The Crestview Motor Lodge sits on Route 17 in a part of New Jersey that the state seems to have forgotten to finish. Scrub pine on both sides of the highway. A diner that closes at three in the afternoon. A gas station whose pumps have not been updated since the Clinton administration.
I stayed there twice. The first time because my car broke down and it was the nearest lodging within walking distance of the garage. The second time because of what happened during the first.
The motel has fourteen rooms arranged in a single-story L-shape. Rooms one through thirteen run along the main corridor. Room fourteen is at the end of the L, set apart from the others by maybe twelve feet of unlit concrete pathway.
I noticed it the first night because its light was on. This was at 2 AM when every other room was dark. A warm yellow light at the edge of the curtains, the kind you get from a lamp left on rather than an overhead. Nothing strange about that. Someone was awake late or had left a light on. I thought nothing of it.
In the morning, I asked the night manager — a man in his sixties named Roy, who managed the register with the careful attention of someone who has spent decades making sure his transactions are precisely correct — whether the guest in room fourteen needed anything, since I'd seen their light on very late.
Roy did not look up from the register. He said, "Don't worry about fourteen."
I asked whether the room was occupied.
He said, "It's occupied." He said it the way you say something that is both true and a subject you are closing.
I had two more days while my car was being repaired. I watched room fourteen from my window across the corridor — not obsessively, not continuously, but with the attention you give something that has registered as slightly wrong. I never saw anyone enter or leave. The light was on every night. The curtains never moved. The parking spot nearest to room fourteen was always empty.
On my last morning, I walked past the room. I stood outside the door for a moment. I don't know what I expected to hear. I heard nothing. No television, no movement, no ambient sound of someone existing on the other side of a wall. But the light was on — I could see it under the door — and there was a smell I can only describe as old and interior, the smell of a room that has been closed for a long time.
I knocked. Nothing.
Roy was at the desk when I checked out. I asked him how long room fourteen had been occupied. He looked at me for a long moment.
"It's always occupied," he said. "That's just how that room is."
I pressed him. His answer was careful and complete and made no sense: "The guest checked in a long time ago. They've already paid. There's nothing to do about fourteen."
I went back a year later. Roy was still at the desk. He recognized me.
Room fourteen's light was on.
I did not knock this time. I paid for my room, thanked Roy, and lay in the dark listening to the silence from the end of the corridor. At some point around 3 AM I heard a sound from that direction — not loud, not dramatic, the sound of someone turning over in a bed, the small adjustments of a person trying to get comfortable.
Someone in room fourteen trying to sleep.
I checked out at dawn and I have not gone back to Route 17. I don't know who is in that room. I don't know why Roy keeps the key. I don't know why it is never listed as available on the booking sites that show the Crestview Motor Lodge with thirteen rooms.
I just know the light is on.