Page 42 of Stay With Me

Because eventually, there was nothing but darkness.

Chapter Nine

Samantha

Samantha had always operated well in stressful situations. When things got tense or scary, a Zen-like calm would take over and she’d coast as she figured out how she might fix things, or she’d wait for it to pass.

When she was six years old, she got separated from her family while at a large amusement park. Instead of huddling in a corner and crying, Samantha made the most of her alone time and took the opportunity to visit the carousel and watched the pretty, plastic horses make circle after circle.

When she was sixteen years old, her best friend had borrowed the family car with permission to make a trip to a frozen yogurt place and then come straight home.

Unfortunately, the yogurt shop was located on the access road of a highway under construction, and the girls got impressively lost in a matter of minutes. Her friend took an exit and turned, got back on the highway, exited again, over and over again until they had no idea where they were. The whole time, her friend was crying and hyperventilating while Samantha sat calmly, making suggestions until they found their way home.

When she was twenty years old, she went home with her boyfriend for spring break. He thought it would be super fun to tear around the dirt backroads outside Midland, Texas, where he reached speeds that were too high for even the truck’s speedometer to register and took sharp turns around corners, which caused the truck to fishtail every single time. Samantha sat calmly once again, thinking to herself,Well, surely he wouldn’t be driving like this if he didn’t think he could handle it safely.

So when she dived across the dirt and rocks, only to miss Nick’s slipping hand by a matter of microseconds and then watch gravity drag him down the slope and eventually drop him like a rag doll at the bottom of the canyon, she shifted into a calm and attempted to assess the situation.

It was possible that he was dead. But she didn’t know that. And if he had managed to survive the fall, and if he was conscious, she needed to make sure he knew she was going to try to handle things.

“Nick!” she called into the canyon, white knuckling the ledge. “Nick, can you hear me?”

He didn’t appear to be moving.

“Nick!”

She stared at his lifeless body for a second or two, racking her brain for what she could possibly do in this situation.

Every solution she came up with began with her somehow getting to him so she had to figure out how to do that.

She clutched her temples and squeezed her eyes shut for a second when she remembered something he’d said not twenty minutes earlier.

They had been walking through the dry creek bed when they approached a split in the trail marked by three obviously man-made rock piles, or cairns,as Nick had referred to them.

“If you take the one to the left, you can actually walk through the canyon,”he’d mentioned as they passed by the piles and headed right.

“Wow, really?”

“Yeah, it’s kind of like this maze of boulders, but after you get through that it becomes more open and flat.”

Samantha scanned his surroundings. It didn’t necessarily look super flat or open, but flatter and more open than other sections.

“Okay,” she said to herself. “All I have to do is get back to that split and follow the path to the left.”

She peered gingerly over the ledge one more time. “Nick! I’m going to find the other trail so I can get to you! I’m not leaving! I’m coming down there! Just try to stay alive. We’ll get through this. Just stay with me.”

With that, she hopped up to her feet and started back down the small hill.

She trekked down the hill and couldn’t help noticing the position of the sun in the sky.

They’d arrived at around one-thirty. Spent about twenty minutes getting their camp set up. Then they hiked for a while. He’d said it would take about four hours to get to the canyon. That would make it close to six p.m.

She stopped short as the first mini-wave of panic caused her stomach to clench.

It was basically evening, even though the sun was still beating down.

That meant it would be night in a couple of hours.

Nick was unconscious or potentially dead at the bottom of a canyon.