The Taped Together Heart

I heard a drawer open and noted Charlie in the kitchen, a roll of Scotch tape in his left hand. He hummed and mumbled while leaning over the counter. There were soft ripping sounds: Tape tearing. On glancing into the kitchen, I didn’t see any gigantic wads of tape accruing on the counter and went back to answering work-related emails.

Later—picking up Jim’s blue coat and various random items from the floor of Charlie’s room—I found this doily heart:

(The sparkles are where there’s tape.)

The heart had come home in Charlie’s backpack two weeks ago on Valentine’s Day. He has been occasionally putting it back into the backpack and looking at it, and the heart had gotten ripped, just like so many of my favorite photos of Charlie, in the time—a few years ago—when he tore any photo he found in half, and then into bits; there went many precious pictures of him on the merry-go-round with the happiest smile and a big baby in Jim’s arms.

The first time this happened, I took out some tape and, prompting Charlie to say “help, fix it,” carefully taped the pieces together, only to find the photo ripped apart a few hours later. Charlie giggled gleefully while pointing to the confetti he’d made. He grabbed my hand and said “help, fix!”—-and then he cried and moaned when he saw how the taped-up photo looked compared to the originals, and even more when the photo had been shredded and wrinkled and taped too many times to be fixed. Sometimes Charlie tried to tape the pieces of photo back together himself, but his long fingers struggled to measure out small enough pieces of tape and small mounds of the sticky stuff—looking like abandoned birds’ nests—littered the floor. Eventually we told Charlie that if he tore up a photo, that was that, and for years most of our photos were hidden in the darkest corners of the basement.

Slowly, slowly, Charlie has learned to use the computer mouse and to look at digital photos. He looks at regular photos now too, and without incident, and keeps careful watch over these treasures, stored in his ghost bucket.

As I inspected the doily heart on the floor of Charlie’s room tonight, I saw that the tears had been repaired by the careful application of a winding piece of Scotch tape.

That the heart, a little ripped for the wear, had been made whole again.