The decision never felt rash or harebrained or reckless. It felt urgent. I felt like I’d been given a reprieve. I felt the astonishing luck of a man who’d agreed to meet a woman for coffee when it was all but impossible for him to leave a hotel room without a crack pipe in his hand, and who then fell in love at first sight—at first glance.
That initial glance was such a profound moment. I realize now that what floored me then was the reflective gaze I spotted in Melissa’s eyes. She looked at me the way my brother always looked at me, the way my dad looked at me before that last, terrifying encounter in his driveway: with love, admiration, wonderment. She saw the pain and trauma inside me and still fell in love immediately. The most insidious thing about addiction, the hardest thing to overcome, is waking up unable to see the best of yourself.
Beau and Dad saw the best in me even when I wasn’t at my best. Looking at them was like looking in a mirror and, instead of seeing an alcoholic or a drug addict, seeing the healthiest me reflected back. I never thought that Beau was worried I wouldn’t be okay. I never thought he didn’t have confidence in me. It was how we stayed connected.
When I saw Melissa that night at the Sunset Marquis, I abruptly realized how dependent I was on that reflective gaze. I remember when I did not see it in Kathleen’s eyes—I carbon-date it, really, to after I was discharged from the Navy Reserve for failing that drug test in 2014. It then became so clear, a few short weeks after Beau had died, when Kathleen and I were sitting together in the therapist’s office after our twenty-two-mile anniversary walk and she told me, “I’ll never forgive you.” That’s when it hit me that I had no chance of handling the pain I was in. That’s when I decided to get a drink. When you see those doubts and questions in the eyes of the person you’re supposed to love the most, it breaks you in half.
In retrospect, it would’ve been hell to live with someone incapable of forgiving me while pretending that she had. And now, at last, I was starting to understand what Beau had been trying to tell me: it, too, had been all part of the process.
Around 6 p.m. on May 17, 2019, just before Maria arrived at Melissa’s apartment, I called my dad to tell him I was getting married.
It took him a quick minute to take in the news; it had happened so fast, nobody in the family even knew I’d met someone. Yet he reset instantly, the way he always does. He seems incapable of not coming through when it matters most. He was thrilled that I sounded so happy.
“Honey,” he said, “I knew that when you found love again, I’d get you back.”
I felt the reflective gaze in his voice.
“Dad, I always had love,” I replied. “And the only thing that allowed me to see it was the fact that you never gave up on me—that you always believed in me.”
I passed the phone to Melissa. Dad’s first words to her were the same ones that his grandmother said to the high school English teacher he’d married five years after becoming a widower.
“Thank you,” my dad told Melissa, his voice soft and warm and welcoming, “for giving my boy the courage to love again.”
The ceremony itself was comically surreal: sign some papers, say a few words—you’re married! We did it under an awning on the apartment’s airy patio. The only other person there besides Melissa, me, and Maria was the photographer from the rooftop pool who’d been part of the group who insisted I meet Melissa—and he was there by accident. He’d called right before the ceremony, unaware of what we were about to do, to say that he was walking by our place and thought he’d check in on us, see how we were. Melissa told him to come up but didn’t tell him why. When he walked through the door, we enlisted him to take wedding pictures.
Wearing a sleek white jumpsuit she’d plucked out of her closet minutes earlier, Melissa looked like a million bucks. When she stepped onto the patio outside, the setting sun lit her up like a votive candle. I threw on a blue blazer, white dress shirt, and jeans; I decided not to go full Canadian tuxedo, like the day we met.
The whole thing lasted maybe ten minutes. Melissa and I exchanged extemporaneous vows about our love and commitment to each other. In a Russian accent that gave her words a kind of Old World officiousness, Maria followed with whatever an officiant is statutorily required to say by the state of California.
That was it. We were now husband and wife.
It was both bemusing and incredibly deep. Our relationship didn’t feel in any way altered, except that now it was official. We had no plans to tell anybody beyond our parents, my daughters, and a few close friends. Yet the shock from the tabloid press that we knew would follow wasn’t lost on us.
We simply stayed focused on each other throughout the ceremony. The purpling Hollywood Hills to the east, the downtown skyscrapers to the south, the snow-white gulls that spun up and down and around the silhouetted palm trees nearby as an orange sun dripped into the Pacific—I barely noticed any of it that evening. I simply stared into Melissa’s blue eyes and felt grateful for what I saw reflected back.
Everything else—we tuned it out. There was always stuff to tune out. The noise out of Washington swirled around us even as we stood there together on that beautiful California
