Julius spent so much of his first year in the hospital, that it wasn't until he was in his second year that she started taking him places. People usually just commented on how angelic he looked. But Perrault remembers well the first time she could read in a stranger's face that the woman had realized Julius was disabled. "It hurt," she recalls.

Perrault grew up knowing about the prejudices against children with disabilities. She knows people stare. Her older sister, Renee, has Down syndrome, and Perrault now has custody of Renee, who lives with her. But Perrault is finding that being Julius' mom is different than being Rene's sister.

As his mother, she finds herself thinking, "Who is going to be there to defend Julius?" if he outlives his parents. She finds herself frightened that someone would be cruel to him and he would not have the words to say so.

Perrault sometimes wonders what his voice might sound like if he could use words, she says, although, of course she knows the meaning of every sound he makes. She used to spend time imagining how it would sound if he said, "I love you, Mommy." But then, she says, one day he looked at her and she knew that is exactly what his face was telling her. She found herself saying, as matter-of-factly as any mom might say, "I love you, too."

Before Julius, Perrault says her art dealt with psychological boundaries. Since Julius, she finds herself concentrating on the potential for breakthroughs. She's learned so much about the brain and the central nervous system that now dendrites stream like flower stems through her art.

The mice in her paintings come from visiting a laboratory in California where stem cell research is going on. The mice, "these sacrificial creatures," have some of the same neurological impairments that Julius has.

Having lost Cyrus has made her recognize more than ever the delicacy of life. So in one sense, her paintings are "a handprint in the cave," she says. They are proof that she and Julius still live. That Cyrus was hers.

They are also a way for her to capture the recurring images in her mind. For example, after Julius' birth Perrault thought often about how he felt at the moment of suffocation. He'd been in a safe place and suddenly he knew terror. As she drew the moments before his birth, she worked with colored pencils instead of oils, because at that point in their life together he was still so medically fragile that she had to use a medium she could put down and not return to until the next day, or the next week.

From the time she can remember, Perrault says, she has been able to put herself in someone else's place, and not just in the place of a human. She's been able to imagine what it would be like to be a frog, a cloud, a lamppost — to see the world from that perspective.