Something in her voice.

When I call Rose, who is at her mother's on this dark winter evening for her visitation week, I can hear something wrong in my daughter's voice. An emotional quality that a phone cannot disguise. A trouble that needs to escape and come home. She is also irritable and short with me, wishing this conversation would end.

"What's wrong, sweetie?" I ask, in my most welcoming tone, desperately not wanting her to hang up.

And then suddenly it is freed. "Keith Jensen committed suicide today. He tied a rope to his bedroom door and jumped off his bed."

A long pause. Now we are connected. "School was weird. There are so many rumors. We sat in small groups in Mrs. Spence's English class and tried to talk about it. Some of the kids were crying because the last words they said to him were, 'Shut up Keith!'

"No one could do any work. I flunked my math test." I look outside the kitchen window at the drifts of heavy snow. I am suddenly shivering, but not from the weather.

I ask Rose if she knew Keith well.

"Everybody knew him. He seemed happy. I never would have thought he would do something like this. I don't understand."

She talks on with emotion and without hesitation, as if she is the river and I am the ocean. I listen without interruption. Then, out of nowhere, my daughter says, "Don't worry, Papa, I would never do anything like that."

It's a long-standing tradition with us that when we are separated and we end our conversation that we each say "I love you." Tonight there is nothing automatic in our goodbyes.

I put down the receiver and get out the family album that holds class pictures for each of the last seven years. I find Keith with Rose in C. Anderson's third-grade class, and in Mrs. Strong's fourth-grade class. There is nothing in Keith's face that could forewarn what happened today; nothing to prepare any of us for the idea of a twelve-year-old going to elaborate measures to hang himself. He is smiling out at me along with the other children I have watched over the years: in the noisy playground at Russell Elementary School, on stage at the annual holiday concerts, and at my annual visits on Career Days to talk about writing.

That's when I remember Keith just for an instant, like a light drop of rain. He's at the edges of the classroom on one of the days I visited. I see him looking at me. I recall eyes and a smile. Maybe the dark brown color of his hair. And that is all I remember.

When I look at Keith's picture, I think of all the children I've known in my life. I remember how I've watched them grow. I remember the times I've teased them, held them, been shocked by their deaths, despaired as their parents split up to form new families. And I've been inspired by their bravery in the face of it all. I think of the connection they share with all the world's children and how their lives ripple through our community, affecting each and every one of us.

I continue turning the pages of the album to watch the lives of my daughter. I am driving a tractor raking fall oat straw in northern Michigan; I am balancing baby Rose on the hood of our ancient green truck at a Reno rest-stop; there are April tulips and Rose playing cello; and her mother holding her wrapped in a towel fresh from a bath, both of them radiant.

More pages: Rose with tricycles and summer Popsicles; twirling a dance, eyes closed, in the Western wind in a blue corduroy jumper and white tights; she is climbing trees and sniffing Northcoast rhododendrons. She walks under the half-light of a redwood forest holding my hand and dances with me, her feet on my own for balance. In every photograph her fingers are busy, her eyes twinkling, and her face reflects the light of each day.

A child's life, with my own intertwined, is held within the covers of this photo album. I can hold each picture and slip into a time frame of emotions. This is what I'm looking for tonight: a reckoning, a validation that the years just didn't pass without notice. I want to remember everything about my daughter. Photos are not easy to look at. Memories are never simple. I can't easily untangle the joy from the pain, and if I am to survive separation and divorce, I am forced to choose the better moments of our lives. What fine actors we ultimately must become.

All the rooms and houses stare back at me. Meals, friends, seasons, and landscapes of desert and rain. Precious fragments of field and wood. Mountain ranges I still climb at night in my bed. All the various Western towns where I tried to hold us together and failed. I guess these years are finally catching up with me.

I close the album. I am haunted tonight. I hear Rose's voice again. Don't worry, Papa, I would never do anything like that. I am holding still in this room, searching for faith with my own small remainder, affirming one child, remembering another.

Stephen Lyons, a writer, lives in Pullman, Washington.