Henry could have shot all three of them from where he sat, wedged into the crotch of a maple, but he knew they wouldn’t die. “You missed,” they’d say, and then they’d kill him. If they weren’t liars, they would admit there was no hiding from the Gestapo—secret rooms, new identities, none of it worked—but they were liars. Henry made his hands into binocular tubes and watched the Allies reach Danny’s lawn, where they dropped their guns and went inside. Henry counted to a hundred before lowering himself from the tree. The coast was clear, but he counted off another fifty, then zigzagged across the field in a crouch, zigzagged across the lawn, grabbing weapons, and he kept running until he reached his temporary headquarters.

Inside, Charlotte was screaming her head off.

His mother walked the baby from room to room.

Henry took two oatmeal health cookies from the cookie jar.

His mom said, “Hi, honey,” over the screaming baby. Henry said hi back and made his way upstairs. If a kidnapper broke into the house late at night when his father was away on business, Henry would take the pocketknife from his dad’s top dresser drawer and kill the intruder. They didn’t know he knew about the knife, but he did.

There were a lot of things they didn’t know.

Like about Mr. Boerman’s pirate walk, how he swung his wooden leg straight from the hip. And on the second day of school, it was Henry he noticed staring at his jerky mechanical walk. “You want to know about my leg, is it?” he said. “Why I walk like this?”

Henry knew why Mr. Boerman walked like that.

The other kids looked at their desks, sneaking peaks at Henry as his face went hot.

“A handicap’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Mr. Boerman said. “And I understand your curiosity.” He walked in front of the class between his desk and the blackboard, showing off his wooden leg, looking right at Henry as he explained his injury: a story about a milk truck running him over during the Depression. Hospitals and rehabilitation and speckles of spit flying, the stiff leg swinging and sweat running down his sideburns just as it had when the Gestapo held him for questioning—before they took a hacksaw to his thigh to get the necessary information. Behind his thick glasses, Mr. Boerman probably had a fake eye that he took out at night, covering the pink oozing hole with a leather patch.

At dinner, Henry told his father he’d been in a fight at school.

“A fight?” his mother said, wiping carrot paste from Charlotte’s chin. “Henry, what are you talking about?”

His dad pushed a forkful of waxed bean mashed potato hamburger casserole into his mouth.

“A kid pushed me,” Henry said. “At the jungle gym.” It could have happened.

Charlotte knocked her sippy cup from her highchair tray. His mother picked it up and said, “Henry, we don’t approve of fighting.”

“Danny started it,” Henry said.

“I won’t have fighting,” his mom said.

The baby threw her sippy cup over Henry’s shoulder. His dad took another big bite while Henry’s mom pulled the baby from her highchair and talked baby talk. “It can be tough being new,” his dad said. “Can’t it?”

“Jack,” his mom said, “don’t encourage.”

“No fighting,” she said on her way out of the kitchen. “And I mean it.”

Henry didn’t tell his dad about being the Germans or what really happened on the playground, which was nothing, except that Ronny Hanson sat next to him on the merry-go-round and started talking.

Henry saw Eric and Paul Stone running around the jungle gym. He saw Paul Stone see him with Ronny, who was saying something about his meteorology kit. When Ronny put his hand on Henry’s shoulder, and said, “Wanna come over after school?” Henry slapped his hand away and shouted, “You’re the Viet Cong!”

“Did you push him back?” his father asked.

Henry nodded.

“You know we don’t approve of fighting,” his father said. He scooped a forkful of vomit casserole from Henry’s plate. “Go watch some tv,” he said. “We’ll have ice cream when your mom comes down.”

For a long time after his brother died inside his mother, back in New Jersey, before Baltimore and now Michigan, Henry thought his unknown brother was only missing. His mom had often talked about the new baby. She’d put Henry’s hand over the dome of her belly and Henry could feel it moving around—kicking, his mom said. But when she went to the hospital, the baby came out dead. And even though they’d explained to Henry that the baby was dead, his mom always referred to it as lost. She had lost the baby, she’d tell people. Even later, in Baltimore, and now Michigan, she might say to someone, “I lost my second. Charlotte’s really my third.”

Now that he was almost nine Henry knew that the baby was dead, but he still thought of him wandering around New Jersey, lost. Maybe under the big beer bottle in Newark, as tall as a smokestack, that they passed on their way to his grandmother’s house in Connecticut. And each move seemed to make it less likely that the baby would ever be found. Like if he’d somehow made it to Baltimore, crawling along the beltway, there was no way he’d find them here.

After they moved to Michigan, Henry got bunk beds and a desk. He’d always wanted bunk beds, but he wondered if his parents wanted them too, to have an open bed if his brother ever did show up.

Ronny had slept in the top bunk the night he stayed over a few weeks after Henry moved in. He lived at the bottom of the hill and rode by on his old-fashioned bike the day the moving truck arrived. Ronny’s mom, Mrs. Hanson, had a purple mark over the left side of her face. Henry and Ronny rode bikes that first day, but when Ronny wanted to show off his meteorology kit, Mrs. Hanson gave them Rice Krispie treats, which Henry was afraid to eat because of that thing on her face.

Everybody else was at camp then—Paul Stone, Eric, Danny—but Ronny couldn’t go to camp because of asthma. Ronny had a stamp collection. Ronny had a Lionel train. Ronny showed him a dead deer in the woods behind his house. Then the other kids came back from camp and Henry had to be a German with Ronny every time they played war.

Danny’s mom bought Twinkies and let you watch “Dark Shadows.” Eric’s brother was in Vietnam. Paul Stone’s dad was a policeman and kept pictures of naked ladies, which Paul Stone sometimes snuck out of the house. Henry’s dad designed weapons systems and had killed people in World War II, which, the two times Henry mentioned it, none of the other kids believed. When Ronny slept over and didn’t believe him, Henry called his dad to his room, but his dad said it wasn’t something to talk about. Then, just yesterday, when Eric was bragging about his brother in Vietnam greasing gooks and Henry said big deal, his dad had killed Nazis, Ronny, who nobody ever listened to, said it was a lie and the other kids believed him. Before, Henry had felt kind of sorry for Ronny, with his asthma and Keds, always having to be the Germans. Now he hated him.

The next day at school, Henry got in trouble for drawing a swastika. If he’d known it was such a big deal he wouldn’t have put one at the bottom of his spelling quiz. The funny part was he didn’t know he’d done it. There was a lot of stuff at the bottom of his page—a house, a seagull, a tank, a guy with glasses and a stovepipe hat, and the swastika. At the end of reading, right before the recess bell rang, Mr. Boerman said, “Henry, stay back from recess, please,” and, of course Henry knew he’d done something wrong and then the bell rang and he was alone with Peg Leg.

“Henry,” Mr. Boerman said, standing from his desk and swivel-walking down Henry’s row, “just so you know: my ancestry’s Dutch, not German.”

Henry had no idea what the old man was talking about.

“This might not mean much to you,” Mr. Boerman said, “but I lost two brothers in the war—one in Italy and one in France.”

“My dad was in the Battle of the Bulge,” Henry said.

Mr. Boerman placed the spelling quiz on Henry’s desk and stood over him. “Then I would think you’d know better,” he said.

Henry looked at the piece of paper. All the answers were right, but at the bottom with his other drawings was the swastika, circled and underlined in red ink.

Henry looked at Mr. Boerman looking down at him. He looked at the swastika. It looked funny, backwards or upside down. “Did I make it wrong?” he said.

Mr. Boerman snatched up the quiz and jerked back toward his desk. “Put your head down,” he said.

Henry put his head down. He had never been in trouble at school.

“I’m writing a note to your father,” Mr. Boerman said, “and I expect a reply.”

Henry smelled his desk against his face and listened to the kids outside screaming. If the Red Chinese came creeping out of the woods with machine guns, he and Mr. Boerman would probably be the only survivors, hidden in a secret room under the basement. Or maybe Mr. Boerman wouldn’t make it because of his leg. Maybe the Red Chinese would assassinate Mr. Boerman at his desk as he wrote the letter to Henry’s father.

The baby was down for a nap when Henry got home. His mom put a plate of oatmeal health cookies and some apple juice on the kitchen table. The letter was folded in his back pocket. On the bus ride home Paul Stone had taken Ronny’s glasses and wouldn’t give them back until Ronny cried and then Shirley the bus driver had to pull over and Paul Stone got written up. They’d both gotten in trouble that day. But at the bus stop, before Henry could comment on that, Paul Stone said, “I want my rifle back, Tyler.”

Henry started to walk. “I didn’t take it,” he said.

“Yeah you did,” Paul Stone said. His house was in the other direction, but he was following Henry.

“Me too,” Eric said.

“I mean it, Tyler,” Paul Stone said, and then they walked the other way. When they were pretty far back and Henry was almost home, he shouted, “I didn’t take your stupid guns!” but he couldn’t tell if they’d heard him. They were around the corner already.

“What did you do in school today?” his mom asked. She stood at the counter making bread, rolling dough on his dad’s old drafting board. She always asked that question. Henry asked for another cookie.

His mom put two cookies on a plate with horses on it.

“Did you have a good day?” she said, turning back to her bread.

The Polish had horses in the war that got slaughtered in the blitzkrieg. They were stupid to think they could beat tanks with horses. “I got in trouble,” Henry said. He pulled the envelope from his pocket. “Mr. Boerman wrote a letter.”

His mother turned to face him, but her hands kept working the dough. “What do you mean you got in trouble?”

“I have to bring a letter back.”

“Henry,” his mother said, wiping her hands on a dish cloth and walking to the table. “What did you do?”

“I drew a picture,” he said. “I don’t know what I did,” he said.

He handed her the letter. “It’s for Dad,” he said.

He watched her open the envelope and read Mr. Boerman’s words. She squinted at Henry, squinted at the letter. He couldn’t tell what she thought.

“Go ahead and get changed,” she finally said, putting the letter back in its envelope. “We’ll talk about this later.”

Upstairs, he walked into Charlotte’s room and looked at her sleeping in her crib. He wished she could talk already. She didn’t know about their brother yet. Maybe the note was no big deal. Maybe he could blame Ronny for the guns. Charlotte stretched in her sleep, rolled over. “We have a brother,” Henry whispered in her ear, “who lives in a secret beach house, in Cape May, New Jersey.” The baby didn’t move. Henry walked to his room and waited to be called down.

At the dinner table, his father’s bottom lip stuck out as he read the note and looked at the spelling quiz. Charlotte sat in her highchair across from Henry. His mother pulled potatoes from the oven. His father put the spelling test in front of Henry and pointed at the swastika. “You know what this is, right?”

Henry nodded.

His mother put plates on the table. “It’s a horrible symbol,” she said.

“That’s right,” his father said. He pointed to the picture of the man with glasses and a stove pipe hat. “Who’s this?” he said.

It wasn’t anybody. Henry remained silent.

“Okay,” his father said. He picked up the papers and folded them. Henry’s mom started feeding Charlotte. His dad cut at his Swiss steak. “You remember when your mom didn’t like to look at babies,” he said, “or got sad when she saw babies?”

Henry remembered his mother crying in the grocery store.

“That was because it reminded her of losing Tommy.”

His mother fed peas to the baby on a tiny spoon.

“The swastika—”

“Which is an ugly symbol,” his mother said.

“Which is an ugly symbol,” his father said, “reminds Mr. Boerman of the brothers he lost in the war. And how he didn’t go, maybe.” He jammed a big bite of Swiss steak into his mouth and chewed.

“He’s sensitive about it,” his mother said. “But Jack, tell him how ugly it is.”

His father swallowed. “These Nazis,” he said, “did horrible things to people. Things you can hardly believe.”

“I know,” Henry said. Didn’t his dad remember how often they watched The World at War?

“You don’t know,” his father said. “You can’t imagine.”

His mother said, “These people were evil.”

“They gassed people in showers,” Henry said, “burned them in ovens. They hunted people down and killed them.”

“That’s right,” his father said, sawing his meat.

Henry’s mother put her hand on top of Henry’s hand and leaned over her plate, looking at him hard. “And when you make that symbol,” she said, “people might think—”

Charlotte shrieked and Henry’s mother loaded another spoonful of peas.

“It’s not a cool symbol,” his father said.

“Eat your dinner, honey,” his mother said.

Henry picked up his knife and fork. They didn’t know anything. It was a cool symbol. A scary, cool symbol. That didn’t mean you didn’t hate the Nazis or anything.

“It just gives the wrong impression, honey,” his mother said. “It’s not something you want to even think about.”

Henry’s face felt hot. The Swiss steak was in a reddish-orange goopy sauce that could have been blood. He didn’t do it, but he thought about tracing a swastika in that sauce right on top of his flat leathery steak, imagined each forbidden line he would make so that it was just the same as actually doing it.

“Are we clear on this,” his father said. “That it’s not a cool symbol?”

Henry choked down a bite of steak. He was going to cry. For no reason he was going to cry and they were going to ask him why he was crying and he’d shake his head and snot would run down his face and he’d cry harder and his dad would think he was a big baby who didn’t know anything. He concentrated on his potato and thought about the peasants in Russia, who weren’t dirty commies yet but still our friends, eating moldy potatoes before the Nazis killed them with machine guns in a big old potato field. All those dead peasants rotting in a pile. The flies and empty eye holes. But he couldn’t stop it. And for a second after it started—this awful crying noise—before his mother jumped from her chair and took him in her arms, they all looked at him, the dirty Nazi, even the baby, confused and horrified by this stranger at their dinner table, crying and gasping for no reason at all.