The stairs had always been slightly steep.

I had noticed this when we first looked at the house, three years ago, before the twins, before the marriage had become what it had become, in the period when Derek and I were still in the mode of seeing possibilities in everything, including the steepness of stairs in a house we were considering. I had mentioned it then, said something about the angle, and Derek had said we would put a runner on them for traction and we had never put a runner on them and I had stopped thinking about it the way you stop thinking about things in a house you live in, until they become part of the landscape that you stop seeing.

The fall happened on a Tuesday morning.

I was carrying one of the boys, Eli, in my left arm, and a burp cloth and a pacifier in my right hand, and I was also tired in the way I have been tired for five months, which is a kind of tiredness that has its own specific texture, dense and total, the tiredness of a body that has not completed a  sleep cycle since before the boys were born.

My foot caught the second step from the top.

Eli was fine.

I did not let go of Eli.

This is the thing I want to say first, before the arm, before Derek, before any of it: I did not let go of Eli. My body made that decision before I could make it consciously, the specific instinctive choice of a mother falling, which is to wrap everything around the  child and absorb whatever is coming with the parts of herself that are available.

My right arm hit the stairs.

The rest of me arranged itself around Eli.

We reached the bottom and Eli was crying, startled and unhappy, and I was on my knees on the hallway floor with my right arm doing something that arms do not usually do, something that my mind was slow to process because the processing of physical pain that large requires a moment.

He was fine.

He was crying but he was fine.

I held him with my left arm.

He stopped crying before I did.

My mother-in-law, Sandra, had arrived ten minutes earlier to help with the morning feeding, one of the arrangements I had assembled in the months since the boys came home, the patchwork of help that I had organized because Derek did not organize it and because the twins were two people who needed constant care and I was one person who needed sleep sometimes and who could not be in two places simultaneously.

Sandra came from the kitchen when she heard the fall.

She found me on the hallway floor.

She called the ambulance.

The hospital was two hours of X-rays and waiting and a doctor explaining what a radius fracture meant in terms of what I could and could not do for the next six weeks. He said it as gently as he could, the way doctors have learned to say things to people who are visibly sleep-deprived and holding an infant, but the gentleness did not change what it meant.

No lifting of anything over a few pounds for six weeks.

My sons each weigh approximately sixteen pounds.

Sandra drove us home and helped me settle the boys and made tea and did not say what I could see she was thinking, which was that I needed Derek to step up and that she was not confident he would.

I called Derek at work.

He came home that evening.

I want to be fair about Derek in the early part of this, because fairness is what I owe the story even when the story is painful. When he came home that evening and saw the cast, his face did the thing it sometimes still did, the thing that reminded me of who he had been before we had  children, the thing that looked like genuine concern.

He asked if I was okay.

I said I had broken my arm and that the doctor said no heavy lifting for six weeks.

He said that was a lot.

I said yes, it was, and that I needed him to help me with the boys. Not for six weeks of full participation, though I could have asked for that. I asked for a day off work occasionally. An hour earlier a few evenings a week. Working from home on the days Sandra could not come.

He rolled his eyes.

The eye roll arrived before any words, which is its own communication, the specific body language of someone who has decided that a request is unreasonable before they have finished hearing it.

He said he had a job.

He said he was not going to sit around with the kids.

I stayed calm.

I explained that my arm was broken, that I was in a cast, that I was asking for help managing two five-month-old  babies with one usable arm.

He said moms don’t get sick days.

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