphie is here, sucking the words out of me.

“Has it been long?” Colin asks from the stoop.

“Two months,” I say, “Almost.”

“Gosh!” says Otis.

“He’s a good dog,” says Colin.

“Not really,” I say. “But he’s mine.”

That night, when I feed him, his pupils dilate. It’s like there are opiates in the kibble. Then he sleeps, one leg across my lap. I pick ticks from his underbelly and feel his limbs, the curve of his spine, his rib cage. I will take him to the vet, just in case. But he’s only scrawny and exhausted. He’s remarkably, seemingly, well. And he’s here. That’s enough.

Orphie noses me awake at daybreak. I realize that it’s not a dream. I let him out and he pees and stares directly at me. He looks a little sheepish but I know he can't be thinking of it, this same moment two months prior when I turned away and he vanished. I don’t say his name. The spell withstands.

His pupils get huge again with breakfast. He sleeps all day. I call my mom. I work in the garden and sing his name. He sighs it back to me.