Cosima "Codi" Noline Timeline and Summary

More

Cosima "Codi" Noline Timeline and Summary

  • Codi says goodbye to her sister in a 7-Eleven parking lot, then goes home to eat cucumbers by the open window.
  • Codi heads to Grace, Arizona, meets up with Emelina, feels like a weirdo pariah, kills some chickens, and has a Labor Day party.
  • Finally, Codi goes up to see Doc and finds him making his odd photographs and losing his memory.
  • Codi starts teaching high school biology, and she introduces what's left of Mrs. Josephine Nash to her students. She starts hanging out with Loyd again, as well as his awesome dog Jack.
  • Codi goes to hear some chicken scratch music with Emelina and ends up doing the baby Heimlich on Emelina's one-year-old son, saving his life. She also starts thinking seriously about hanging out with Loyd, in the biblical sense of hanging out.
  • Codi takes her class to the river for a specimen-collecting field trip and finds out that the river is basically dead. This is totally the fault of the Black Mountain Mining Company.
  • Codi and Loyd go to the Apache reservation to buy fighting cocks and then head to an 800-year-old archeological site to hang out and talk about animal dreams.
  • Codi goes to celebrate the Day of the Dead with Emelina's family. In the graveyard, she learns that there are a bunch of people buried there with the same last name as her. Might her father have lied? Is she actually from Grace, after all?
  • Codi also starts hearing about violence and scariness going down in Nicaragua.
  • Codi gives a lecture on the river to the matriarchs of Grace. They talk about dynamiting the mining company's bulldozers but instead decide to make a lot of piñatas to draw attention to Grace's plight.
  • The ladies all go up to Tucson to sell their piñatas, and Codi and Emelina spend a couple of nights staying with Codi's ex-boyfriend, Carlo. He invites her to join him when he moves to Colorado later that year.
  • The piñatas make the local news.
  • On the way home, Codi and Emelina stop at a cave. It's super dark in there, and Codi realizes that these crazy dreams she has about hearing a popping noise and everything going black are about how she doesn't know who she is or where she's from.
  • Codi and Loyd go to the Navajo and Pueblo reservations to spend Christmas with Loyd's family. It's super beautiful, and Codi gets to know Loyd way better, but she still won't tell him that she was actually pregnant with his baby at fifteen. They watch a bunch of awesome Pueblo dances.
  • When Codi and Loyd return, Codi finds out that Hallie has been kidnapped by the contras, the bad guys in Nicaragua who are actually funded by the U.S. Government.
  • Codi's terrified, of course, and starts writing letters to everyone she can. She also stops talking to Loyd, and she and Doc have a conversation about how he lied for all those years about his past. He's not from Illinois; he's from Grace.
  • Codi gets a letter from the school board informing her that she's teacher of the year and asking her to come back. She's flattered, but she still plans to leave.
  • In the meantime, the ladies of Grace are getting the town on the historical registry in order to save it from the mining company.
  • While Doc is off getting an official diagnosis of his Alzheimer's, Codi goes through the attic at his house and finds photos that prove she and Hallie are pure specimens of the Grace gene pool. She's not an outsider, after all.
  • Codi finds out that Hallie has been shot, and Codi and Loyd go to fill out paperwork. On the way there, Codi sees a woman die in a car crash. She runs away from Grace, taking a bus to a plane, but as the plane is taking off, its engine charmingly fails.
  • Codi decides to take the train back to Grace, and when she gets there, she sees Loyd. They kiss.
  • Codi holds a memorial service for Hallie during which everyone brings objects that remind them of her. Codi wraps all the objects up in an afghan and buries them in Hallie's garden at their dad's house. Doc helps, and he has a lucid moment during which he tells Codi that he loves her and is sorry for being a terrible dad.
  • Codi stays in Grace, gets pregnant with Loyd again, intentionally this time, and eventually goes with Viola Domingos to see the place where her mother died, a mesa way up above town. She remembers watching it happen, and we can be pretty sure she's going to be okay now.