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If there’s anything that can redeem a lost soul, love would have to top the list.
— Sister Maggie Grace
Maggie’s mistake, when she looked back on it, was in thinking she was going to have an easy night.
The infirmary was empty. That was unusual for cold and flu season, but then again the number of children in her care had been steadily dropping for years now, as more were placed in foster homes. Their ranks would sadly swell again after Christmas, just a couple of days away, but that was a problem for another night.
For now, her turn on the overnight rotation was settling into familiar lines. She walked the halls slowly, prepared to treat any sudden sickness, to comfort the occasional nightmare sufferer, and to scold anyone roaming without permission. The long hours of vigilance, and the mostly quiet rooms, appealed to her. She never felt more accomplished than when everything and everyone had been tucked away in their proper places, and only she remained to survey them.
The knock, then, was particularly unwelcome.
It was barely audible, and the hour wasn’t terribly late, but Maggie knew every single sound the building could make and exactly what it meant, and this knock could only mean trouble.
The air that blew in when she opened the door chilled her, but it was the sight before her eyes that drove the cold into her bones. A breathless man with a blaze of red hair knelt on the stone, propping up another man, who was barely conscious, his eyelids fluttering.
He was wearing a black vest, marked with the dark red of blood and the glowing white of a human skull.
The Punisher was at her doorstep.
Maggie’s mind went blank of all other thoughts for a few heart-pounding, stomach-dropping seconds, but then her training kicked in and she flew to his side.
“What happened?” she asked his companion, but the man didn’t seem to have any concrete details. His words blurred as she checked the Punisher’s vital signs.
“This man needs an ambulance,” she said. “Call—”
“I can’t do that,” the redheaded man protested, his voice rough with panic. “They’d arrest him for sure. I’m real sorry I came here, but I couldn’t think of anywhere else. All I could remember is that you took in Daredevil when that building fell on him.”
“What?” Maggie gasped.
“That’s what I heard, anyway.” The man grabbed her arm. “He saved my kid, Sister. Please. It’s almost Christmas. My little girl is going to get to open presents on Christmas morning because of this guy. You have to help him.”
The Punisher chose that moment to try to get to his feet, and Maggie was filled with a deep sense of recognition. The vigilantes on the streets of New York City were obviously quick to gamble with their lives. Utter foolishness was basically baked into the job description.
But the Punisher wasn’t Matthew. He went well beyond beating people with his fists while wearing a Halloween costume. Still, the man was wounded and, as far as she could tell, unarmed. And she couldn’t exactly see him shooting up an orphanage.
Not by appearance shall he judge, nor by hearsay shall he decide.
“Lord save us,” she muttered under her breath before raising her voice. “Help me bring him in.”
She sent up a prayer of thanks that the infirmary was empty — though that very fact made her start to wonder if this wasn’t all His plan to begin with.
The man with red hair helped her get the Punisher into one of the low, narrow beds and then stepped away nervously.
“I gotta get back to my kid,” he said apologetically. “To my family.”
Maggie nodded, but she scarcely heard him. She was already lost in her work.
The man in the bed wasn’t the Punisher anymore. He was only her patient.
He’d live.
That was the encouraging part. Maggie didn’t need to worry about Frank Castle dying in her care. He was stable and sleeping, his injuries serious but certainly not worse than what he’d faced before, judging by the scars that marked his body.
Now came the difficult part — figuring out how to get the Punisher out of her infirmary as quickly as she could.
Already the secret was spreading. Maggie had brought another person into the mess by summoning Sister Regina, whose room was nearby.
Sister Regina’s eyes widened when she saw the man in the bed, but she didn’t make a peep of protest, even when Maggie handed her Frank’s vest and bloody clothes in a bag.
“The crypt,” Maggie said. “And bring up donations that will fit from the laundry.”
Regina nodded but couldn’t seem to find any words in the Punisher’s presence. Maggie thought, idly, that he must get that a lot.
When Regina returned to the sick room, Maggie left them and shut herself up in her office. Her first call was to Matthew, but there was no answer at his apartment. She tried the burner cell phone number that changed frequently, but there too she got no response.
She wasn’t surprised. It would have been too easy, to let the vigilantes sort it out themselves. No, for some reason, this was meant to be her problem.
Her next thought was to call Father Rivera, but she quickly rejected it. He wouldn’t know how to help, and she was already risking too many lives by harboring a fugitive — if the danger didn’t come from Frank Castle himself, it might come from someone who would follow him here. She had learned that lesson the hard way.
And yet, she held firm through the wave of fear that surged through her. God had seen fit to deliver the Punisher to her door, and she had to trust that He would guide her shaking hands.
Perhaps she really should call the police, despite her tacit agreement with the redheaded man. Even if he spared the innocent, Frank Castle was a killer — an executioner, even, and the Catholic Church had been critical of death penalty since at least Vatican II. That certainly went double for a freelancer.
Freelancer. The word caught in her brain. Journalist.
All those articles she’d read about Daredevil, when she was trying to understand her pissed-off little boy, all grown up. The ones Karen had written.
Karen had written about the Punisher, too. The two vigilantes’ stories were often tangled together in the same long columns of ink. Most of what Maggie knew about the Punisher came from Karen’s passionate prose — the children, the carousel, the bullet to the head. More than once, she’d had to stop reading, to cover the newsprint with her hand and say a prayer before she could go on.
Who understood Frank Castle better than Karen Page?
Maggie knew who she had to call.
Karen appeared more quickly than Maggie could have imagined. She rushed through the door in a swirl of icy air, her cheeks flushed and her eyes slightly wild.
“Thank you,” she said, out of breath. “Thank you for calling me.”
Her earnestness caught Maggie off guard. She’d made the phone call with regret at having to drag Karen into her problem. She certainly wasn’t expecting Karen to be grateful for it. Karen wasn’t even getting a scoop out of this — she’d left the Bulletin behind, and anyway, this was a matter better kept quiet, for all concerned.
Maggie’s surprise left her trailing a half-step behind as Karen made a beeline for Frank Castle’s infirmary bed. There were no chairs nearby, so she knelt beside him on the wooden floor and grasped his hand in both of hers. “Frank?”
His eyes stayed closed, but he stirred, and Maggie didn’t miss the way his hand curled tight around his visitor’s. Karen bit her lip and turned her head, the corners of her eyes glistening in the half-light of the sick room. “He’ll be OK?”
The tone of her voice, and the look on her face, told Maggie everything. The man in the bed wasn’t just the Punisher to Karen Page. He was more than just the tragic and violent figure she wrote about with such empathy.
He was someone she loved. Deeply.
And with a sudden, blazing clarity, Maggie understood why the obvious affection between Karen and her son hadn't changed into more as the months passed.
Maggie cleared her throat. “He’ll be fine,” she said, as gently as she could manage. “But he can’t stay here. I’ve been trying to reach Matthew—”
“No,” Karen said abruptly. “You can’t tell Matt he’s here.”
She squeezed Frank’s hand and then got to her feet, crossing the room and towering over Maggie with a stormy expression. It would almost be intimidating, if Maggie’s backbone hadn’t hardened into steel years ago.
This was unusual, though. Maggie was used to being on the same page with Karen. Since the very beginning, they had been something like kindred spirits. Now Maggie wondered if she had ever really seen Karen before tonight.
“Matt will insist on turning him over to the police,” Karen said.
“Isn’t that the best place for him? Truly?”
“He won’t survive it. The last time he was in police custody, he—he was attacked while handcuffed to a hospital bed.” Karen shook her head. “I’ll get him out of here. But … is it safe to move him?”
“He can stay a few more hours, to rest. But he’ll be recognized if he remains here during the day. Matthew’s blindness, and his history with us, provided a cover. Only a very few knew his secret. But this one’s been all over the news for years. Not exactly low-profile.”
Karen pressed her lips together and nodded. “I’ll make some calls.”
“You can use my office.”
Before she left the room, Karen walked back to Frank and touched his hand again, murmuring something almost too low for Maggie to hear.
It sounded like — “I’ll come back for you.”
“Karen?”
Frank’s voice came out in a rasp, his eyelids blinking open.
“I’m sorry,” Maggie said as she approached him gingerly. “Karen had to step away. But she’ll be back shortly.”
His eyes snapped to Maggie’s with surprise. “She’s here?”
He thought he’d dreamed her. That was clear enough. Maggie had to bite back a smile.
“She’s trying to find more...suitable arrangements for you,” Maggie said, lifting her eyebrows.
Frank shook his head slightly, and winced at the motion. “Should’ve left me out there.”
“In this cold?”
“I’ve managed worse.” He wasn’t looking at Maggie anymore, but at the wall over her shoulder, at something in the distance. “You called her?”
Back to Karen now. His face had taken on an air of concern — what he was really asking was how did you know to call her?
“We have a mutual friend,” Maggie said. “One of the lawyers who represented you at your trial.”
“Murdock,” Frank said, his voice a shadow. It carried a hint of wistfulness, a whiff of “lucky bastard.”
“He’s a parishioner here,” Maggie said. “And he stayed with us, as a child, after his father’s death.”
Frank’s chin lifted slightly. “This an orphanage?”
“One of the last remaining in all of New York City.” Maggie had some pride in that. She kept St. Agnes running on two toothpicks and a stick of gum sometimes, but it had continued its mission of service well into the twenty-first century.
“Mr. Castle…” Maggie found herself stumbling a bit. “Should I call you something else?”
“You can call me Pete,” he said. “If that makes it easier.”
“Does it make it easier for you?”
“No, ma’am. Just Frank’s fine with me.”
“Well, Frank, I need to check your vital signs, and your bandages.”
“I’m sure it’s all fine.”
“Nevertheless, I’d like to check. While you’re here, you’re my patient.”
He nodded, his eyes drifting half-closed again. She set to work, in the brisk, no-nonsense fashion that had invariably served her well.
“I’ve always thought it was a little ironic, that your name is Frank,” she said as she replaced a piece of gauze on his bicep. “Do you know the Prayer of St. Francis? ‘Lord, make me an instrument of your peace’?”
Frank’s lips twitched. “Respectfully, Sister, I stopped asking anything of Him a long time ago.”
“And yet of all the places in this city,” she said dryly, “you ended up here tonight.”
In the hallway, Maggie found Karen leaving her office.
“I have a plan,” Karen said in a rush. “We’re going to—”
“I would say the less I know, the better,” Maggie interrupted. “Don’t you think?”
“Yeah. Um, probably.”
Maggie took a step forward, meaning to let Karen return to Frank, but something stopped her in her tracks. She sighed and straightened her shoulders.
“Karen, I should tell you that when I called you, I had no idea…” Maggie hesitated, choosing her words more delicately than usual. “That the two of you were...so close.”
Karen huffed out a breath, a rueful smile playing around her mouth. “As close as two people who never see each other can be.”
“This is obviously none of my concern, but…does he know how you feel?”
Karen bit her lip, shifting her weight from one foot to the other and tucking her hair behind one ear. “I think I made it pretty clear the last time we were in a situation like this one.”
Maggie nodded, letting the silence stretch.
“He doesn’t...he doesn’t want to stop.”
Maggie almost flinched at the reminder that she was helping to heal a man who would surely kill again. But neither could she sentence him to death, and she believed Karen’s account. Perhaps it had been naive to think the law could ever work for him again, now that he’d lived for so long outside it.
“Well,” Maggie said briskly, trying to paper over whatever hole she’d surely opened up, “at least you have a plan.”
Karen kept vigil through the rest of that long night, sitting at Frank’s bedside in a hard wooden chair that Maggie had dusted off and brought into the infirmary.
Maggie couldn’t help looking in on the two of them more frequently than was strictly necessary. There was something almost holy about them — something in the way Karen’s hair glowed around her face as she watched the steady rise and fall of Frank’s chest — something in the way their fingers tangled together on top of the coarse blanket that covered him.
As much as Maggie needed Frank Castle out of her orphanage, she felt a twinge of regret when the time came to disturb their peace.
Karen left the room to coordinate with whoever was helping her, and then it was just Maggie alone with the Punisher. Except she was having trouble thinking of him that way, now.
“I think this is the part where I’m supposed to say I’ll keep you in my prayers,” she said. “But I’m not so sure you’d appreciate that.”
“No?” Frank asked, sitting up with a flinch of pain. “Why’s that?”
“You said you’ve stopped asking Him for things. That means you used to, and you don’t anymore.”
Frank shrugged. “Things are what they are. If you want something done, you’ve got to take care of it yourself,” he said. “I guess you could say I stopped seeing the point in it.”
“Yes...it can be difficult to see the point,” Maggie said, handing him a dark sweatshirt that Sister Regina had brought up from the laundry. “You know, there was a child who came to us many years ago. He’d been blinded when he ran into the street to save a man’s life. Not even ten, and his first instinct was to put himself in harm’s way to help another person. And he was forever changed for it. I feared for many years that it was retribution...for the sins of the previous generation. Now I see that God had a plan for him that was beyond my comprehension.”
Frank made a soft noise as he zipped up the sweatshirt, and Maggie gave him a sharp look.
“Don’t worry. I’m not going to tell you that you should rejoice in your losses. Far from it. All I’m asking you to see is that, even in your loss, you have been given something powerful. You’ve found someone who is willing to share your burdens and carry them.”
Frank’s eyes were dark with an alarming intensity, but Maggie pressed on anyway.
“Give up on God if you must, but don’t give up on love,” she said. “For her sake, if not your own. She—she hasn’t moved on.”
Maggie snapped her mouth closed then. She’d said too much, probably, but she hoped...
“I’m sorry, Sister,” Frank said, “if me being here caused you trouble. Thank you...for your help.”
Maggie smiled, just a little. “Merry Christmas, Frank,” she said.
If it was possible to have a guilty pleasure story in the Bible, Maggie’s would have to be the parable of the lost sheep.
The way Jesus told it, it went like this: If a shepherd who had a hundred sheep noticed one of them was missing, he would leave the flock and go in search of the lost one. And when he found it, he would rejoice. He would celebrate that one sheep that came back over the 99 who never went astray.
The story always felt too good to be true — the idea that God would welcome back a lost soul with more joy than he felt for those who’d never left him. But she’d seen something like it in her own life. The children in her care who gave her the most trouble but then managed to find their way were somehow the dearest to her.
So she let herself believe that, just maybe, it was true.
During the swirl of holiday activities and Christmas services that followed Frank Castle’s visit to St. Agnes, Maggie found her thoughts straying to him often, and to Karen, too. Nothing appeared in the papers, so their getaway appeared to be a clean one.
Maggie was thrilled when Matthew joined her for midnight Mass, though her conscience twinged at her secret. She promised herself she’d tell him the whole story, as soon as she’d spoken with Karen.
It was late in the afternoon on Christmas Day before she could finally spare a few minutes away, and she dressed for a walk in the cold to Karen’s apartment.
She was concerned about the state of her friend’s heart. Maggie worried that her meddling had caused Karen pain — it wouldn’t be the first time — and she wanted to provide whatever comfort she could in the aftermath.
But at the last minute, Maggie grabbed her small black medical bag to take with her.
Just in case.
Karen answered the door with a smile. “This is a surprise,” she said, ushering Maggie in.
Inside her apartment, Christmas music played softly, lights twinkled from a tabletop tree, and a warm blanket covered the man recuperating on her couch.
“I thought I would check in on my patient,” Maggie said, meeting Frank’s eyes.
“I thought you didn’t want to know the plan,” Karen said, a hint of teasing in her voice.
Maggie smiled. “The Lord works in exasperating ways.”
An oven timer sounded, and Karen moved swiftly toward the kitchen, her festive red dress swishing. "I'll be just a minute,” she called over her shoulder. "I'm making my grandmother's lasagna."
Maggie made her way to Frank’s side, but he waved off her attempts to check his wounds. “I’m all right,” he said. “You should be enjoying your holiday.”
Maggie tilted her head appraisingly. “You left some property behind with us,” she said softly, and significantly. At Maggie’s request, Sister Regina had hidden the Punisher’s vest in the crypt below the church. “It goes against my better judgement, but I can see that it gets returned to you.”
Frank’s gaze shifted over her shoulder, to where Karen was working in the kitchen. His whole face washed over with tenderness, and his answer warmed her heart before she even heard the words.
“No need, Sister,” he said. “Don't think that fits any more.”
It was nothing short of a miracle, but Frank Castle had found his way home for Christmas.