Elián González was dazed when fishermen picked him up on Thanksgiving Day, lashed atop an inner tube in the Atlantic off Fort Lauderdale, Fla. The boy and his mother Elizabet had fled their Cuban town of Cardenas three days before, along with 12 companions, in a small aluminum motorboat, which sank in heavy seas, drowning Elizabet and 10 of the others. And the sharks-TV news crews, Cuban-American activists, Fidel Castro, Jesse Helms and other U.S. politiciansÐwere just beginning to circle.

What must this small boy, a child who loves nothing more than making and flying kites in the warm Cuban brisa, have thought during his hours on the water? And later, as he paraded before the world on television-at Disney World, in school, playing "rescue pilot" with his cousins in the backyard of their Miami home where he is being cared for-it seemed possible to read everything, anything, in his deep eyes: fear, joy, courage.

Although the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service ruled last week that Elián's father Juan Miguel González has the right to call him back to Cuba, the fight over the boy's future isn't done yet. Representative Dan Burton, an Indiana Republican, has issued a congressional subpoena designed to freeze Eli‡n's repatriation, at least until his American relatives can appeal it in court.

It is hard to think rationally about Elián when your throat is swelled and your eyes wet. It's an instinct that what Elián needs most right now is to fill his big eyes with a vision of his father, a 31-year-old hotel security guard and Communist Party member. Juan Miguel hasn't cut his hair since Elián left, because it was their habit to make the trip to the barber together. It's a trip they'll have to make in the future on foot, since Juan Miguel sold his 1956 Nash Rambler to help pay for the calls he makes regularly to his son in Miami.

Sources close to the González family in Cuba have told Time that to help Elián, a team of Cuban government psychologists counseled Juan Miguel on what to say to him about their separation. Just tell him he's on vacation. That all this will end soon. But isn't it time to bring this vacation, which began for Elián in the early-morning hours of Nov. 21, to an end? Isn't it time to help him understand the awful truth about what happened to his mother? The boy seems so completely a product of two loving parentsÐwho suffered seven miscarriages before he was born and chose as his name an elision of theirs, Elizabet and JuanÐthat the thing we reflexively want to do is restore to him what is left of his family.

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