Back at Ivymount in the fall, Owen, now 11, is not being challenged academically or socially. Cornelia’s response is to crank up his programming. She starts him in piano lessons with an Ivymount instructor who specializes in teaching special-needs kids. There are still the rounds of therapist visits and any after-school activity we can find. Not many playdates, though.

Owen doesn’t seem to mind. All he wants are sketch pads and pencils. Markers, too. He goes through a pad in a few days and wants another. O.K., back to the CVS. A few more days, he needs another one. I look around for what are now two missing pads. They’re nowhere. Could he have hidden them?

We’ve been observing him closely since the ouster from Lab. We know he was bruised, but he doesn’t have enough expressive speech to explain his feelings. So we watch, collecting clues, like spies in our own home. He’s distracted. He’s watching lots of videos. The school reports that he’s doing lots of “silly,” the word we use for self-stimulatory behavior like flapping hands.

One Saturday afternoon, while Cornelia and Walt are running errands, I see Owen padding across the kitchen’s Mexican tile floor on his way to the basement with pad, pencils and one of his large animation books in hand. I wait a minute before I tiptoe behind him, stopping at the bottom of the stairs. He’s on the rug, kneeling but hunched forward, flipping furiously through the book; as I edge closer, I see it contains artwork from “Learn to Draw Disney’s The Little Mermaid.”

Standing silently over him, I can see he’s stopping at pictures of Sebastian, the wise crab who watches over the heroine, Ariel. There are lots of Sebastians: pencil sketches from when the animators were developing the character, full-color renderings of key scenes from the movie. That is where he stops, at a slide of Sebastian with a fearful look, mouth open and eyes wide.

The sketchbook flies open, the black pencil in hand. He looks from the picture to his pad, picture, pad, picture, pad. And then the tightly gripped pencil begins to move, a lead-lined crawl. Most kids, most anyone, would begin with the face — where we all tend to look first — but he starts on the edge, with the crab leg, then the claw, which take shape in a single line. I think of those old-style drafting machines with two pencils poised above two pads, the pencils connected to a mechanical apparatus, a crosshatch, so that moving one would create the same motion, the same precise line, with the other. At the end, you’d have two identical drawings, side by side.

But here’s the crazy part: Every part of him starts moving except that rock-steady hand. His whole body begins twisting and flinching, moving as much as you can move while kneeling, with his free arm bending in the angle of Sebastian’s left claw. Five minutes later, when he gets to the face, I look up and see a reflection of Owen’s face, me behind him, in the darkened screen of the TV in front of us. The look on the crab’s face in the book is replicated in my son’s reflection on the TV, where, of course, we’ve watched this scene — of Sebastian watching Ariel lose her voice — so many times.