By Betty J. Cotter
When I first met the bird cardiologist, she was working out of a basement lab in the granite Biology building on the old campus. They had stuck her beneath the steam pipes and fluorescent lights of what had once been the furnace room. A series of long, slender windows emitted shafts of sun, illuminating her substandard equipment–tables and drawers of banding supplies, three bird cages, a microscope, a tangled pile of mist net and, against one wall, a collapsible ladder. Inside the cages perched a hawk with a broken wing, a female cardinal with most of her tail feathers missing, and a chimney swift with a cage cloaked in black.
Of course, she was not a bird cardiologist; I just called her that. She was an ornithologist, her name was Alva, and she did not complain about the accommodations. In her first year at the university, she seemed well aware of her tenuous status. They had not even given her a computer. She told me this matter-of-factly at the meet-and-greet event where we met, as we hovered over the chintzy outlay of dried cheese and stale crackers and lemonade. I was not surprised. The College of Arts and Sciences has left behind the traditional botany and biology and zoology, funneling its resources into neuroscience and A.I. That's where the money is, in grants and tuition. No one cares about the natural world anymore.
Alva's department head, Bertram, a crusty professor of animal science who should have retired a decade ago, did not care about her lack of equipment or onerous class burden. Clearly she had been hired to plug an instructional hole and given the basement lab as a sop to her research. Somehow she was supposed to study bird hearts while teaching a 3/3 schedule that included a lecture section of Introduction to Biology with 200 students. Even a few weeks into the semester she seemed frazzled.
We took to walking at lunchtime on Fridays. The university had built a trail north of the new campus that wended through a hardwood forest to a small pond. The excursion became an escape for me too, and I loved to follow her gaze into the tree canopy when she heard the twee or whistle of a vireo or mockingbird or white-throated sparrow. I was as ignorant as a child about the feathered world, and even when she passed me the binoculars I had trouble distinguishing bird bodies from bark, leaves, or dappled sun. But Alva was a patient teacher; she must be great in the classroom, I thought.
The start of what I came to think of as The Trouble started in late October. The leaves slipped off the maples, most of the migrants left, and Vees of Canada geese sliced through the air. She took me a few hundred feet off the trail, where she had been capturing cardinals, equipping them with tiny heart monitors, and releasing them. “Birds have higher heart rates than humans, but there is great variation in those numbers,” she explained. She listed them off: 150, 247, even 647 beats per minute.
“Some birds do the opposite,” she said, as a large mist net came into view. “The emperor penguin can drop its heartbeat to as low as six beats per minute during its dives.”
Although too modest to say so, she had studied the penguins in Antarctica, using electrocardiogram recorders.
“Of course, in the old days they would just shoot the birds,” she added. “Imagine that. Audubon, Chapman, even William Beebe. The dead bodies still warm in their hands, but the one thing that means life–the heart–stilled for all time.”
The mist net dangled between two poles. Something about the way it hung there, waving in the wind, had caught her attention.
She pointed to the woven pockets meant to capture flying birds. Now they would not hold the tiniest wren. Something, or someone, had cut gaping holes in them.
She shrugged it off. “Tomorrow I'll put up new netting. I'll just have to take it down each day.” But as we headed back her steps slowed, and she did not notice a murmuration of starlings cutting elaborate arcs in the sky.
“Do you have any tips for classroom management?” she asked when we next met. That was how she talked: formally, politely, as though we were mere acquaintances. Perhaps, I thought, we were.
“The iron fist,” I replied, aiming for levity.
She changed the subject.
A week later, Alva texted me in her formal anachronistic language: I regret to tell you I will not be able to walk today. That was all–no explanation of illness, no promise to meet on our next scheduled day.
Gotcha, I responded. Hope everything's OK.
When she did not show up at the appointed time on the following Friday, I felt unsettled. Had my crack about class discipline offended her? She expected serious advice and I could only summon a lame joke. She probably thought I was mocking her.
Hoped to see you today. Must have gotten mixed up, I texted. Let me know how you're doing.
I followed this with a smile emoji; inane, yes, but the best I could do. She did not respond.
When another week passed with no Alva, either through text message or in person, I decided to visit her lab. There was no elevator to the ground floor, and walking down the dusty steps I felt strangely uneasy. The hall corners housed spider webs, active and abandoned. One corner harbored a crumpled paper cup. Couldn't the custodians at least clean this dungeon?
A beam of light shone from a crack in the door. As I creaked it open I saw the back of Alva's dark bob and the crisp lines of her lab coat. Black and white like a chickadee, and seeming just as tiny, she bent over a microscope. Somewhere a bird spat low chattering noises, almost as though it were narrating some avian story.
“Hello, Alva.”
She startled. Her eyes, when she turned, flashed at first fear, then fury. “You should not sneak up on someone like that. Did you not see the sign? Knock first.”
I stumbled out an apology. “I was just worried about you, that's all. You haven't met me for our walk in weeks.”
“I'm busy.” She looked away. “Midterms.”
But she was not grading papers, and her laptop was closed. “I know, it's a crazy time. I won't bother you.”
I started to back out of the room. As I passed her desk my eyes settled on a pile of papers, the top one emblazoned with the heading STUDENT DISCIPLINE REPORT.
“I saw a junco yesterday,” I said, stalling for time. “I wouldn't have thought to look it up, if not for you.”
“That's early for them.” Her tone softened. “Where?”
“In my back yard, actually.” From the corner of my eye I spotted typed letters and numbers, but I could not make them out.
“Put up your feeders,” she said. “They won't land there, but will stay on the ground, pecking at the seed other birds drop. They especially like suet.”
I filed this away and said, “What is their heart rate? Do you know?”
“I haven't studied the junco,” she said, as though admitting some personal failure.
“Would you like to?” Just keep her talking. I sneaked another glance at the memo but caught only a sea of type.
Then Alva's shadow of a smile, which quickly vanished. “Perhaps. Though I have so many breeds already to study.”
But when I suggested she visit my house, she brightened, and soon we made a date for Friday afternoon. I puzzled over this. Why would she stop walking with me on campus, but eagerly accept an invitation to my home, surely a more intimate surrounding? I peeked again at the paper, but all I could make out was a scrawled signature.
On Friday, I prepared a plate of sweets and a pot of tea, but Alva cared only about the juncos. They flocked to my patio in twos or threes, as though knowing they had an appointment with the bird cardiologist. Before I knew what was happening she had swooped them up one by one, affixing a small electronic transponder to each bird's breast. They did not fly away when she put them back down, but resumed pecking suet crumbs. Perhaps I should call her the bird whisperer.
Often in recent days I have thought of that afternoon. What if I had tried to draw her out? Asked her point-blank about that document on her desk? Could I have prevented what happened next? But perhaps I am imposing romantic notions on a purely physiological response. Her body was destined to do what it would do.
On impulse the following Tuesday, I again took the dusty stairs to her office, thinking I could talk her into lunch. Sitting rather than striding purposefully, she would be less apt to evade my questions.
But the door was locked, the lab lights off. I peered at the class schedule taped to the window. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, she had two labs, from 8 to 9 a.m. and 2 to 3 p.m. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, she taught three classes back to back – 9:30, 11 and 12:30. No break for lunch. A punishing schedule, the sort given to graduate assistants or lecturers, not tenure-track assistant professors. Couldn't they at least have found a T.A. to take the labs? Two days a week, she was on the run from class to class; three days a week, her classes broke up her day so that any meaningful research must be impossible.
I dashed up the stairs and found the elevator. This was not my building, my department, or my business. But fury drove me. By the time I reached the third floor and found Bertram's office, I would have broken down his door if I had to. But his office was open, his balding head lit by a halo of light from the panoramic windows lining one wall. He absently stirred a cup of coffee that no doubt his administrative assistant had prepared before departing for lunch.
“Bert, I have just been down to Alva Dann's lab. It's a disgrace. You should be ashamed of yourself.”
“Well, hello to you too.”
“How on earth could you put her down there? It's filthy, dank and wholly inadequate for any professor, regardless of rank.” I took a deep breath, frustrated by his bland expression. “Not to mention giving her two labs on top of three classes. That's a violation of her contract and you know it.”
“She hasn't complained a peep to me,” he said, as though this settled it.
“Of course she hasn't complained to you!” How thick could he be? “It's her first semester. She's five years away from tenure. She's not going to go running to the union, or to you.”
He chewed on his cheek for a minute. “Maybe we can find some money to staff the labs next semester. As for the office assignments, the dean's office does that. But I can have a look.”
“Thank you.” But something else, beyond the poor accommodations, gnawed at me. “I think she's having a hard time. Being harassed. A student, perhaps.”
“Oh really?” He sat up straighter. “Has she said anything to you?”
The room felt chillier. Could it be that Bertram was harassing her? But the report had said “student.” “No. She just seems–overwhelmed, and nervous.”
“The new hires always feel overwhelmed.” He leaned back and sipped his coffee.
But this was a woman who had done research in Antarctica, graduate work at Cornell. “I think it's more than that. She found her mist nets–disturbed.”
“It's probably nothing.” He waved a hand dismissively. “But see what you can find out.” Then, in an official tone: “We take that sort of thing seriously, as I'm sure you do.”
When I didn't respond to this administrative blather, he cleared his throat. “Well, she has the makings of a scholar. Her research is interesting.”
All the more reason to get her out of that basement hell hole, I thought. But I simply nodded and left. I had already said too much.
Thanksgiving approached, and the cold came on in earnest. Without comment Alva resumed our walks, but I could not engage her even on her favorite subject, avian heart rates.
To accommodate the holiday, we decided to walk the Wednesday before. She stood waiting when I arrived at the trail head.
“I'm glad to see you. I don't like being here alone,” she said.
As we set out, I glanced around. You would hardly call the trail isolated – it starts a few hundred feet from the campus ring road, and students with backpacks and skateboards move about within hailing distance. Even a half-mile in, you can hear campus traffic and the wail of the Amtrak train.
“I need a favor.” She stopped. I noticed a fine sheen of sweat mustaching her upper lip. “I'm going home for the holiday. I need someone to feed the hawk and cardinal. The swift is gone.” I raised my eyebrows but she did not elaborate. “Of course, most of my students will be away too.”
It was not convenient, but I agreed. We resumed our stroll but not a hundred feet farther on she whirled toward me with glassy eyes. “Were you here when the shooting happened? In 2019?”
There was no shooting, I started to explain, only the threat of one. But I stopped mid-sentence, remembering that day–the stream of students racing out of the Social Sciences Building, dropping backpacks, shoes, purses. At first, I had thought they were making a zombie movie. But then the disembodied voice came over the intercom. There is an emergency in the building. Please exit immediately.
“Did they ever catch him? The shooter?”
“There was no shooter, Alva,” I repeated. “It was all hysteria. Almost like a game of telephone gone bad.”
She was not listening. “It happened in the same auditorium where I am teaching now. And what has been done since? Nothing. I am a sitting duck at the dais. All those students in the audience, at a raised height. All those exits at the top of the room. They would never catch him, you know. He would slip away before the campus police ever showed up.”
I touched her shoulder. “Alva, don't do this to yourself. Whoever is bothering you, there are ways to take care of it. If the Dean of Students won't help, tell campus police.”
She scoffed. “They don't even acknowledge it when you make a complaint. They slap him on the wrist and he's back again, a vulture after fresh meat.” Her voice rose. “And what does everyone think? That you can't manage your own classroom. That it's your fault.”
She moved ahead so briskly I struggled to keep up. “And you had to go running to Bertram,” she said over her shoulder. “Do you know how embarrassing that was? He must think I am an idiot.”
“Alva, I'm sorry.” I lengthened my stride. “I was just concerned. I know how hard it is to stand up for yourself when you're so– ” Powerless came to mind, but I restrained myself.
She stopped. She breathed heavily through her mouth. She bent at the waist. Beneath her orange vest I saw a sliver of her turtleneck, rising and falling with her heart. She tried to say something, but clutched her chest instead. And that was when I pulled out my phone and began frantically pushing buttons.
I visited Alva once in the hospital. Pale, with hollow eyes, she lay propped in bed, wires snaking out from beneath the blanket to a heart monitor. She no longer regarded me angrily, but nor did she smile when I walked in. “Did I tell you that emperor penguins can induce bradycardia?” she said. “For diving deep, in cold waters. They slow their heart rate down as low as six beats a minute.”
The doctor who followed me into the room chuckled softly. “Unfortunately, we human beings can't bring ourselves out of bradycardia.”
He placed a stethoscope to her faded johnny. “Mmm,” he said. “Doing the trick. Remember, no raising your left arm over your head for six weeks.”
“How am I supposed to teach?” Alva sounded more annoyed than worried. “How am I to carry around my research equipment, my nets, my ladder?”
“Get someone to help you. No excuses.” He typed something into his laptop. “If you rip out the wires of that pacemaker, I'll have to go back in and do it all over again.”
“I never did check on your juncos,” Alva said after he left, as though that was why I'd come. But it was her heart that I cared about. What had caused her bradycardia? Was it the stress of her teaching load, the student who was harassing her, the indifferent administration–or a combination of all three? Or, in fact, was it a coincidence that the very condition she was studying in birds had become her human undoing?
Maybe she just had a bad heart.
After the holiday, I returned to find Alva's lab locked, lights out, empty. The hawk and cardinal I'd been feeding had been whisked to God knows where. The schedule had vanished from her door, leaving not even a Scotch tape mark as evidence. It was as though she had never existed.
“A terrible nuisance, having to find someone new,” Bertram said when I confronted him.
“But surely you could have accommodated her. It was only six weeks.”
He shook his head, and I saw real regret in his eyes. “We offered,” he said. “But she wanted out.”
Like an exotic bird blown in by a hurricane, Alva vanished as quickly as she had appeared. This was not her environment, our college, though Lord knows the administration had done nothing to make her feel welcome. I wondered where she had fetched up. With her qualifications, she should have been able to get another position. Hadn't the doctor said she could resume normal activity after the six weeks? I began obsessively reading ornithological bulletins, trying to suss out where she had gone. I sifted through papers on bradycardia and arrhythmia, atrial and ventricular contraction, resting heart rates and blood oxygen depletion. Although the technical language strained my humanities brain, the papers confirmed what Alva had told me–that ornithologists know little about the hearts of birds.
A year and a half passed before the Google alert I had set up revealed news of Alva Dann. She had found a much better job, as director of a research institute near Cornell. But this was no Linked-In posting or official press release. It was her obituary. Reading it with dismay, I searched her background for clues: father a professor of agronomy, mother a high school teacher, a brother who had gone into medicine. Several papers she had co-authored were listed, and a graduate school award. Her research in Antarctica was mentioned, though not the penguins' mysterious ability to slow their heartbeats. In lieu of flowers, mourners were prompted to donate to the American Heart Association.
No one but I guessed the secret of the bird cardiologist, a woman who had stilled her own heartbeat to escape danger. But unlike the emperor penguins, she could not recover from her deep dive into oblivion. And now her memory lay warm in my hands, but the one thing that means life, her heart, had been stilled for all time.
Betty J. Cotter is the author of the novel, Roberta's Woods (Five Star, 2008). The first chapter of her novel, Moonshine Swamp, was selected for the premiere issue of Novel Slices (2020) and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She holds an MFA in writing from Vermont College.