Nova blackish's Arc

Chapter 3 of 4

Friday came and they signed for the house with two chimneys. Nova carried the keys in her coat pocket for a week before she noticed she had no midwife. The clinic on the far side of town had one nurse who took winter calls, and the nurse had already booked three deliveries for January. Twins were not a job she wanted in a cold house on a road that closed after the first heavy snow. Nova stood in the clinic hallway and heard her own breath speed up. She left without an appointment card. She walked to the coffee shop and found Rowan at the corner table again. Nova said she needed a midwife and no one would come. Rowan set her cup down. She said her aunt had delivered babies out on the tundra for twenty years before her hands went bad. She said the hands could still hold a baby, just not turn one. Nova asked if the aunt would come. Rowan said she would ask by radio that night. Nova walked home slow. The sky was low and yellow. Before she reached the porch a cramp bent her at the gate. She held the fence post and waited. The cramp came again. She was thirty-four weeks. She was supposed to have another month. Brock was at the new house stacking wood against the south wall. She sent a boy from the next lot to fetch him. By the time Brock came running she was on the kitchen floor with a towel under her. He called Collin. Collin called Rowan. Rowan called her aunt on the radio and told her to come now, not next month, and to bring whatever she had. The aunt was two hours out by sled. The first boy came before the aunt did. Rowan caught him in a clean sheet and cleared his mouth with her finger the way she had seen her aunt do as a girl. He was small and blue for a second, then pink, then loud. Brock held him against his coat while Nova pushed again. The second boy came twenty minutes later, quieter, slower to cry. Collin rubbed the baby's back with a warm cloth until the baby coughed and started to breathe on his own. The aunt arrived after both cords were cut. She checked Nova, checked the boys, and said they were small but sound. She said Nova had bled less than most. She stayed the night. Nova named them in the morning. Leo for the loud one. Pisces for the quiet one. They weighed less than a sack of flour each and had to be fed every two hours. The aunt said they could not go to the new house yet. The rented red house had the north wall that iced in December, and the new house had no crib, no warm room, no stove lit. Nova looked at Brock across the babies and understood the next month would not be the one she had planned.